mozilla.org Releases Mozilla 0.9.8

asa writes: "Today mozilla.org released the Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on winXP and OS X, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements, and much, much more. www.mozilla.org and www.mozillazine.org have the full scoop." The build I'm posting with (2002020305) is a little crashy, but most aspects are shaping up very nicely.

Comments

Re:The most important fix...

[weave]

Speaking of this "fix", the fix created a lot of controversy. Apparently some sites like ole slashdot set their pages to no-cache, most likely to force a page refresh so as to get another ad impression. Ignoring it was debated for cases of moving back in history but Netscape objected to it because they claimed banks would worry about the security implications of ignoring no-cache directives.

The compromise was to ignore no-cache for speed purposes on http requests but don't ignore it for https requests.

The full gritty details is in big 112564.

When to deploy...

[vex24]

I'm a sysadmin (yes, Windows :P ) and I've actually started rolling out Mozilla with new workstations instead of our standard Netscape 4.7x (I will never encourage our users to use I.E. for political and security reasons). I'm finding that Netscape 4.x is becoming a hassle to many users as they're often finding sites that it can no longer handle. Rather than drift into I.E., I'm trying to give them a solid alternative.

I've been impressed by the reception so far... only one user has rejected it wholesale, but the first question after I loaded on Netscape for him was, "Now how do I turn off pop-up ads in this one?". That seems to be the most-loved feature so far, as many websites now have pop-up ads (I wouldn't know, as I turned them off at 0.9.4!).

IMHO Netscape has made a very bad name for itself by releasing 6.x too early from buggy Mozilla builds, and loading them up with advertising and AOL stuff to boot. I've found that telling clients that Mozilla is a new browser based on Netscape is a good way to go.

I've actually found that the few problems users have had have been minor, and the mozilla bug tracking site almost always has workarounds for those show-stopper bugs...

Anyhow, just something to think about; this is a nice foothold that open source software can make in your office workplace. It's kind of the Apache of desktop software I suppose...