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October 12, 2001

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Mozilla Milestone 0.9.5 Browser-Suite Released

Mike Angelo -- 12 October 2001 (c)

The Mozilla Organization released a very buggy Milestone Mozilla 0.9.5 edition of its Mozilla browser-suite today, on schedule. The Mozilla Milestone 0.9.5 browser-suite is cross-platform and open source. Builds are available for the BSD, Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, Sun, and several UNIX platforms. Source code is available if you want to custom compile your own Mozilla Milestone 0.9.5 build.

Mozilla 0.9.5 is the buggiest Mozilla Milestone ever. For information about that, please see our article, Turbo Mode & Bugs Slow Mozilla Development to Snail's Pace subtitled Milestone 0.9.4 Delayed and Turbo/Quick-Launch Examined -- Is Mozilla Really Open Source?.

The Windows-only Quick Launch feature (-turbo) was enabled by default in Mozilla 0.9.4 for installer builds. There is no mention of that in the Mozilla 0.9.5 Release Notes. Turbo was turned off by default in the pre-release Mozilla 0.9.5 build we tried. In that build, Turbo can be turned on in Advanced Preferences -- more about Turbo further down in this article.

Mostly, the changes in this pre-1.0 edition of the Mozilla browser-suite are behind-the-scenes improvements in performance and stability. A more noticeable new feature is the the Tabbed Browsing feature. It lets you open several different Web pages in the same browser window and then select a tab to display a selected Web Page. Please see Figure 1.

Figure 1. This Mozilla 0.9.5 screen shot shows the new tabbed browser feature. Please notice the tabs bar just above the displayed Web page. Simply click on a tab to select the Web page under that tab. To put Mozilla in page tab mode, simply press CTRL+T.

There are also lots of bug fixes in Mozilla 0.9.5. However, there still are many unfixed bugs in Mozilla too.

Target Milestone

The seamonkey project uses target milesones to plan Mozilla's development process. A milestone plan enumerates when different features are expected to be completed. If a bug is marked M18, it means work on the bug is expected to be completed by milestone 18. This field should only be set by the person responsible for the bug. From bugs, Mozilla Organization. (Link in Resources section below.)

Earlier today, there were some 62 bugs targeted to Mozilla 0.9.5, 1347 bugs to 0.9.6, 386 bugs targeted to 0.9.7, and 1,962 bugs targeted to Mozilla 1.0. That's a total of 3,667 bugs targeted to these four, work-in-progress, Mozilla releases. All these 3,667 bugs are in Mozilla 0.9.5. They just are not expected to be fixed until release of the specified targets.

The comparable bug count was 3,103 bugs in Mozilla 0.9.4.

Incidentally, there are some 4,991 bugs targeted to Future Mozilla releases at this time -- up from 4,694 when Mozilla 0.9.4 was released. Please see the bugs list in the right-hand sidebar on the MozillaQuest Magazine front page (mozillaquest.com) for the updated Mozilla bug counts.

To learn more about how many bugs there are in the Netscape 6.1 and Mozilla Web browser suites, and to learn how the Mozilla and Netscape developers are sweeping bugs under the carpet, please see Mozilla 0.9.3 Branched Behind Schedule & Buggy and Mozilla Roadmap - Mozilla 1.0 Set Back to 2002 - Mozilla 0.9.4 Set for 7 September.

Some new, visible, features previously added for March's Mozilla 0.8.1 edition are a hierarchical history, a routine to un-install themes, and some Gopher support. There also are lots of changes to ChatZilla, the Mozilla-based chat client in that release. For more information about the features added or improved in the Mozilla .0.8.1 browser-suite Milestone, please see Lizard On The Move: Mozilla Milestone 0.8.1 Browser-Suite Released.

There has been lots of rewriting too. For example the image library was rewritten for Mozilla 0.9. The disk cache subsystem was rewritten also. The level-1 cache rewrite was included in Mozilla 0.9, and the level-2 cache rewrite is in Mozilla 0.9.1. For more information about what's new and improved in 0.9 and 0.9.1, please see our articles, The Snail Moves: Mozilla Milestone 0.9 Browser-Suite Released and Netscape 6.1 PR 1 Browser-Suite Released.

Here is what the Milestone 0.9.5 Release Notes list as new in 0.9.5:

The History and Mail&News applications now allow you to reorder columns with drag and drop. For instance, If you prefer to have the date listed first in your mail thread pane, drag the Date header onto the Subject header and the Date column will move to the first position.
Warnings in the JavaScript console now show the text of the offending line.
Venkman, the JavaScript Debugger is now available in complete installer builds. Remember to choose 'complete' install, instead of 'typical'. Start the debugger under the Tasks/Tools menu or from the command line with mozilla -venkman.
Mozilla has a new experimental Tabbed Browsing feature. Press Ctrl+T to open a new tab. (Bug 101973.)
People who like tabbed browsing may also like the mozilla gestures add-on, Optimoz now available at mozdev.org.
SOCKS proxies (both v4 and v5) can now be used with all protocols (Bug 89500) except MailNews. Using socks with MailNews is covered by Bug 44995.
Mozilla has a new Site Navigation Bar for navigating sites that use the element (like Bugzilla buglists) Choose the menu item View | Show/Hide | Site Navigation bar | Show As Only Needed to make the toolbar show up automatically when you visit pages that use the element.
The View Source window now has a context menu with items for Find, Copy, and Select.

In July and August, the Mozilla Organization made some changes to its development roadmap and development plan which, in-effect, push a projected Mozilla 1.0 release back to January 2002 at the earliest. That tree diagram anticipates at least two more 0.9.x Milestone releases before there is a Mozilla 1.0 release.

For more information about the Roadmap revisions, please see Mozilla Roadmap - Mozilla 1.0 Set Back to 2002 - Mozilla 0.9.4 Set for 7 September.

The milestones are intended to be periodic check points for progress on the project, stability of builds, porting status, and are entry points for additional mozilla (sic) contributors to provide testing and engineering help on the project. (Project Sea Monkey. Link in Resources section below.)

Nevertheless, pre-Mozilla-1.0 development builds now are pretty much features-complete, stable, and usable. Mozilla development work now is focused on bug squashing, improved stability, and better performance. Browser-wise, we find current Mozilla Milestone releases good enough for regular use. We also find the latest Mozilla Milestones to be better, browser-wise, than Netscape 6.1.

MozillaQuest Magazine is giving the Mozilla 0.9.5 builds a preliminary try out now. Check back for more information soon. In the meantime, if you want to test drive the brand new Mozilla 0.9.5 builds now, we recommend that you install Mozilla 0.9.5 in it own directory, that you do not get rid of your current browser(s), that you do not enable turbo mode, and that you do not set Mozilla 0.9.5 as your default browser -- yet.

About Turbo Mode

Windows Memory includes both actual physical RAM memory plus virtual, swap file, memory on a hard drive.

The fairly new Mozilla turbo mode for the Windows edition loads some Mozilla code when the system is booted. That means that Mozilla will start more quickly when you open it because some of the Mozilla code already is loaded into Windows Memory.

The Netscape people call this turbo-mode feature Quick Launch in Netscape 6.1. It's meant to try to make Netscape 6 (and Mozilla) more competitive with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which seems to start more quickly than does Netscape 6.

The upside to turbo mode is that Mozilla and Netscape 6.1 start faster than they would without turbo mode. One downside to turbo mode is that is adds a few seconds to the amount of time it takes Windows to boot.

Another downside is that you waste resources by using the turbo mode until you use, and if you actually decide to use, Mozilla and/or Netscape for that session.

Yet another downside is that Mozilla and Netscape 6.1 are very buggy and do a lousy job of memory management. So if you enable turbo mode, you are loading buggy Mozilla or Netscape code every time you run Windows -- if you run only Windows and have Mozilla/Netscape turbo mode enabled, you are loading buggy code every time you run your computer. With turbo or Quick Launch mode turned on, Mozilla or Netscape load whether or not you ever use them. Of course, if the Mozilla folks ever get the bugs out of the Mozilla/Netscape code, then this downside of loading buggy code would be gone.

For more information about turbo mode and Quick-Launch, please see our article, Turbo Mode & Bugs Slow Mozilla Development to Snail's Pace subtitled Milestone 0.9.4 Delayed and Turbo/Quick-Launch Examined -- Is Mozilla Really Open Source?.

Downloading & Installation Info

Note: usually the Mozilla Organization includes a simple, non-talkback, Milestone download build for the Microsoft Windows platform such as mozilla-win32-0.9.5.zip plus a talkback build. The Mozilla 0.9.5 release notes also call for such a mozilla-win32-0.9.5.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 0.9.5 Release Notes, the Mozilla Organization, 12 October 2001.)

Unfortunately, the Mozilla Organization has decided not to give you that choice for Mozilla Milestone 0.9.5. It has not included the non-talkback mozilla-win32-0.9.5.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-win32-0.9.5.zip too. Whether you participate in Mozilla talkback should be your choice, not the Mozilla Organization's choice.

Of course you can turn talkback off when you install Mozilla if you use the installer version 0.9.5 Mozilla Milestone build (mozilla-win32-0.9.5-installer.exe). However, the installer version of Mozilla presents some potential privacy breaches, which we shall address shortly in another article.

In the meantime, we recommend that you disconnect your computer from the Internet when installing mozilla-win32-0.9.5-installer.exe so that you can adjust your security and privacy preferences before taking Mozilla 0.9.5 online for the first time.(Please see our article How To Download, Install, & Configure Netscape 6 -- Safely! for more about that.)

0.9.5 Download Links

Here are the FTP download links for Mozilla 0.9.5 for you readers that cannot wait to try Mozilla 0.9.5

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 0.9.5 Source

Other Builds, RPMs, & Platforms

Release Notes