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Mozilla 1.2.1 Released 397

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lather-rinse-repeat dept.
I shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20 and must've forgotten to click that all important 'Save' button. Hey, Everyone's favorite web browser besides Chimera has released version 1.2.1. The fix includes security patches so it probably wouldn't hurt to snag it if you're running it.
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Mozilla 1.2.1 Released More

Mozilla 1.2.1 Released

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  • I found the problem... (Score:3, Funny)

    by mschoolbus ( 627182 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `yelirsivart'> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:35AM (#4802130)
    I posted this at like 8:20 and must've forgotten to click that all important 'Save' button.

    Well maybe that is the problem, editors keep accidently hitting the save button throughout the day... I am sure we will see this story yet again... =P

  • Glad to see... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Smelly Jeffrey ( 583520 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:35AM (#4802133) Homepage
    that mozilla is quick at fixing their software when problems arise. Too bad that the DHTML bug came up in the first place. But I say "good job moz" for their fast repairs.

    • Re:Glad to see... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick&havokmon,com> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:37AM (#4802153) Homepage Journal
      that mozilla is quick at fixing their software when problems arise. Too bad that the DHTML bug came up in the first place. But I say "good job moz" for their fast repairs.

      Yeah, it almost seemed to big for them to miss. But when I was browsing the bug # referenced in Buzilla, it looks as if the patch for that issue and some other patches just didn't get committed for some reason.

    • Re:Glad to see... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by greechneb ( 574646 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:40AM (#4802174) Journal
      I have to agree. I've been using the nightly builds of 1.3a for about 3 weeks or so, and they are as reliable as IE6 SP1 is. I won't make any comments about what that implies though...

      anyway, good job mozilla team, and keep up the great work!

  • DHTML Patch (Score:5, Informative)

    by rherbert ( 565206 ) <slashdot,org&ryan,xar,us> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:36AM (#4802141) Homepage
    Since the story didn't mention it, the only difference between 1.2 and 1.2.1 is the fix for the DHTML bug (#182500).

  • security fixes? not really (Score:5, Informative)

    by aromanos ( 552657 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:37AM (#4802147)
    From the release notes: "The only difference between the two releases [1.2 vs 1.2.1] is the fix for this bug (Bug 182500)." And it was a DHTML bug, not a security bug. -- Andrés

  • What I dont understand... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gamorck ( 151734 ) <jaylittle AT jaylittle DOT com> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:39AM (#4802164) Homepage
    Is why a revision point release of a browser is all that big of a deal. I understand this is /. and open source is pretty much the life blood around here - but is it that slow of a news day that the editors are digging for App BLAH has released Version ?.?.x ...? Perhaps /. should do a story on the European Online hate speech ban or be so kind as to give us /. readers an update on the DMCA FatWallet scandal (which has become a lot more interesting IMHO)

    Anyway I guess my point here is to say that I think that instead of relying 100% on submitted news items that /. editors may want to start doing a bit of poking around on their own (beyond the woefully overhyped Anime DVD releases that Taco raves on about). I think that the content of slashdot could be improved a great deal with very little effort on the part of the staff.

    Afterall, isn't there more to "journalism" than reguritating content back to the viewers who told you about it in the first place? That seems logical enough to me. If you want a better browsing experience I suggest you take a trip to http://www.arstechnica.com - while they may not post as many stories - they are far more carefully choosen and presented in such a way that doesn't alienate 50% of viewers by the second sentence (Hint: Check out any Anti MS story here and then check out the browsing statistics for this site)

    Thanks for your time,

    J

    • The reason that this is "that big of a deal" on /. is because the full release of 1.2 was pulled last week because of a DHTML bug.

      This is essentially the full release of 1.2, just patched and with an added .1 on it =)

      Cheers.
    • Is why a revision point release of a browser is all that big of a deal.

      In all honesty, I would normally agree with you. Point releases for nearly any software project aren't really deserving of front page Slashdot linkage.

      However, in this case, it is deserving because the latest 1.2 release of Mozilla had a huge error that caused improper rendering of any Web page that contains DHTML-specific code.
    • Is why a revision point release of a browser is all that big of a deal. I understand this is /.

      I belive they posted the story due to the story Saturday about the bug and the new release would fix it. AKA new release is out. Please refrence the older slashdot article. [slashdot.org]

      Yea I know I'm probably feeding the trolls but what the hey....

    • From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aWalrus ( 239802 ) <sergio@overcaffeina t e d . net> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:25PM (#4802636) Homepage Journal
      From CmdrTaco's journal [slashdot.org]:


      Icing on the mornings cake: I got up on time, drove to work, posted a story, and then forgot to press *save* on the goddamn web form. So for hte next 2 hours I keep deleting submission after submission about Mozilla 1.2.1 thinking "geezus, are people blind?" and not realizing that no, I am in fact stupid. Of course, why so many people submit a bug fix release of a web browser is beyond me. Some stories I'd rather not post, but sheer volume of submissions really makes it impractical to ignore them
      --

  • DTML... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by peterprior ( 319967 )
    Just for my own reference, examples of sites which died with the DHTML bug? Do lots of sites use DHTML? What the hell _IS_ DHTML ? :)

    • Re:DTML... (Score:5, Informative)

      by greechneb ( 574646 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:43AM (#4802204) Journal
      dynamic HTML

      Dynamic HTML is a collective term for a combination of new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags and options, that will let you create Web pages more animated and more responsive to user interaction than previous versions of HTML. Much of dynamic HTML is specified in HTML 4.0. Simple examples of dynamic HTML pages would include (1) having the color of a text heading change when a user passes a mouse over it or (2) allowing a user to "drag and drop" an image to another place on a Web page. Dynamic HTML can allow Web documents to look and act like desktop applications or multimedia productions.

      The features that constitute dynamic HTML are included in Netscape Communications' latest Web browser, Navigator 4.0 (part of Netscape's Communicator suite), and by Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 4.0. While HTML 4.0 is supported by both Netscape and Microsoft browsers, some additional capabilities are supported by only one of the browsers. The biggest obstacle to the use of dynamic HTML is that, since many users are still using older browsers, a Web site must create two versions of each site and serve the pages appropriate to each user's browser version.
      The Concepts and Features in Dynamic HTML
      Both Netscape and Microsoft support:

      * An object-oriented view of a Web page and its elements
      * Cascading style sheets and the layering of content
      * Programming that can address all or most page elements
      * Dynamic fonts

      • Re:DTML... (Score:3, Informative)

        by C14L ( 622656 )

        Or for short:

        DHTML = HTML + CSS + JavaScript

        Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
        Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

        ??? I am not using "so many caps", I am using abreviation! What the heck...

    • Re:DTML... (Score:5, Informative)

      by joycea ( 607343 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:47AM (#4802235)
      From one of the bug dependencies at bugzilla...

      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126
      Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126

      If an input filed with type set to hidden is not preceded by either the body
      open tag or text it will be displayed as a text field, but will not have it's
      default value set.

      Reproducible: Always

      Steps to Reproduce:
      1. Save the following in a file:
      <html>
      <form action="/listings/update.php" method=post>
      <input type=hidden name=test1 value=value1> :test1<br>
      test2: <input type=hidden name=test2 value=value2><br>
      </table>
      </form>
      </html>

      2. Load the file in Mozilla

      Actual Results:
      An empty text input field apears before the test ' :test1'

      Expected Results:
      the field should have been hidden and kept its value.

      Workarounds are trivial, the <body> tag or any text, even a period, prior to the
      hidden input will cause it to behave normaly.

      • Re:DTML... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        so your "bug" is that wildly invalid html doesn't work properly?

        here's the fix, fire the ass who mistook your example for html.

    • Re:DTML... (Score:4, Informative)

      by cheezycrust ( 138235 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:47AM (#4802243)
      In this case, Mozilla ate the first characters of a print() function. Many ads are constructed using print() statements, and if the first characters are lost, you don't get to see the advertisement (which could be good), but you also end up with strange html (which is bad).

  • This is a fix release. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:42AM (#4802192) Journal
    As the post said... this is a fix release. If you got to sites that use DHTML, or couldn't get Mozilla 1.2 installed (It had a nasty permissions bug on UNIX, which kept it from being run by a normal user). Basically, get this release, but dont expect any cool features... it's just a bug fix release.

  • Work before coffee! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:42AM (#4802197) Homepage
    shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20 and must've forgotten to click that all important 'Save' button.

    That's ok, I'm sure we'd have seen the story the next two times it's going to run on Slashdot.

  • Why so much bigger than 1.2? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CodeWheeney ( 314094 ) <JimCassidy@maiAUDENl.com minus poet> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:47AM (#4802240) Homepage
    Looking at the release notes [mozilla.org] shows that the only change from 1.2.1 to 1.2 is the fix for the DHTML bug, but the installation images (Win32) went from 10.81 MB (11,339,472 bytes) to 10.95 MB (11,491,024 bytes). Anyone know why it got so much bigger? Was the fix that involved?

    • Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dog and Pony ( 521538 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:03PM (#4802429)
      Since when is that much? Depending on the compiler, and how it optimizes, it is quite possible to *remove* code and end up getting a slightly bigger executable.

      And the word we are looking for here is indeed "slightly".

    • Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? (Score:4, Informative)

      by mst ( 30456 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:15PM (#4802530)
      Was the fix that involved?

      To my (faint) understanding: Maybe :-)

      Looking at the bug page of bug #182500 on bugzilla.mozilla.org (sorry, direct links blocked from slashdot), the list of associated bugs has 32 entries, and is a result of an incorrect backout of way too much code at some point just before the 1.2 release.

      Somebody closer to the mozilla project could surely give more detailed / accurate info on this though.

      • Re:Why so much bigger than 1.2? (Score:5, Informative)

        by dbaron ( 463913 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:10PM (#4803685) Homepage

        The fix to bug 182500 was a single character. An 9 was changed to an 8. There was not a backout of way too much code.

        The problem was that a checkin that added a value to an array was incorrectly backed out. The size of the array was written explicitly instead of using sizeof and preprocessor magic, and the change to the size wasn't backed out along with the value added to the end of the array. The incorrect size caused whatever random data was stored after the end of the array to be read. (The array was in the HTML parser, containing a list of the types of things that are valid children of the HEAD element. Thus, I think the bugs can be traced to things that should have been in the BODY ending up in the HEAD.) Depending on the compiler, this caused different behavior, so the bug was worse on Windows (with MSVC 6.0) or on gcc 3.2 (on x86 Linux) than it was with egcs 1.1.2 (on x86 Linux).

        So, in other words, the size of the binaries shouldn't have changed. That's odd.

    • The 1.2 release also had a build problem where some of the changes checked into the branch did not get pulled for the build.

      Specifically, from an artical on www.mozillazine.org they say that "the 1.2 release tag was not complete so builds created from that tag may have additional problems"

      I suspect that the difference may be due to this

  • Keep missing that save button please! (Score:5, Funny)

    by a_timid_mouse ( 607237 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:48AM (#4802247)
    I was actually able to download *both* the Windows and Linux binaries in their entirety WITHOUT waiting several hours for the process to complete. I attribute this feat entirely to the slashdot editor who forgot to press "Save". THANK YOU! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

  • A few solutions (Score:3, Informative)

    by ultor ( 216766 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:48AM (#4802254) Homepage
    If the new release appears to cause problems, be sure to remove/move your profile directory. This is one of the things I always forget to do when installing a new release because most of the time it doesn't make a difference. Also, although the source tarballs aren't posted, I was able to steal one out of the Redhat SRPMS that appears to be authentic (using rpm2tgz/rpm2targz and there's another tarball inside). Now why couldn't they just post the tarball first?

  • 1.2.1 does have better security than 1.1 or 1.0.1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:49AM (#4802270) Homepage
    Actually, the headline isn't completely wrong, Mozilla 1.2.1 only contains the "can't write to dynamically created elements" fix that was breaking some DHTML and page layout. Mozilla 1.2.1 also contains everything that the 1.2 release contained when it was released and then unreleased last week. That included new features, improved performance, better stability and security fixes. So if you're using _any_ oler Mozilla releases you really should upgrade to get all the new 1.2.1 goodness, including improved security.

    For the folks that just downloaded Mozilla 1.2 last week, if you're not having any problems (and it seems like the DHTML issue is a lot less visible on linux) then there's no pressing "security" reason to upgrade to 1.2.1 but you might as well get it for this DHTML fix which is likely to eventually cause you some pain at some site somewhere.

    --Asa

  • Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <[be] [at] [eclec.tk]> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:53AM (#4802309) Homepage Journal
    Since over half the slashdot crowd uses IE, should there not be stories out when MS releases new versions of it?

    • Re:Hmmm ... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      That, of course, would destroy the illusion that only open source projects get bugs fixed.

      Besides, it's easy enough for IE users to find an update.

    • Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:06PM (#4802450)
      Well, except that you forget... IE is evil, and Mozilla should be worshipped. This is completely arbitrary, and isn't at all based on quality of the programs, bloat, features, bugs, rendering capability, or usage statistics. Damn, man! Remember where you are! This is Slashdot, where facts and objectivity are meaningless!

    • Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:13PM (#4802510)
      Since over half the slashdot crowd uses IE, should there not be stories out when MS releases new versions of it?

      Sure - but when was the last release? Way back in September. Have there been any bugs reported since then?

      Do you follow the progress of IE? What are they working on now? Are you able to download beta code? Report bugs that get fixed in a timely manner?

      That is the difference between a community and proprietary software. Maybe you can do these things with IE, I don't really know. I only use it when I am forced to, and more and more that is less often.

    • IE 6 was released, when, over a year ago, right? Microsoft has no need to innovate IE anymore since they now dominate the browser market.

      Now if other browsers start re-gaining some share, expect IE 7 in a hurry, with nifty new features like tabs!

    • in eventual response to some major security flaw which will have been discussed a few months earlier on /. when it was first discovered. And when they are released, normally there will be a /. article about the ridiculous new EULA provisions ("In the name of computer safety, we reserve the right to purchase, sell, trade, barter or dispose of at our convenience your first born child") so we are informed, in a way.

    • Maybe... (Score:2)

      by Pac ( 9516 )
      Maybe because when Microsoft releases a new version every technology site plus almost every other site including online book stores, online lingerie stores, online food delivery sites and gramma's blog run reviews, praisings and articles about it. Such an event is usually also covered by all newspapers, magazines, high-school student papers and church bulletins in the world. It is not like without Slashdot we would all be ignorant of Microsoft new releases...

    • Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @05:08PM (#4805288) Journal
      " Since over half the slashdot crowd uses IE, should there not be stories out when MS releases new versions of it?"

      Because MSIE is not a community project. There are many, many slashdot readers who contribute to mozilla in terms of code, bug reports, add-ons [mozdev.org] and so on. There's a whole community of people surrounding this project and many of them also congregate here.

      You can't say that about IE. There is no development community. It's all privately developed by a corporation.

      The mozilla updates are announced so much more than MSIE because they are important because they are developed and perpetuated by members of this community.

  • Threaded e-mail, wouldn't that be handy? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex@NoSpAm.spamcop.net> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @11:58AM (#4802363) Homepage

    Mozilla is a threaded e-mail client, eh? So far, so good. However, it doesn't actually remember the Expand All Threads state [mozilla.org].

    So, suppose that you turn on threading and tell Mozilla to Expand All Threads. You now have a nice tree-like view of mail threads :). But, next time you load Mozilla, it'll be back to compressed view again (but still sorted by threads). If threaded mail sounds useful to you, you may want to vote for the bug [mozilla.org] (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account [mozilla.org] to vote).

  • But isn't the Mozilla installer on Windows just as bad as any other windows application? It insists on "updating" all of my registery settings and putting crap on my menus. Why can't it just put the damn application in C:\usr\mozilla and count on the fact that I'm smart enough to do the rest? Couldn't that at least be an option? Argh....

    And when are they going to fix the damn quick launch and the plethora of mail bugs that keep me tied to Communicator for mail.

    I love Moz, but geez, this stuff has been pushed out since 1.0RC1 (which was a fine application EXCEPT THIS STUFF).

    </rant>

  • Annoyance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:01PM (#4802397)
    I get really annoyed every time I install a new version of mozilla. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong somehow, but every time I upgrade all my plugins disappear. The first page I have to visit after an upgrade is optimoz.mozdev.org to get my mouse gestures back.

    Is there some way to preserve these plugins that I don't know about?

    And why oh why do I have to be root to install mouse-gestures under linux?

    • Re:Annoyance (Score:3, Informative)

      by Spacelem ( 189863 )
      Simply go to your old Mozilla plugins folder and copy all the plugins except npnul32.dll and put them into your new Mozilla plugins folder. Unless the plugins are broken with the new version, this should just work, even if Mozilla is still running.

    • Re:Annoyance (Score:5, Informative)

      by billbaggins ( 156118 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:26PM (#4802644)
      Is there some way to preserve these plugins that I don't know about?
      Install to a new directory each time. What I do is install to /usr/local/mozilla-$version and then symlink /usr/local/mozilla to that. Then, once you've installed, copy the plugins directory from the old version to the new one (though you'd probably better leave libnullplugin.so alone; easy way to do this is 'cp -iR mozilla-old/plugins mozilla-new/plugins' and say 'no' to the overwrite request. (And remember to change the symlink!)
      And why oh why do I have to be root to install mouse-gestures under linux?
      Well, were you root when you installed mozilla? If not, I don't know... but if you were, then there's the problem! I think there's some sort of script thingy you can do that might help with that though. Check with someone who knows more than I do.

      The problem that I'm running into here is that the installer segfaults while it's trying to install the EN-US language pack. Anyone else have any idea what's going on here?

    • You shouldn't have to install mouse gestures etc. as root, as long as you installed Mozilla as a non root user. This morning I downloaded mozilla and installed as myself, and then installed Multizilla, Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus, A spellchecker and my own toolbar, all as this local user.

      Plug-ins such as Flash and Java can be restored as described above. Mozdev extensions such as mouse gestures tend to write their data to the ~mozillainstalldir~/chrome directory. You can try backing this up before the new install and then restoring it, it should work between 1.2 and 1.21 and is something I always do when installing a nightly release of Multizilla or similar.

    • Re:Annoyance (Score:3, Informative)

      by felipeal ( 177452 )
      I think someone posted a hint about that here on slashdot sometime ago. I took note of it, but haven't tried yet. Anyway, here it is:

      You can share bookmarks amoung all your installs of Mozilla, Phoenix, and probably other Gecko browsers (untested). All you do is add the following command to your prefs.js file:

      user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "C:\\Documents and Settings\\userdude\\Application Data\\Mozilla\\Profiles\\default\\wx4vqyna.slt\\bo okmarks.html");

      In addition, you can share plugins by adding the following line to your environment. Her is an example of what I did on my Windows box:

      MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH = "C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Share\Plugin" (in Environment Variables on Win2k)

      Really helps so you don't have to redo plugins all the time and you can share one bookmark file for all!

  • Ack my Themes! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blonde rser ( 253047 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:04PM (#4802435) Homepage
    "Themes are Mozilla version-dependent; thus, themes created for Mozilla version 1.x will not install on Mozilla version 1.2, and above. The same is true with using version 1.2 Mozilla themes on earlier versions of Mozilla."


    has this always been true or is this new to 1.2... I don't remember my themes not working before but it may just be my memory that's not working

  • So if there's just been one bug fix... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yoz ( 3735 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:05PM (#4802440) Homepage

    ... how come I now can't have both my mail and browser windows open at the same time? Worked fine in 1.2 final. Now the mozilla process won't even die when I close all the windows (well, all one of the windows, since now, in an obvious bid to Highlander fans, there can be only one).

    Let me demonstrate where I am with Mozilla:

    start of tether [----------------|--] end of tether

    Don't tell me to bug it, I've already filed loads of bugs (very few of which have even been looked at, let alone fixed), and I haven't the time. 1.1 kept crashing on me, the 1.2 beta was worse, and you can forget about using the nightlies if you don't want to hit completely random regressions every other minute.

    No, I know I'm not paying for it, and I know it's a community effort, whatever. Let me just have five minutes of rage. (Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)

    -- Yoz

    • Re:So if there's just been one bug fix... (Score:4, Informative)

      by asa ( 33102 ) <asa@mozilla.com> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:13PM (#4802508) Homepage
      (Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)

      No one ever took it from you. If you deleted it after the install just go back to ftp and download it again. I'd recommend that you do an uninstall and remove any traces of the Mozilla install directory then try a reinstall of 1.2.1. There should be no problems with a clean install. If that doesn't work then try creating a new profile and see if that works (you can copy your old profile data over to the new profile if necessary). I'm surprised you're having this difficulty and hope that one of the steps I suggested would fix it. The chances of 1.2.1 introducing a problem that didn't exist for you in 1.2 are about zero so I suspect that some other problem is at work here, possibly cruft left over from a beta install. Like I suggested above, removing the entire beta install directory should clear up any problems if it was a beta build problem that's manifesting in the final release. Good luck.

      --Asa
      • Hey, Asa, someone brought up a good point - why not just release a patch or delta or something? I haven't gotten it yet, so maybe it's more complicated than that, but if only a couple of files have changed, why not release that also?

      • Thanks for the advice! I did a complete uninstall and reinstall, no luck. Then I moved my profile dir elsewhere, and then it worked fine.

        So now, being faced with having to rebuild my profile from scratch, I wasn't entirely happy, so I took a different route: Backed up my profile and thought about what I could delete that would solve the problem fastest while still keeping the majority of my data and preferences.

        Most obvious was registry.dat, but it's over a meg and I probably have lots of important stuff in there. So after some looking around, I killed chrome/chrome.rdf.

        Bingo! Works fine now.

        How odd.

        Still not entirely happy about the experience, but, as you suggested, I've been trying nightlies so that may have introduced the cruft. (I've a sneaky feeling it may have been the Orbit skin, though, in which case that's a nasty bug)

        -- Yoz
    • That's funny. My current fortune on slashdot is as follows:

      "The UNIX philosophy basically involves giving you enough rope to hang yourself. And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure."
    • At the risk of stating the obvious, I can't see this bug on either 1.2 or 1.21 on Windows or Linux. Running KDE is dual screen mode I normally set Mozilla to open one window for email on the right hand screen which I attach to all desktops and keep a web browser window open on the right hand screen, generally opening only one window since I discovered the wonderful Multizilla [mozdev.org] extension.

      I do think the mozilla mail client is one of the most underrated part of the suite. It's IMAP compatability puts Notes and (to a lesser extent) Outlook and Outlook express to shame. The new filter after after the fact functionality is very useful, I have around 10,000 emails in an archived mailbox on my local machine which I have finally been able to quickly organise into useful categories. I even managed to find a UK english spellchecker for it the other day ... :-)
  • Don't speak for everyone... Mozilla and Chimaria aren't my favorite browsers... Opera is.
  • I built it up from the FreeBSD ports a year or so ago and found it was slow, so I ditched it. Galeon, which uses parts of Mozilla, also seems a little sluggish. That one I use regularly just because Netscape doesn't know how to render some web pages. And Galeon looks prettier than Mozilla.

    So, give me the good word and maybe I will let the computer crunch away on Mozilla source for an hour or so :)

  • Just a General Tip (Score:5, Informative)

    by joel8x ( 324102 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:14PM (#4802520) Homepage
    For those of us who are absent minded, don't forget to disable any 3rd party skins on existing installations of Mozilla before uprading to 1.2.1. It will save you the step of deleting the chrome directory when Mozilla freezes on startup due to incompatible old skins.

  • Woohoo, fixed OS X interface quirks! (Score:4, Informative)

    by mindKMST ( 562038 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:14PM (#4802524)
    I started using Mozilla on OS X after discovering, a few weeks into my introduction to X, that IE on OSX had all sorts of problems. Knowing that Microsoft often let their Mac products sit for years before actually releasing any updates, I decided to try out Mozilla. I discovered a more full featured browser that had a tabed browsing feature incredibly useful for doing research. Since then, Mozilla has always been my personal favorite browser on OS X but there have been problems. The biggest of the problems were all the annoying UI quirks. For example, having to minimize a download window if it was the only mozilla window open in order to open a new browser window. Problems such as this prevented me from recommending the browser to non techsavy people. Now I have to say that most of these bugs have been corrected and speed improved. The stable version of Mozilla is exactly that. On my machine Mozilla 1.2.1 renders pages faster faster then Chimera 0.6 which, allthough more reliable, seams slower than 0.5 . The only thing I use IE for is embedded Windows Media Player content.
  • Okay, maybe I'm just having a slow start to my Tuesday, but why can't I figure out how to get Mozilla 1.2 to go ahead and smooth fonts in KDE on a RedHat 8 system? I can't even find anything useful on Google, which is bizarre.

    • Re:font smoothing in KDE? (Score:2, Informative)

      by tuffy ( 10202 )
      Did you download the experimental xft version? The regular version doesn't have the smoothing code, so that one won't work.
    • Mozilla.org now has xft RPMs available for RH8. Check a mirror (mozilla.org is slow right now), but in any case it should be around /mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft /RPMS/i386

      You can replace "xft" with "vanilla" if you want (to get the non-xft support), and RPMS with SRPMS if you want to build RPMS from source (perhaps for a different arch, remove the i386).

      Note that Mozilla isn't exactly dependent directly on KDE. To get smoothing, you actually use XFT, with is unrelated to KDE (KDE uses it through QT, but neither are a part of each other).

      Another poster mentioned the xft support is experimental. He's probably right, so ymmv. I've been running the RPMS I mentioned above for a few hours with 0 problems on RH8, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

  • Minor release patches? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beeblebrox87 ( 234597 ) <slashdot@alex a n d e r .co.tz> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:16PM (#4802541)
    Why must Mozilla always release only the full version, even for minor fix releases like this one. I am on a satellite connection, so it took me hours to download 1.2, and now I will have to download almost the exact same thing all over again. Can't they release both a full version and a patch for the previous version?

    • Re:Minor release patches? (Score:2, Informative)

      by M1000 ( 21853 )
      You might want to compile from source and sync to their cvs...
    • I agree, but for a different reason.

      Every time I get a new Mozilla, I have to uninstall and reinstall the entire thing. Trying to install on top inevitably leads to problems (not that I don't try to make it work.) For instance, this time, the Bookmark Sidebar couldn't load my bookmarks. When I uninstalled (and eliminated the resources) and reinstalled, they worked again.

      Of course, this is under Windows. I never had problems like this undir Linux.

      Anyway, I think that a Windows patch would probably leave enough alone that I'd be able to go along my merry way without this much hassle.
    • I see your point about just getting a patch, but you should also know that you can just install using the Net Installer, which gives you a 200KB program to select the exact configuration you want to install, and THEN it downlaods and installs.

      http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ [mozilla.org]

      Scroll down looking for "Net Installer" .

  • So, was the DHTML bug the reason why the image map (top right: Help|My Orders|etc) on the EB Games [ebgames.com] wasn't working for me in 1.2? It seems to be okay in 1.2.1.
  • I'm sorry, but for all that Chimera is hailed, is is a piece of crap browser. I've been using it and it just crashes constantly and lacks a lot of features. Features that I sorely miss from mozilla/phoenix while using Chimera are:

    Smart Bookmarks (searching from location bar very convenient, am using what I feel is a kludge of a javascript monstrosity set as my search page to search by selection or pop up a dialog if there is no selection, decent, but still not as cool).

    Type-ahead find: very nifty feature.

    Ability to have hrefs that request new windows open in tabs. I like tabs and don't like sites breaking my preferred usage paradigm.

    Freaking close buttons on the tabs. I hate having to right click, control-click, or click and hold to close a tab that is not the active tab. Just annoying.

    The first is to me the biggest issue. I just had to rant that Chimera is not 'all-that'. If it didn't crash so much and at *least* had smart bookmarks, then maybe. OmniWeb and IE are just too feature barren, Opera misrenders some important pages to me, and Mozilla is too slow. Phoenix has been decent, but middle-click doesn't work and sometimes it gets a bit confused in the MacOSX builds... Well, enough of my rant..

  • BEWARE---Installing 1.2.1 can destroy your Palm user account. [mozilla.org]

    Aside from that, Palm address book sync is in... but there still seems to be lots of issues with it. Categores don't seem to sync well, it resets the "Show in list" field every time something changes, secondary address books don't always sync, etc.
    Classify as Not Yet Ready for Prime Time(tm).

  • What a difference a character makes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by endico ( 29407 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:41PM (#4802804) Homepage
    You'll be amused to know that Mozilla 1.2.1 differs from Mozilla 1.2 by one character.

    Ok, not exactly. It actually differs by 34 characters. The bug fix itself was a one character change (changed a '9' to an '8'). Changing the version string in various places from "1.2" to "1.2.1" took 33 characters.

  • One thing that is really keeping me from using Mozilla is the fact that I can't use my google toolbar. I've become dependant on it, to be honest. So, it would be cool if Mozilla could emulate IE somehow or another to fool Google and be able to have IE style custom toolbars. Not sure if this is possible....
  • Honestly folks, do we really need a front page story every time a new version of Mozilla is realeased? I'm sure there's other applications that are more deserving than a web browser.

    Mozilla 1.2.1 Released [slashdot.org]

    Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed [slashdot.org]

    Mozilla 1.2 Beta Released [slashdot.org]

    Mozilla 1.2 Betas Start Flowing [slashdot.org]

    Mozilla 1.1 Hits The Street [slashdot.org]

    Mozilla 1.1 Beta Out And About [slashdot.org]

    And that's just from the first two pages of search results. I know we all love our Mozilla, but I'm sure there's something else a little more newsworthy [wired.com] going on today.
  • The directory for src is empty:

    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozil la 1.2.1/src

    I really want to start this building whilst I'm at work but I can't find the source!

    Anyone know which nightly this was built from? I can just download that one.

  • My 2 big gripes about Mozilla (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <vasqzr@@@netscape...net> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:46PM (#4803478)

    1 - Tabbed browsing is cool, but you should get a confirmation that you'd like to close the main browser window when you have 23 tabs open

    2 - CTRL-SHIFT-L to open a web address. Make it CTRL-O.

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