Articles - Reviews, criticism. anecdotes and my musings.

About - Info about myself.

Mozilla - Tools to help test the open source browser.

The Pit - Unfinished ideas and failed projects.

Contact me - Spelling and grammar corrections welcome.

Mozila nightly review

The sidebar appears to have broken fairly badly in this release. Only the tinderbox section worked. Collapsing toolbars also failed to work properly leaving a white area where the toolbar would be...

History for the back/forward buttons has been implemented. However I found this to be unreliable - sometimes old pages would not be shown, sometimes the current page would be stored several times.

I have noticed that in recent builds, spare spaces around hyperlinks are often being turned into under lines creating the following sort of effect Mozilla    . Also, the layout of various pages can be off. This was shown on one my own pages.

By far and away the worst thing though is the crash I see on Disney. I suspect that it is becuase of the flash plugin but I have no proof. The crash tied up the whole of MacOS and forced an unwelcome reset. Sun's java site raised an excpetion. However dismissing it left a "Applet Error : Closing" in the status bar which would not change.

Overall 5/10 - Not a bad build but plagued by layout problems and crashes not seen on other platforms.

050412 Win32
After being greeted by a box saying that my computer was missing MSCVIRT.DLL moz loaded. A swift browse of some smoketest site revealed the jumping input boxes are still with us and a very messy Excite. I am unsure whether it was this bad in the Mac build...

Other differences from the Mac build was the display of the png smoketest. The background seems less transparent on this build but I'm unsure of what the correct display of the page should be.

When using Yahoo Mail (a framed site) mozilla began to feel slugish. I would click and it would be at least a second before mozilla would show signs of life and start animating.

There was a bit of strangeness on silicon when a page set to load in another window also loaded in the window I was looking at. The back/forward histories were also a little strange.

Only one crash on newsnow but this is a known bug anyway.

Overall 7/10 - a reliable build but with odd layout on some well known sites and slugishness when using frames.

050509 Win32 installer

Probably the worst nightly I have used in the past few months of mozilla testing. Why is this? Becuase I could not even get it to finish the installation.

Despite trying 5 different WinNT 4 SP6 machines, the installer always crashed before finshing reporting a -201 error. I cannot recommend a nightly that you cannot even install.

Overall 0/10 - If I can't install it, I can't run it.