First Release Candidate For Mozilla 1.7 Released

Mozilla.org has made available the first release candidate for Mozilla 1.7, the next major version of its Internet application suite. Changes include a smooth scrolling setting, IMAP IDLE support, and the prevention of sites from blocking contextual menus. From the release notes:

Browser
  • Official Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 builds for Windows and Linux contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. To help us make 1.7 the most stable release yet, please submit your crash reports.
  • A new option to prevent sites using Javascript to block the browseris context menu.
  • A new set of icons for files that are associated with Mozilla.
  • Password Manager has a "show passwords" mode which will display saved passwords. You will need to enter your master password if you are using one.
  • The "Set as wallpaper" feature now has a confirmation dialog.
  • Linux GTK2 builds have improved support for OS themes.
  • Cookie dialogs have been reworked to make them more usable.
  • Date handling, especially on OS X, has been improved.
  • It is now possible to fine-tune Mozillais pop-up blocking using two preferences (dom.popup_maximum and dom.popup_allowed_events) but thereis no UI for that yet. Even without a UI, users should notice a greater variety of pop-ups blocked (primarily mouseover pop-ups) and a limit of 20 or so open at one time, regardless of whether pop-up blocking is active which provides some protection from sites that open hundreds of windows in a loop.
  • Downloaded files are now moved to the target directory as soon as the user selects the desired location. This was the frequently reported bug 55690.
  • There is now user interface to activate Smooth Scrolling (Preferences -> Appearance).
Mail
  • Many improvements to Palm Sync.
  • IMAP IDLE support has been added.
  • Support for "MSN Authentication" and Secure Password Authentication using SSPI NTLM auth for SMTP and POP3.
  • A new preference to "always use the default character encoding for replies" rather than using the encoding of the message being replied to.
  • Improvements to performance of downloading, viewing, and saving mail messages.
  • This is the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for multiple identities on the same mail account. See the Multiple Identity Support documentation for more details.
  • is also the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for relative paths for mail folders in prefs.js. This makes it easier to copy profiles around without having to fix up prefs.js afterwards.
  • With Mozilla , you can now edit address lists containing "Last, First" style names.
  • When composing mail, you can now use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the To/CC/Bcc list.
  • On Mac OS X, attachment file names are no longer displayed in decomposed Unicode but are converted to composed Unicode.
  • All Mozilla LDAP queries now default to using LDAPv3 (previously, they used LDAPv2). There is a hidden .protocolVersion preference which can force LDAP v2 to be used on a per-server basis. LDAP autoconfig authors can force v2 also by adding a setProtocolVersion call to their JS. Details can be found by grovelling through bug 198168.

Mozilla 1.7 is set to replace 1.4 as the so-called stable branch, off of which third-developers will base their software. The next version of Netscape, presumably 7.2, will be based on Mozilla 1.7 later this summer. You can find more information and download links for this release at the Mozilla.org Web site.