yowkee essential

Mozilla 1.4 Beta (Release Note) and 1.3.1 (Release Note) are out. Mozilla 1.3.1 was released to restore XPI functionality for Mac OS X users. In addition, initial implementation of Mozilla Midas, rich text editing controls, is included in 1.3.1.

Notable new features in 1.4 beta:

• Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use “windows integrated security”.
• Users can now specify “blank page,” “home page,” or “last page visited” for each of first window, new window and new tab.
• Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML mail compose.
• Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can “view image” to see blocked or not loaded images.
• Mozilla Mail now has CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5 AUTH support.
• “Launch file” after downloading has been enabled for .exe files.
• As of Mozilla 1.4b, it is possible to build Mozilla for Win32 using GCC. See the win32 build instructions for details.
• Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented.

Mozilla has been my main web browser since version 1.2 (I am rarely using other browser such as Opera or IE after version 1.3, except for testing purpose). It has come to significant stage to be considered to replace IE since it rendered HTML better (showing prettier page, in my opinion), and hardly crashed. The only defeat is that it’s still out of those IE-specified designed websites.

My sister is doing publishing works with Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator. Last week she faced an IE problem after process some korea fonts related projects: all web pages displayed scrambled in IE, looks like korea fonts, but not. Uninstalling all the Asian fonts, upgrading IE6 to SP1 (with auto-upgrading in WinXP), all couldn’t work! Not bothering to search on MS support, I just introduced and installed Mozilla 1.3 for her. It works like charm! And definitely it isn’t hard for an IE user to switch over.