Mozilla 0.9.1

June 8, 2001 6:30 AM

Mozilla 0.9.1 came out today, marking a big leap in quality from 0.9. It seems like a much leaner, cleaner, faster and more stable build. "New features include Bi-directional text support, LDAP Autocomplete in mail, new combined taskbar, an overhaul of the Modern skin with all new colors and buttons, and lots of performance and stability fixes, with over 30 of the topcrash bugs fixed." Via Slashdot, where the comments are supprisingly supportive:)
posted by tallman (17 comments total)

I'm using 0.9.1 right now and I'm happy with it. Lots of bugs fixed, lots of interface improvements, and the new Modern skin is pretty nifty. I've been using Mozilla as my daily browser since 0.9 came out.
posted by RylandDotNet at 6:52 AM on June 8, 2001

I use Opera 5.11 almost exclusively now. Its the best browser I've ever used, but there are still some annoying little things - mostly websites that don't use standards compliant code. Mozilla 0.9.1 is excellent as well; I've been using it all morning. Once it reaches 1.0, I think I'll dump IE...
posted by tallman at 7:24 AM on June 8, 2001

Is there something akin to the placebo effect with software projects like Mozilla - convincing yourself that each new release really is faster and less bug ridden while in reality little has really changed and after the initial euphoria you find it performs pretty much the same as the last one you installed?
posted by kerplunk at 8:40 AM on June 8, 2001

Is there something akin to the placebo effect with software projects like Mozilla...

Well, I didn't time it to prove that it was faster, but it seems faster. I know some bugs that were really, er, bugging me are now fixed because I looked at the release notes and did some testing. 0.9.1 is provably less bug-ridden than 0.9 -- go look at Bugzilla if you don't believe me.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but even as is, it works better than Netscape 4.7, and almost as well as Internet Exploiter. For my tastes (the way the interface feels, how menus work, keyboard shortcuts, context menus) it works better than IE. But that's just my opinion, not a cold and factual evaluation.
posted by RylandDotNet at 10:21 AM on June 8, 2001

It only crashed twice and hung once while I was playing with it this morning. For Mozilla, that's pretty good.
posted by darukaru at 11:23 AM on June 8, 2001

I use Opera 5.11 almost exclusively now. Its the best browser I've ever used, but there are still some annoying little things - mostly websites that don't use standards compliant code.

Well, I installed Opera a while back for testing my site, but I never switched to it for my daily browser. (Don't know why). I just opened it back up and used it for a while and I must say, unless I find something grotequely wrong with it, I'm NEVER going to use IE again (except for testing).

Holy cow, is this thing fast... And it seems to render everything exactly like IE. Will continue to test... If this OPera thing works, out, I'll wait on trying Mozilla until 1.0...

P.S. I do miss the spacebar == scroll, but maybe it's somewhere in the Preferences.
posted by fooljay at 12:29 PM on June 8, 2001

kerplunk, the reason it's getting faster with each release is that they're taking out more and more debugging code. (Earlier releases had a lot of such, and were dog slow because of it. Ignoramuses thought this was evidence of poor programming.) Also, 0.9.1 loads a lot faster when you start a new session because they include a -turbo option, which leaves a major chunk in memory, the way IE does. (But you can't control whether or not IE does it!)
posted by dhartung at 12:42 PM on June 8, 2001

I'm impressed with this build of Mozilla. I'd be more impressed if it didn't request 29MB of RAM. Despite that, it quit unexpectedly with an error 2 (out of memory) within fifteen minutes. But it's definitely better than the last Mozilla i checked out.
posted by kindall at 1:09 PM on June 8, 2001

Fooljay, good luck in your Opera exploits. Theres tons of little things that make Opera 5.1x great. The whole Mouse Gestures thing is addictive - I often find myself trying to use them in IE or NN. The embedded linkbot (go to a page with a lot of links, press ctrl + J and you'll get a listing of all the links which you can even export to a txt or html file) is really cool. So is the ability to quickly switch to "document mode" or turn off image loading, making some pages much less annoying and easier to read. It even has a download manager that supports resuming...

Also, theres a lot of customizability available in the form of configuration files and whatnot. I've only played with them a little bit, but it makes Opera very flexible... let me know how Opera is treating you:)

The only problems I've had with Opera are:
::Using it with Blogger is horrid - the text box is very small. Apparently this is an issue with all standards compliant browsers though
::The occasional poorly coded site won't render correctly...
::You have to pay to get rid of the ads...

all in all, its a fantastic browser.
posted by tallman at 1:11 PM on June 8, 2001

as dhartung stated above, try this: run mozilla with the -turbo parameter (add it to the end of your icon properties target in windows) and mozilla will load itself into memory on bootup like IE. from then on when you click your icon mozilla will pop up instantaneously... suck on that, non-believers.

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla.org\Mozilla\mozilla.exe" -turbo
posted by afx114 at 1:28 PM on June 8, 2001

It only crashed twice and hung once while I was playing with it this morning. For Mozilla, that's pretty good.

*shrug* I've been using it for a day or so and it hasn't crashed on me yet. (0.9.1 under Windows 98 SR2).
posted by RylandDotNet at 2:36 PM on June 8, 2001

Can someone tell me how to persuade Mozilla to interpret a single word entered into the address field as www.+word+.com and not as a search request? IIRC, 0.9 used to handle this properly. (Macintosh-separatist version, if that is relevant.)
posted by joeclark at 2:44 PM on June 8, 2001

Compared to 0.8, ryland.net, in which I could get it to hang within thirty seconds of launch by entering the preferences window, leaving it, and re-entering... I'd say only two crashes in an hour is decent. *heh*

joeclark: expand the 'Navigator' section in the prefs, select 'smart browsing' and uncheck both boxes.
posted by darukaru at 4:08 PM on June 8, 2001

Re Opera: I love Opera for general browsing, I just wish it supported more of DOM1. The lack of document.createElement() is a killer.
posted by ericost at 5:33 PM on June 8, 2001

I really like the new Moz browser as the sucker flies past IE 5.5 is every page rendering race I had during my sleepless night.

The oddity of the whole thing is I am running MS ME (named such to deter people for yelling, "ME sux") with 64MB RAM on the graphics card and 384MB RAM yet IE 5.5 locks up my system, particularly when using MS Media Player. When I run Moz 0.9~ it is stable.
posted by vanderwal at 5:46 PM on June 8, 2001

(Offtopic on post but on topic for comments)

tallman, I just wrote this about the text box on blogger and BlogThis. It;s fixable. It's Ev's stylesheet that's broken.

Ericost, I just wrote a blurb on Blogger Discuss about the document.createElement() attribute but can't find it now (moderation?). This seems to be an Opera problem, but as for BlogThis, you can get around it if you don't mind not being able to use selected text...

Change the BlogThis bookmarklet code from this (these are focibly linewrapped, some reassembly may be required):

javascript:Q='';if(top.frames.length==0)Q=document.selection.createRange().text;
void(btw=window.open('http://www.blogger.com/blog_form_pop-upE.pyra?b=NNNNN&t='+
escape(Q)+'&u='+escape(location.href)+'&n='+escape(document.title),'bloggerForm',
'scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,left=75,top=175,status=yes'));btw.focus();

to this:

javascript:if(top.frames.length==0);void(btw=window.open('http://www.blogger.com/
blog_form_pop-upE.pyra?b=NNNNN&u='+escape(location.href)+'&n='+escape(document.title)
,'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,left=75,top=175,status=yes'));
btw.focus();

Don't forget to replace NNNNN with your bloggerID.
posted by fooljay at 9:42 PM on June 8, 2001

opera is an amazing piece of code. i run the linux version.
very, very stable, unlike mozilla OR ns. 1.6Meg footprint
with VERY efficent use of RAM. After runing opera
under linux, I'm wondering what the hell is wrong
with mozilla. will it ever get stable?

hell, i'll gladly pay $35 bucks for a super fast, stable
bowser under linux. mozilla is quickly becoming a joke
in my opinion ... a classic example of code bloat, like windoze.
posted by anocious at 4:25 PM on June 9, 2001