Mozilla 1.4 RC 3 Fixes More Bugs in Preparation for 1.4 Final

by , 12:00 PM EDT, June 25th, 2003

The Mozilla Organization has introduced Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 3, an updated version of its browser suite. Instead of adding new features, 1.4 Release Candidate 3 has new bug fixes that will help ensure a polished final release of Mozilla 1.4. It does include a new blue, glossy application icon, however. As stated in the release notes, Mozilla 1.4 and these release candidates collectively include the following new features:

• Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use "windows integrated security".
• Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
• Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
• Mozilla now has smooth scrolling. It is disabled by default. To enable it, use about:config to add the boolean preference general.smoothScroll with a value of true. To disable smooth scrolling, set the value of the pref to false.
• Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a "delete junk mail" menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
• Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
• Users can now specify "blank page," "home page," or "Last page visited" for each of first window, new window and new tab.
• Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML compose.
• Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can "view image" to see blocked or not loaded images.
• Mozilla now has CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 AUTH support for SMTP
• "Launch file" after downloading has been enabled for .exe files
• It is possible to build Mozilla for Win32 using GCC. See the win32 build instructions for details.
• Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented
• Mozilla 1.4 contains thousands of additional bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.

While the future will yield small updates such as 1.4.1, Mozilla 1.4 will be the last major release in which the browser is based on the traditional browser suite. Beginning with Mozilla 1.5, the browser will feature the standalone Mozilla Firebird application. Check out the Mozilla roadmap for more details.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Honestly there isn't much to say that we haven't already. As always, we are glad to see the Mozilla developers are hard at working producing improved versions of their already-excellent software.

The Mozilla Organization