status of mozilla

[Bill Squire]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 11:16:01PM -0500, higgsr at rpi.edu wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I updated my ports collection yesterday and saw updates to mozilla.  So I
> built and installed it.  Everything works great except that I am unable to
> resize the mozilla windows.  I am using fvwm2.	Have I overlooked something
> or is this a problem with mozilla?  I realize that there are probably still
> a bunch of 64 bit issues with mozilla.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ray Higgs
>

Hi Ray and all,

Mozilla works well and the window resizes with no problems. Below is what 
I did and some notes on what I'm doing elsewhere.

You got me to try it. Compiled mozilla-gtk2-1.6_1 with the flags that usually
work. (more later) Works great, very fast and except for the lack of java and 
some forms of javascript, there are no obvious bugs and a good first im-
pression. GTK has worked in 64bit (AFAIK) from the beginning. If you are
using Motif, that could be the problem. (QT is also excellent in 64bit.) 

I run Gnome panel inside KDE. While some KDE apps don't perform that well,
generally a Gnome equivalent one will. While xpdf is a bit shaky and 
often goes out in a core-dump, gpdf is perfect. For that occasional .doc 
file, antiword is especially good and very simple. AbiWord compiles but
that's about all -- very disappointing compared to its i386 counterpart.  

In general, I use DPIC, -pipe (sometimes with a base -O) and -D__amd64__
which is sometimes missed in makefiles when needed. For CXXFLAGS -fPIC is
allays safe and often makes the difference. The classic examples do work
but can produce allot of warnings, like -fmemoize-lookups -fsave-memoized
which only (AFAIK) speed up the compile. 

Sure, nobody needs it, but java would be nice. (for mozilla and beyond) 
I'm trying but messing with that is madness. Sun certainly must be able
to help. (and i party with some of Sun's founders) 

On the kernel hacking, linprocfs works except for the Linux OS info which
could be pre-set anyways. Linux ABI support 'appears' just around the corner
but 64bit Linux first! (Almost anything Unix compiles 64bit.) While I did
have a 32bit compat setup, things changed and i question how interesting
such a direction is. (If 32bit applications can run even close to 64bit,
then its interesting.) My personal observation is that its easy to make 
mistakes working 32bit binaries in the amd64 that freeze the machine. Per-
haps there is a standard way to be developed? I've had my Alpha for years
and are still happy with it today. While it is quite different than CISC
systems, I've learned lots over the years. (ev56, 21164 @ 533MHz) I'd love
more Alpha's but they are too expensive relative to the amd64.    

Bill