Run For Cover; It's Mozilla 1.4 Alpha

asa writes "Mozilla 1.4 Alpha is out. This release features dynamic image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (see release notes for enabling this feature,) and usability improvements to spam filtering. In addition to these feature improvements, 1.4a also contains fixes for performance, stability, standards support and website compatibility. This is an alpha release so expect bugs, and don't use it unless you are willing to live with the risks inherent in such a release (ie. crashes, data loss, etc.). More information is available in the release notes."

Comments

Aint Slashdot Great?

[The Real Chrisjc]

Heh, thanks to my Slashdot subs, I have already downloaded this release, and I must say, the smooth scrolling is lovely :)) Well, its not majorly different, but nice.
about:config anyone?
Get it for cheap thrills of smooth scroll if you havn't already :D

Not mentionned in the story ...

[Pat__]

The code for the bookmarks has been rewritten so you can see major updates there including icons in the sidebar (still waiting for icons in the personal toolbar) but that's a good start.

Also the dynamic image resizing in Composer is way too cool :-)
Worth launching Composer just to see it in action.

And finally for those of you using the pie-menu extentions you should download the latest version compatible with 1.4 alpha.

NTLM on Windows!

[bunratty]

Asa didn't mention one new major feature -- Windows builds now support NTLM authentication. This was the one blocker for lots of folks who wanted to run Mozilla at work. Eventually, other platforms will get NTLM, too.

Re:NTLM on Windows!

[weave]

Let's hope they fix bug 162025, another huge corporate blocker. If a place has a GPO that redirects the %appdata% folder, mozilla won't work. If a mozilla profile is pointed at UNC pathname, it won't work.

Read my ranting about it for more details in comment #28 of that bug.

I manage 2000 desktops and deployed Mozilla before fully understanding the ramifications of this bug. The end result was a lot of pissed off users of lost profiles over and over.

Don't think it's a big deal? My employer's entire IT structure was recently looked over by an outside consultant and during my interview, she asked "What is your e-mail client?" I said "Mozilla." She was like "Mozilla was a big mistake let me tell you. Your users hate it."

And the only reason they hate it is because Windows, when using roaming profiles (and my users roam a lot being it's a college) likes to move the location of the profile (eg, ...\username, ...\username.domain, ...\username.domain.001, etc) and if that happens, mozilla goes to hell and loses the profile. And you can't move %appdata% to a UNC path via GPO to get around this because Mozilla just plain ole won't work then.) And while you can move most of the profile to a fixed drive letter place, like Z:\mozilla, registry.dat file still must remain in %appdata%.

So here I tried to give my users a browser alternative and I got reamed by a consultant (whose final report hasn't been released yet) for doing it.

So yeah, I'm a bit bitter... If you manage a windows domain environment, avoid Mozilla, Netscape 7, or anything based on the code, until this bug is fixed,. Learn from my misfortune.

Reading Spam-filtering rules?

[hiryuu]

One thing I had hoped to find, based subsequent interest from reading the various whitepapers on Bayesian filtering for spam, is an ability to study the spam I get and the rules implemented and learned. Even just an overview of the statistics would be nice (or a plainly-obvious way to access the data to do my own analysis); this became particularly relevant to me after "training" my filters on 1.3 on several hundred spam I'd saved, only to find several false positives in the first few weeks (most related to my job-hunting efforts, one from a friend letting me know briefly that her email had changed, and one from an old college buddy asking how I was doing after so long).

I hear "usability improvements" in regards to the junk mail filtering, and wonder if this kind of thing might be involved, or on the horizon. (Yeah, I know I could download the alpha, but I'm a wuss who likes stable releases.) I see "context menu items" in the release notes, but that doesn't mean much to me. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Re:Smooth scrolling not on by default?

[abischof]

You can enable smooth scrolling by adding this line to your prefs.js file (while Mozilla isn't running).

user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);

However, it's not entirely useful since Mozilla will crash when you try to scroll horizontally if smooth scrolling is enabled. In any case, here's the bug discussing whether smooth scrolling should be enabled by default (which I think could make sense, once that horizontal-scrolling crasher is fixed).

(You may need to cut-n-paste the Bugzilla URLs into your browser, since Bugzilla doesn't accept referers from Slashdot)