yowkee essential

What’s the big deal of this latest stable release of Mozilla? The 1.4 branch would replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development base, which also means Netscape would adopt it as the base for Netscape web browser. In fact, they have done it, Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla 1.4. Alright, may be there isn’t anybody would care about Netscape. But with this changes, they are actually more advanced than IE now. Switch to Mozilla if you’re still using Internet Explorer, read my call on Mozilla switch, and part 2, part 3.

Here’s the new features quoted from its release note:

• 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”.
• Mozilla’s bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
• Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
• Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a “delete junk mail” menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
• Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
• 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.
• “Launch file” after downloading has been enabled for .exe files
• 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 1.4 contains thousands of additional bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.