Mozilla 1.4b Loosed

An anonymous reader writes "The fine Mozilla folks have decided to bless us with the release of Mozilla 1.4b this weekend. Highlights include support for NTLM authentication, usability improvements, and lots of performance, stability, and site compatibility fixes. As always, the release notes have more detailed info on changes."

Comments

Also, 1.3.1

[friedegg]

Mozilla 1.3.1 (bugfix update for 1.3) was released this week, too.

New Phoenix/Firebird builds too

[Patik]

It's been updated a lot since the 0.5 milestone, I suggest you check it out. There are several new features and UI enhancements.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/nightly/latest-t runk

Also check out all of the extensions, most of which still work on the latest nightly build.

Re:New Phoenix/Firebird builds too

[pipegeek]

Is Phoenix the same thing as Firebird?
Yes. They renamed Phoenix to Firebird due to some trademark dispute.

What about Thunderbird?
Thunderbird is a new email client which is (I believe) being written to accompany Firebird.

What's the difference between them and SeaMonkey?
Seamonkey is what Joe User would know as "mozilla". It's (I believe) the codename of the current mozilla app suite, which is based on XPFE. These new projects (Firebird and Thunderbird) are designed using new, faster toolkits (and are themselves much smaller and more streamlined) but they still make use of Mozilla's gecko rendering engine. These two projects are slated to replace seamonkey in mozilla 1.5 and all subsequent releases. They are, however, currently available as standalone programs (though, from what I've heard, Thunderbird is still a bit not quite there).

Re:New Phoenix/Firebird builds too

[fishbert42]

You should check out the new Mozilla branding strategy. It should answer your questions. In particular:

Before defining how we talk about something and how we want to present it to the world, we should talk about what we're actually producing. Right now we have two basic projects:

1. 1. SeaMonkey: The SeaMonkey project is also called the Application Suite or "App Suite." It's largely the same as the old Netscape 4.x Communicator brand. It has more or less the same functionality and branding as that the old 4.x product and we've done little to counter that association.
   2. Firebird/Thunderbird: These are the basis for the second generation mozilla products. They split our application into two separate applications with separate identities: a web browser and an email program. In talking about these projects, we should allow them to have their own identities.

Re:New Phoenix/Firebird builds too

[ncc74656]

Er, you can already switch tabs using only the keyboard in the standard Mozilla client, with Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn.

Ctrl-Tab works, too, and it's less awkward (only needs one hand to type).

Re:Still Beta?

[noda132]

Mozilla 1.4a is "alpha" (hence the "a"). Likewise, Mozilla 1.4b, the version being mentioned in this article, is "beta" (hence the "b"). Once Mozilla 1.4 is finished, it will be released as simply "Mozilla 1.4" and that'll mean it's stable.

Then a few months later some minor bugs will be ironed out (or in a few minutes some major bug will be) and that'll be Mozilla 1.4.1. By that time, Mozilla 1.5 may very well be starting its own release cycle.

Re:I used to follow mozilla

[GuNgA-DiN]

Definitely! I love tabbed browsing, and the popup and cookie features are far superior to IE. Mozilla has become my primary browser. I've been investigating the calendar feature too. I plan on proposing that we implement it company-wide at my work. Mozilla has matured greatly and it's only getting better. You should check it out again.

Re:NTLM for Linux?

[mr_goodwin]

Check out the NTLM authorization proxy server here.

That's what I use.

Re:image blocking

[Phroggy]

Is this what you're looking for?

Shameless plug: if you run Squid, here's mine.

FYI: How to make firebird start faster (windows)

[draziw]

Add a link to firebird in your start-up folder, with "-turbo". It will then rest in your toolbar. When you go to launce firebird for real, the window will come up much quicker.

Ryan

The most annoying installer yet

[drinkypoo]

The 1.4a installer pops up a plethora of windows, which steal focus even when windows is set to prevent applications from stealing window focus.

Thanks, Mozilla installer team! You have successfully produced an installer that prevents me from ircing while Mozilla installs!

Re:SVG Support

[Anonymous Coward]

SVG support is still very much incomplete; the browser won't recognise SVG that is embedded into pages using the embed tag (which is pretty much all SVG on the net, since that's what the Adobe plugin supports best). It also doesn't have support for the entire spec, although for basic static graphics, it is pretty much there. The libart licensing issue to which you allude is a simple incompatibility between the MPL/LGPL/GPL trilicense that Mozilla is released under and the LGPL of the libart library. That pretty much prevents mozilla including SVG by default at the moment. In addition, a lot of the SVG had a rewrite quite recently and, because no one has had time to review thousands of lines of new code, it's still living on a branch. That's important if you decide to compile Mozilla with --enable-svg set - to get the new code you need to pull the branch from CVS, otherwise you'll get the older, somewhat buggier code. For more details, including quite detailed build instructions, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/ If you think that duplicating cpu effort by compiling everything yourself is a waste of time, then there are regular svg-enabled builds contributed to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest These come in two flavors, GDI+ (windows only) and Libart (Linux and windows). All svg builds have mathml-svg in the filename. If you're not on one of those platforms or want something cool like Xft and SVG, you'll need to complie yourself, I'm afraid. For more information, see the netscape.public.mozilla.svg newsgroup.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

XBL security change

[jesser]

Mozilla 1.4 beta includes a security fix to prevent web pages from loading XBL from file: URLs (bug 200691, fixed). Unfortunately, the fix also prevents user style sheets from making web pages load XBL files from file: URLs (bug 204140), which affects some users of my XBL Flash blocker (blocks Flash using a placeholder that you can click to play a particular Flash animation).

If you saved flash.xml to disk and used a file: URL for flash.xml in userContent.css, you need to change userContent.css to load flash.xml from a local web server or from the original location on www.cs.hmc.edu instead. Otherwise, Flash won't appear at all (not even a click-to-play placeholder), and you'll see this if you open the JavaScript Console:

"Security Error: Content at http://www.shockwave.com/sw/home/ [or another URL with Flash] may not load or link to file:///C:/.../flash.xml#obj."

Re:support for NTLM authentication

[darinf]

> Standard HTTP authentication is hideously broken. It's plain text. Period. That's all there is to it. It's goddamn plain text.

Bogus. See RFC 2617 section #3, which outlines Digest (MD5) authentication. Digest auth is far superior to NTLM auth because it uses stronger crypto. The only reason to support NTLM is for compatibility with older microsoft products.

Darin