[20815] in Athena Bugs

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: When do we get Mozilla 1.1?

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Thu Sep 26 11:13:44 2002

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 11:13:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
cc: <bug-infoagents@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200209252121.RAA22351@multics.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.33L.0209261103130.19002-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Well, Mozilla is being echoed local now in Athena anyway, and the speed
improvement is pretty good. The Sun version is still slow to start, but
compared to the infoagents version it's a joy.

I don't think it's too soon to be asking the question, given that some
people had wondered aloud why we didn't just go with 1.1 in the first
place. The answer is, I am waiting for Mozilla.org to call it stable. At
some point they will stick a fork in it and say it is done. Then I will
grab it.

Right now it is officially considered bleeding-edge, no matter how usable
and/or stable it looks on the surface ... and to me, "bleeding edge" in a
project with that many fingers in the pie really means something. I
already have about ten messages a day on Mozilla things I can't fix, and
that's the stable version!

(Understand, I believe Mozilla is presently the best game in town with the
Unix features we need, or I wouldn't have recommended it. But it does
still have problems.)

I do need to upgrade to 1.01, which is considered a stable bug patch to
1.0. This was supposed to happen two weeks ago, but I got a little swamped
by other things. I hope to be able to do it next week.

I suppose we could put 1.1 in a locker somewhere as a "no guarantees"
browser for those who want to risk it. (In fact I believe the 'mozilla'
locker is running 1.1, albeit unconfigured for MIT peculiarities.) But
this has traditionally not been the province of the infoagents locker.
There seems to be an assumption that anything in the infoagents locker has
support behind it. Personally, I wouldn't mind a clueful-access-only
location for 1.1, because early testing returns on it could be very
helpful a couple of months down the road.


On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, John Hawkinson wrote:

> I see that Mozilla 1.1 has support for managing which web-sites are
> allowed to pop up windows. I seem to recall that Athena didn't go to
> it because of a belief in a dearth of features (or something)? I'm sure
> there are lots of other features/bugfixes too (and doubtless some
> instability).
>
> In any case, I'm sure we'll move eventually.
>
> What's the timetable for the upgrade, and how constrained is it going
> to have to be?
>
> If you think it's too soon to be asking this question, well, I point
> out that we often lag far behind the rest of the world in software
> versions, and generally this isn't considered a good thing...
>
> I mostly ask since running Mozilla out of non-local disk is pretty dog
> slow (i.e. the mozilla locker). Perhaps the mozilla locker maintainers should
> encourage people to mirror the locker to local disk...
>
> --jhawk
>


home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post