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MozillaQuest the on-line computer magazine

August 26, 2002

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MozillaQuest Magazine Comprehensive Mozilla 1.0 Coverage

The Mozilla 1.0 Web browser suite is out! MozillaQuest Magazine has the best, most balanced, accurate, robust and in-depth coverage of AOL-Netscape's Mozilla 1.0 browser on the Internet. I'ts all on MozillaQuest Magazine.

Mozilla 1.1 Browser-Suite Released

Mike Angelo -- 26 August 2002 (c)

Mozilla 1.0 Coverage

Mozilla 1.0 Is Out! (includes release info and download links)

A Quick Look at Some Mozilla 1.0 Browser-Suite Annoyances, Bugs, And Issues

Mozilla 1.0 Browser-Suite Performance -- Speed, Stability, and Memory Hogging

Mozilla 1.0 Browser Quick Look

Mozilla 1.0 Browser-Suite's E-Mail & News Quick Look

About the Mozilla Organization Verbiage

On 16 October 2001, the Mozilla Organization's CTO, Brendan Eich, promulgated his Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto as an adjunct to the October 2001 Mozilla Roadmap revisions. In that Manifesto, Eich decreed that (a) Mozilla 1.0 and its 1.0.x progeny would have at least a one-year life-span, (b) that the Mozilla 1.0 release would be of high quality, (c) that Mozilla Organization's reputation was at stake, and (d) that Mozilla 1.0 was to be finished and released within six months, to-wit, April 2002. The16 October 2001 Roadmap Schedule set the Mozilla 1.0 release for 5 April 2002. That did not happen.

The Mozilla Organization has failed to successfully implement Eich's Manifesto on all four counts:

(a) With the release of Mozilla 1.1, the Mozilla Organization has effectively killed the Mozilla 1.0.x branch in a little more than two months after its release rather than keeping it viable for the minimum one year called for in Eich's Manifesto.

(b) Mozilla 1.0 is froth with performance problems, bugs, annoyances, and all sorts of issues. We have documented that throughout our comprehensive Mozilla 1.0 coverage. The infamous Oingo.com bugs alone are enough to take Mozilla 1.0 out of the high quality category. Lack of a spell checker for the E-mail, News, and Composer modules is enough to take Mozilla 1.0 out of the high quality category. And so forth!

(c) As stated in (b), immediately above, Mozilla 1.0 was far below a high quality release. Although Mozilla 1.0 has lots of nice features and is a usable product, it also sucks in many ways too. To the extent that the Mozilla Organization's reputation depended on Mozilla 1.0, the Mozilla Organization has earned itself a lousy reputation -- primarily among those who do not base their evaluations of products and producers on emotion, fanaticism, unsubstantiated or misleading claims by a product's evangelists, or just merely hatred of Microsoft, and so forth.

Face it, if Mozilla had a good reputation and a high quality product, it would have more than less than 1% of the browser market.

(d) Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002, two months past Eich's six-month deadline which expired in April 2002.

Overall, Eich's Manifesto is a fair plan, horribly executed.

From Eich's Manifesto:

Mozilla 1.0" would be: . . . * The first major-revision-number milestone release (mozilla1.0) of the Mozilla browser application suite and platform from mozilla.org. A release of higher quality than any delivered so far, on whose quality our reputation is at stake precisely because 1.0 is such a coveted and feared version number. . . . * A stable, long-lived branch . . . (a year minimum, at a guess) . . .

The majority of staff and drivers surveyed believes that the "1.0" brand should be used sooner rather than later to identify our stable, long-lived branch with API commitments. We believe "sooner" means within the next six months, based on feedback from various vendors, book authors, and others in need of such a branch."

mozilla 1.0 manifesto, Brendan Eich, The Mozilla Organization (February 8, 2002 revision).

AOL-Netscape's Mozilla Organization placed the first .x upgrade to its recently released Mozilla 1.0 browser-suite on its public FTP server today. Mozilla 1.0 was released 5 June 2002. Two pre-1.1 Mozilla milestone editions, Mozilla 1.1-alpha and Mozilla 1.1-beta were made available for public downloading on 12 June and 22 July 2002 respectively.

Mozilla 1.1 Kills Mozilla 1.0, Etc.

Today's release of Mozilla 1.1 in effect kills Mozilla 1.0.x, if the release of Mozilla 1.1-beta has not done so already.

In effect, the release of Mozilla 1.1 kills Mozilla 1.0 and its 1.0.x maintenance upgrade progeny as viable product. We suspect effectively killing Mozilla 1.0 as soon as it could be killed has been the intent of the Mozilla Organization all along -- despite Mozilla Organization verbiage that Mozilla 1.0.x is supposed to be a long-lived branch. However, that is another story for another day.

Now that Mozilla 1.1 has been released, there is not much use to using what now likely amounts to a quality-wise, technology-wise, and usability-wise outmoded Mozilla 1.0 build. Mozilla Organization people already are claiming that Mozilla 1.1-beta is more stable and better than what will be Mozilla 1.0.1. Moreover, Mozilla 1.1 has been released before Mozilla 1.0.1 ever will have seen the light of day.

On 22 May 2002 AOL-Netscape placed its Netscape 7.0-PR1 upgrade from Netscape 6.2.3 on its public FTP servers . Netscape 7.0-PR1 is based upon Mozilla 1.0-RC2 code. It will be interesting to see if AOL bases its next Netscape release, Netscape 7.0-PR2, or perhaps just Netscape 7.0, on the Mozilla 1.0.x branch or a trunk milestone such as Mozilla 1.1

The Mozilla Organization's February 2002 Roadmap Schedule and Tree Management Diagram had set Mozilla 1.1 release for 3 July 2002 and suggested an early May 2002 release for Mozilla 1.0.1. In early May, however, it became apparent that the Mozilla Organization would not be able to meet that schedule. So, it revised the proposed releases schedule.

The Mozilla Organization's May 2002 Roadmap Schedule and Tree Management Diagram revisions re-set Mozilla 1.1 release for 19 July 2002 and suggested an early June 2002 release for Mozilla 1.0.1.

However, both Mozilla 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.1 missed the May Roadmap revision release schedules -- all told a substantial slippage in product release scheduling from the earlier February Roadmap release schedules. So at the end of July, the Mozilla Organization once again revised its release schedule.

The new, July, Roadmap Schedule and Tree Management Diagram set Mozilla 1.1 release for 9 August 2002 and suggests a late August or early September 2002 release for Mozilla 1.0.1.

Of course revising the Roadmap Schedules to reflect more accurately what is happening along the Mozilla development roadway is not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself. When development tree or release candidate builds are not up to snuff, it certainly is prudent to slip a milestone release until the milestone is ready for release.

The problem, however, is that the Mozilla project mangers are unable to bring Mozilla development builds within quality control parameters within project release-time schedules. And that happens in part because the Mozilla code-base has become too darn clumsy and too darn buggy.

Crash Bugs Up in Mozilla 1.1

At the time Mozilla 1.0-RC1 was released there were 533 "crash" bugs listed in Mozilla's Bugzilla bug-tracking database and there were 561 "crash" bugs listed when Mozilla 1.0-RC2 was released. The "crash" bugs count was up to 618 open crash bugs by the time Mozilla 1.1a was released and the "crash" bugs count was 620 open crash bugs when Mozilla 1.1b was released. Earlier today the "crash" bugs count was 663 open crash bugs.

Mozilla Not for End Users

Apparently, the Mozilla Organization does not desire to attract end-users to the Mozilla browser suite. Interestingly, the official position of AOL-Netscape's Mozilla Organization is that it does not want end-users to run the Mozilla browser suite.

Interestingly, since we raised the "end users" issue in previous articles, there appears to be a movement afoot by some people in the Mozilla Community to get-real and make Mozilla 1.0, et sequitur, an end-user product. That's a good move!

If you are an end-user that would like to discuss Mozilla or would like some Mozilla help, try the #ChatZilla, #Mozilla, and #Netscape channels on the EFNet IRC network.

These IRC channels are not affiliated with AOL or its Netscape and Mozilla divisions. It's mostly Mozilla and Netscape users helping other Mozilla and Netscape users. You also will find #Caldera, #KDE, #Linux, #Mandrake, #RedHat, #SuSE, and #Windows channels on EFNet too.

Incidentally, ChatZilla is an IRC client that comes with Mozilla. Give it a try. To launch ChatZilla just go to the Mozilla Menu Bar and click Window > IRC Chat.

For more information about Mozilla 1.0, please see our Mozilla 1.0 comprehensive coverage articles:

What's New in Mozilla 1.1

Here is what is new in Mozilla 1.1 according to the Mozilla 1.1 Release Notes:

(Note: most if not all of the items listed in the What's New section of the Mozilla 1.1 Release Notes actually were introduced in Mozilla 1.1-alpha or Mozilla 1.1-beta. Consider this section to be in the nature of what's new since Mozilla 1.0)

* Improved application and layout performance

* Improved stability

* Improved Web site compatability

* Improved CSS, DOM and HTML standards support

* Distinct window icons on for the different Mozilla applications (artwork contributed by Grayrest).

* Mozilla can now trigger MS DUN when started without a connection.

* Fullscreen mode for Mozilla on Linux (press F11).

* Browser tabs now close left to right (they used to close right to left).

* The tab bar now has a button for creating new tabs.

* All Search entry points now use your default search engine.

* Download Manager has been enabled as the default download view (with many improvements)

* Autocomplete in the addressbar has more intelligent completion.

* The Linux File Picker has improved filtering and a new directory button.

* File extensions more accurately handled in downloads and we save the correct files when saving complete Web pages

* Drag and drop support has been greatly improved.

* View selection source: Context clicking on a selection now lets you view the HTML source for the selected area.

* Page info displays more page info with improved General and Media tab content.

* New button in prefs for making Mozilla the system default browser on MS Windows

* MathML is now enabled for Mozilla on Macintosh (already avail on win and linux).

* Mozilla now takes advantage of Quartz rendering for users of Mac OS X 10.1.5

* Better B-Di Arabic and Hebrew support including improved layout of Arabic pages on Linux and other platforms without their own Arabic shaping support.

* We have new layout performance enhancements targeted at DHTML.

* Mozilla now has support for the display of XBM images.

* Image and plug-in blocking for Mail & News

* Mozilla allows viewing HTML mail messages as plain text.

* Viewing HTML mail messages as plain text is new.

* You can now quote the current message in a Mail compose window with Quote Original under the options menu.

* The JavaScript Debuggerhas gone through a major development cycle. It now sports a palette of nine views which can be rearranged within the main window, or docked in separate floating windows. It is also possible to create user defined views and commands directly with JavaScript. More details are available in the FAQ, newsgroup, or IRC channel.

* Chatzilla has improved tab completion and can now join channels with Japanese names.

The download information and links are in the Resources section at the end of this article.

Lots of Bugs for Mozilla 1.1

We addressed some concerns about Mozilla'a runaway bugs problems in our article, Mozilla Milestone 0.9.9 Branched Behind Schedule. In that article, we noted that on 1 March, there were some 12,137 targeted new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs and 21,199 new, assigned, and reopened bugs (open/unfixed bugs) altogether.

On May 10, when Mozilla 1.0-RC2 was released, there were 12,417 targeted, new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs and 23,569 new, assigned, and reopened bugs (open/unfixed bugs) altogether. Mozilla 1.0-RC2 had more bugs than did Mozilla 0.9.9.

On Mozilla 1.1a release day, there were 1158 bugs targeted to Mozilla 1.1a, 12,638 targeted, new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs, and 24,850 new, assigned, and reopened bugs (open/unfixed bugs) altogether. Mozilla 1.1-alpha had more bugs than did Mozilla 0.9.9.

By the time Mozilla 1.1-beta was released, the targeted, new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs count was down to 12,462. However, new, assigned, and reopened bugs (open/unfixed bugs) altogether bug count was up to 25,939 bugs.

Earlier today, the targeted, new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs count was down to 12,301. However, new, assigned, and reopened bugs (open/unfixed bugs) altogether bug count was up to 26,856 bugs. In addition there were 4,161 untriaged (unconfirmed) bugs listed in Bugzilla earlier today.

Please see our Mozilla 0.9.9 release article for more information about, and a breakdown of, the targeted new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs complex. For more information about how Mozilla bugs impact on the user experience please see our articles A Quick Look at Some Mozilla 1.0 Browser-Suite Annoyances, Bugs, And Issues, Mozilla 1.0 Browser Quick Look, and Mozilla 1.0 Browser-Suite's E-Mail & News Quick Look

Mozilla has bugs problems. The Mozilla developers have continually failed to get the bugs targeted to milestones fixed before the scheduled milestone branching dates. Moreover, the Mozilla developers do not seem to be very effective in keeping buggy code from getting into the development tree.

However, since the Mozilla 0.9.9 release, code-checkin practices have been tightened down somewhat. That seems to be providing some reduction in the Mozilla runaway bugs problem.

Note: the distinction, targeted bugs, is important. Almost anyone can submit a bug to the Bugzilla database. Many bugs so submitted are duplicates of other bugs, unconfirmed, or otherwise not bugs that should be fixed or need to be fixed. However, in order for a bug to be targeted, it must be either submitted or reviewed by a Mozilla developer or triager that has the appropriate skills and permissions level in Bugzilla to set the target parameters for bugs. This also applies to bugs listed as new, assigned, and reopened -- those parameters can be set only by a Mozilla developer or triager that has the appropriate skills and permissions level in Bugzilla. When we query Bugzilla for bugs targeted to a specific Mozilla release, we also restrict that query to new, assigned, and reopened bugs. Incidentally, the general query for all new, assigned, and reopened does include bugs related to other-than-Mozilla projects such as Bugzilla, Web tools, and so forth. That is one reason we do not report that bug in our Front Page bug-count tracking.

The preceding bugs discussion has focused on the impact of Mozilla's bugs on the development process. Just as important as that, if not even more important, is how the Mozilla bugs hit users. If the Mozilla bugs for the most part are trivial or only rarely occurring, then end-users likely are not going to be very upset by the bugs, However, if the bugs are more noticeable, annoying, disruptive, or result in data loss, system crashes, or application lock-ups, then users likely are going to be rather upset.

That said, the more bugs in a program the more likely users will notice them and the more likely they will be annoyed by them. Bugs in milestone development releases are understandable although not a good thing.

Incidentally, a Bugzilla query today for open bugs with the keyword crash turned up more than 600 hits. A similar query made today using the keyword dataloss turned up more than 150 bugs. That's not a very pretty picture either.

All this bug stuff can be confusing. The most important point is that Mozilla 1.1 includes not merely the bugs targeted to Mozilla 1.1. Rather, Mozilla 1.1 includes some 26,000 un-fixed new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs. The Mozilla 1.1-targeted bugs is merely a subset of the more than 26,000 un-fixed new, assigned, and reopened Mozilla bugs.

Please see our 0.9.4 branching article, Mozilla 0.9.4 Branched -- Behind Schedule & Buggier Than Ever, for more detail and information about the Mozilla bugs.

Mozilla post-1.0 Milestone and daily development builds normally are available for the BSD, Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, Sun, and several UNIX platforms. Source code usually is available if you want to custom compile your own Mozilla builds.

Incidentally, please check the MozillaQuest Magazine front-page (mozillaquest.com) sidebar every now and then for bug-count updates and for upcoming Mozilla Milestone progress updates.

Please see our article, Mozilla Roadmap Update: Mozilla 1.0 Set Back to April 2002, for more information about the October 2001 Mozilla Development Roadmap and development schedule revisions. There is lots of bug information in that article too. For the revised post-Mozilla 1.0 development roadmap and plan please see our articles, Moz 1.0 April Release Confirmed & Post-1.0 Development Plan Announced and New Mozilla Roadmap Sets 1.1 for 9 August 2002 and Effectively Kills Mozilla 1.0.x

Downloading & Installation Info

Note: the Mozilla Organization used include a simple, non-talkback, Milestone download build for the Microsoft Windows platform such as mozilla-win32-1.1.zip plus a talkback build. The Mozilla 1.1 Beta release notes also call for such a mozilla-win32-1.1.zip build file and a talkback build file, mozilla-win32-talkback.zip.

1. Click the mozilla-win32-talkback.zip link or the mozilla-win32.zip link to download the .zip file to your machine. (Mozilla 1.1 Release Notes , the Mozilla Organization, 26 August 2002.)

Unfortunately, the Mozilla Organization has decided not to give you that choice for Mozilla Milestone 1.1. It has not included the non-talkback mozilla-win32-1.1.zip build -- even though the release notes say it is included.

The Mozilla Organization's rationale is that it needs the talkback info to get rid of bugs in Mozilla, particularly crash bugs. Getting rid of Mozilla bugs certainly is a noble purpose. And Mozilla has lots of bugs that need to be fixed.

However, freedom of choice is an even more noble pursuit. Moreover, choice is much of what Open Source Software is all about. Therefore we think the Mozilla Organization should have included the non-talkback mozilla-win32-1.1.zip too. Whether you participate in Mozilla talkback should be your choice, not the AOL-Netscape-Mozilla Organization's choice.

Of course you can turn talkback off when you install Mozilla if you use the installer version 1.1 Mozilla Milestone build (mozilla-win32-1.1-installer.exe). However, the installer version of Mozilla presents some potential privacy breaches, which we shall address eventually in another article.

In the meantime, we recommend that you disconnect your computer from the Internet when installing mozilla-win32-1.1-installer.exe so that you can adjust your security and privacy preferences before taking Mozilla 1.1 online for the first time.(Please see our article How To Download, Install, & Configure Netscape 6 -- Safely! for more about that.)

1.1 Download Links

Here are the FTP download links for Mozilla 1.1 for you readers that cannot wait to try Mozilla 1.1

Linux Builds

Windows Builds

Please see the important note in the sidebar to the right here before installing.

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Macintosh Builds

Mozilla 1.1 Source

Other Builds, RPMs, & Platforms

Release Notes