Mac Browser Watch - Firefox 1.0.1, Mozilla Suite 1.8 Beta Released

by , 2:15 AM EST, March 2nd, 2005

Mozilla.org recently made two new software releases. Firefox 1.0.1 provides improved stability and new security updates, including a fix for website spoofing via International Domain Names. Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 offers many improvements of its own, and its Disk Image now uses built-in compression instead of tar and gzip. From the Firefox 1.0.1 release notes:

Here's what's new in Firefox 1.0.1:

• Improved stability
• International Domain Names are now displayed as punycode. (To show International Domain Names in Unicode, set the "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference to false.)
• Several security fixes.

From the Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 release notes:

New Features and Fixes

Browser

• MacOS X: Mozilla Suite disk image now using embedded compression.
• Various bookmarks menus were made middle-clickable.
• A lot of (Japanese) IME work being done for Windows.
• Background tabs can no longer set the status bar (part of bug 104532).
• Drag-slider scrolling now resumes when you drag the mouse back over the slider (bug 282195).
• [iann] Help viewer's search is now automatic (like bookmarks or about:config) (bug 281563).
• [bsmedberg] (Windows) -edit startup flag now works if you used the installer (bug 276943).
• You can now specify actions for mice with alternate/horizontal scrolling (bug 274179).
• Power users can risk the prefs that force new windows into tabs (bug 231984).
• [CTho] (Windows) You can now set a pref to change backspace to scroll up or do nothing instead of going back (bug 219203).
• Help viewer's external links now reuse an existing window (bug 226911).
• [Mano] (BiDi) You can now switch the direction of a page or a text field (bug 279416).
• Serif/Sans Serif fonts preferences are now per-language (bug 95227).
• [bz] The JavaScript console now correctly displays long messages in last to first order (bug 126620).
• Copy Image now copies the pixel data as well as the location (some applications require you to use Paste Special to choose the image). (bug 135300).

Mail

• [bienvenu] News message can now be reloaded if it failed due to a temporary network error (bug 107776).
• [bienvenu] Mozilla Mail can now connect securely to incoming servers that support TLS (bug 60377).
• [shaver] You can now use one form of WPAD proxy. The advanced manual proxy settings have been moved to their own dialog. You can now use your SOCKS proxy as your DNS server.
• You can now easily set the delay before mail messages are marked as read (bug 231428).
• [bienvenu] You can now auto save draft messages (bug 16360/279034).
• You can now select flagged messages (bug 72823).
• [kairo] You can set a hidden preference so that newsgroups are marked read when you finish reading them (bug 99048).

Composer

• [glazou] You can now easily make the Return key start a new paragraph when composing HTML (bug 92686).

Chatzilla

• The Chatzilla menu item now appears in the correct place even if you don't install Mail (bug 206803).

Under the Hood

• E4X (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-357.pdf), except for the DOM binding magic, which is coming in 1.8b2.
• Bug 280711 brings a fix for displaying long blocks on Windows (excluding Windows 95, 98, ME).
• Fix for 212034 makes printing long tables behave much better and more consistently (cross-platform).
• [jshin] Mozilla now recognises web pages created for the Mac (bug 237712).

New Issues

These are items that have been added to the Known Issues page since the last milestone, although the bugs themselves may have existed previously.

General

• Email address auto complete doesn't always work (regression caused by bug 272002).
• Setting Mozilla as your default mail client doesn't always work.

The latest releases of Firefox and the Mozilla suite are available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows at www.mozilla.org.

Mozilla.org