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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."
The biggest feature I've found it "Type Ahead Find". I start typing the text of a link when on a webpage, and it takes me to that link. It's still a little buggy, but not too bad.
Also, I find the new features that keep coming in MultiZilla to be worth much better than those introduced by Mozilla.
I have an idea for image blocking. Now that Mozilla uses a statistical technique to identify spam, presumable with some sort of set of words to begin the database before it is trained with our spam messages, perhaps we could apply some sort of guessing technique for image blocking.
A central database of crap ( read Doubleclick.net ) images could be maintained. Images could be checked against the database and then blocked or allowed based on that. Perhaps the domain that the images come from could be taken into account as well.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
As someone trapped behind a firewall with only an NTLM enabled proxy for Internet access, the NTLM feature is *very* interesting. I suspect there are tens of thousands of Moz users in the same boat.
This is actually a great thing. I frequently work with clients who run IIS on their intranets. As it stands now I have no choice but to switch to IE when accessing areas that use NTLM authentication. This is one less reason for me to fire-up IE.
Ultimately this could contribute to a wider deployment of Mozilla in corporate environments.
After 1.0 the improvements in Mozilla are less noticeable. That's because all the noticeable and useful improvements are happening over in the Phoenix/Firebird department.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/why/
The biggest reasons I choose it over moz are
a) Tabbed browsing is implemented better
b) Smaller, faster, lighter, better
c) extensions and themes are cooler
d) my computer is slow and crappy
e) I prefer birds on fire to dinosaurs
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Agreed! And there is a great improvement in these features that I have just noticed in 1.4b and I never saw in 1.4a. There is a little icon in the corner next to the 'lock' that appears if the site uses cookies or popups. Obviously I have popups disabled, so when I see the little popup icon, I get this lovely warm feeling inside knowing that at least 1 pop-up was annihilated. It's so much more gratifying than seeing nothing at all.
Furthermore, you can click on that little icon and change the cookie or popup blocking customisations for that particular site. This way, if a useful popup was identified as 'unrequested' then you know it was killed and you can easily re-enable it.
It actually can, and has been able to since the feature was introduced. If you hit the properties button on the toolbar, you'll be able to pull up an individual download window, and then pause it. Terribly annoying, I know, but at least it's possible.
The fix involves more than just adding a button to the download manager window, however. You'd then have to add functions to the interface the manager uses for the button to call, which would then call obtain a copy of the interface the individual window uses for downloads and call functions on it to pause it. A better fix, of course, would be to finish the backend work to combine the two into a single working interface.