Mozilla 0.9.4 Released

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Posted by michael on Friday September 14, 2001 @11:49AM from the fast-as-a-speeding-snail dept.

asa writes: "Lots of bug fixes (1,467 at last count) since 0.9.3 including the ability to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. You can find more information on what's new at the release notes and mozillaZine."

9 of 388 comments (clear)

How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by davidu · 2001-09-14 11:57 · Score: 5, Informative

Ok folks, here is a really cool feature: The Ability to manage, on a site by site basis, which sites can give you popups and which can't. A very effective way to manage pop up ads. Here's how:

No POPUPS whatsoever:
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

But...if some sites need popups, make a zone for them like this:
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.sites", "http://www.evil.org http://www.annoying.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.alert", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.confirm ", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.prompt" , "noAccess");
... you get the idea....

It is very cool, and there is a lot of scripting and other trickery you can do with these prefrences.

Btw, this is all from: Configurable Security Policies

-David

--

# Hack the planet, it's important.
1. Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla by Spy+Hunter · 2001-09-14 13:21 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Actually, what is in Mozilla now is much cooler yet, which is the ability to disable 99.9% of advertising popups while letting 99% of wanted popups through, with no user intervention necessary ! No need to maintain a list of sites that need popups to function. It disables popups during page load and unload, but lets through popups that happen due to an actual mouse click.
  Of course, if this feature ever gets widespread use we'll just see javascript links that open up advertisements in addition to their targets, but that won't happen unless IE gets this feature, which is unlikely. So download Mozilla and free yourself from evil automatic popups!
  
  --
  main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:Wow! by Gerv · 2001-09-14 12:02 · Score: 5, Funny

Wow, what a great release! I think that 0.9.3 really is a key step in the right direction for 1.0.

Has someone been cutting and pasting out of their "Slashdot comments" file? ;-)

Gerv
Re:Looking good by maggard · 2001-09-14 12:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

If Mozilla is going to be able to compete with the major browsers...
What other major browsers? Opera? Lynx? The legions of other 1%'ers?
As far as most webfolks are concerned there's IE for Wintel, IE for Mac (they've different code bases and behave very differently), Netscape et al v.4x, Netscape/Mozilla et al v.6x then generic text-browsers for ADA compatibility. That leaves Netscape/Mozilla as one of the two major names and the rest lost in the "other" catagory*.
*Yes lots of browser-partesians will howl at this but for most web sites the vast majority of browsers hitting them regularly are IE or NS. No comment on quality or anything else, just reading the logs.

--
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Re:Mirror by Gerv · 2001-09-14 12:11 · Score: 4, Funny

The mozilla folks really ought to put up MD5s with the release.

Why? If they can tamper with the releases, they can tamper with the MD5s.

Anyway, the standard disclaimer we put on all releases applies: "If it doesn't melt your hard drive and send your tax evasion plans to the IRS, consider yourself lucky."
Gerv
Re:Mirror by pete-classic · 2001-09-14 12:15 · Score: 4, Informative

Why? If they can tamper with the releases, they can tamper with the MD5s.

For mirrors. You get the MD5 (AFAIR, 128bits, conceiveably double that when including the filename ;-) from the "official" site and use it to verify that the bins on the mirror haven't been altered.

-Peter
Re:Speed issues. Moz 9.3/9.4 by zachlipton · 2001-09-14 12:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

In my mind, I don't think of Mozilla or Netscape 6.x to be an upgrade to Netscape 4.x, I think of it as a completely different product. Any time that you rewrite 100% of the product, you can expect the new version to be slower, more infested with bugs, and just "feel" worse than the older version which has been tended for many years.

However, if Netscape decided not to do the 5.0 rewrite, disaster would be the only end. The old code was not mantainible and doesn't allow for the powerful new features and embedding that seamonkey allows for.

Speed is something that is being worked on and is significantly better than before. I won't mention full names here on /. without permission from the people involved, but someone at Netscape (d. hy.) did a lot of work on page loading and a new contributor did a lot of proformence work as well recently (jes.). Mail/news also uses the widget in the folder-paine, which has great speed increases as well.

So we are trying the best we can. As always, patches are welcome.

Zach
What's new in 0.9.4 by mbrubeck · 2001-09-14 12:25 · Score: 4, Informative

The difference in 0.9.4 is that you can disable popups on page-load/page-close only. This gets rid of most popup ads, while preserving less-annoying uses of popup windows (unlike 0.9.3).
See this newsgroup post for details.
Re:Proxomitron by Todd+Knarr · 2001-09-14 13:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

How about not optimizing your page code instead? Just write HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 or CSS1/CSS2 or Javascript 1.2 or whatever according to the standards ( see www.w3c.org for all of them ) and make life easy on all of us. I find it annoying to go to a site and see "Sorry, Netscape 6.x isn't supported.", flip the user-agent string to IE5.5 and discover that the site renders perfectly in Mozilla 0.9.recent. To me it says that the site doesn't care what customers it annoys and that the designer doesn't know how to create HTML pages.