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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla 1.4b Loosed 372

Posted by timothy from the lizardly-goodness dept.
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."
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Mozilla 1.4b Loosed More

Mozilla 1.4b Loosed

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  • Also, 1.3.1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by friedegg ( 96310 ) <bryan@noSPaM.wrestlingdb.com> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:22PM (#5931959) Homepage
    Mozilla 1.3.1 [mozilla.org] (bugfix update for 1.3) was released this week, too.


    • Just wonder - does the 1.4 Beta contain a fully working Download Manager ?

      The 1.3 series's (including the 1.3.1) Download Manager cannot do "Resume Downloading".

      1.4 alpha's Download Manager also failed to resume downloading.

      Anyone here know the answer ?

      Thanks in advance !

      • 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

  • support for NTLM authentication (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    support for NTLM authentication

    Gah!!! Mozilla has been assimilated!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • son of a ...... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:25PM (#5931975)
    I just installed 1.4a on Friday.

  • New Phoenix/Firebird builds too (Score:5, Informative)

    by Patik ( 584959 ) * <cpatik@NoSPAM.gmail.com> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:26PM (#5931984) Homepage Journal
    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 [mozilla.org]

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

    • At first I thought "So what?" -- I already get tabs in Mozilla, so Firebird doesn't win points selling that as their first feature. But on reading further, I found listed the one feature I've wanted in mozilla for a long time: tab navigation.

      It works similarly to Multi Gnome Terminal [sourceforge.net] where you can switch between tabs using only the keyboard. I love it.

      I'm going to try Firebird now.

  • I used to follow mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Knife_Edge ( 582068 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:28PM (#5931990)
    Much more closely than I do now. After 1.0 the improvements seemed less noticeable to me. I suppose this means the software has matured. Is anyone really excited about the new features? Are they interesting from an end user perspective?

    • Re:I used to follow mozilla (Score:5, Informative)

      by GuNgA-DiN ( 17556 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:35PM (#5932041)
      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:I used to follow mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @08:27PM (#5933567) Journal
        "Definitely! I love tabbed browsing, and the popup and cookie features are far superior to IE."

        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.

    • Re:I used to follow mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) <mohr.42@DALIosu.edu minus painter> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:36PM (#5932048)
      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 [mozdev.org] to be worth much better than those introduced by Mozilla.

    • Re:I used to follow mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rodgerd ( 402 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:40PM (#5932075) Homepage
      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.
    • Yeah, I'm the same way, I used to follow each release and even the nightlies. I'm not so bothered these days. BUT (and i'm sure you're all sick of hearing this yet i don't care) Firebird on Linux totally owns. Get the Firebird GTK2/XFT2 builds, google for them (NOT the official ones) and you'll get a pretty, visually integrated very fast browser with extensions coming out the wazoo. When I saw the list of available extensions I felt I was in candyland. You should try it! It's the future of Mozilla, that's
    • The coolest new feature in 1.4 for me was the ability to specify a group of tabs that opens with the first Mozilla window, but not further windows or tabs in the current session. This enables me to start Mozilla with my regular news sites, and have empty windows when I press ctrl-n.

      And I also use "type ahead find" quite often now.
    • 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
    • I found that 1.3 was significantly faster than earlier versions. And now that I've got tabbed browsing I will not go back to a browser without it.

      As for the 1.4 features I do find the "open new window/tab as copy of current window/tab" to be useful. The image blocking improvements might be good too.

  • Loosed? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:31PM (#5932019)

    Mozilla 1.4b Loosed

    Good lord, when you people learn, it's LOSE, not LOOSE! LOOSE means to "let loose, to free, to release", and LOSE mea...

    Erm.

    Never mind. You got it right this time. Carry on then.

  • NTLM for Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bytes256 ( 519140 )
    When will they support NTLM on Linux? That's one of the few reasons I still have to dual boot. (A web site required for my job uses NTLM authentication.)

    I would think it would be possible using part of Samba. Am I mistaken about this?

    • Re:NTLM for Linux? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      When will they support NTLM on Linux? That's one of the few reasons I still have to dual boot. (A web site required for my job uses NTLM authentication.)

      The NTLM authentication feature is Windows only because it uses Window's own SSPI API. See this MozillaZine article [mozillazine.org] for more details. Bug 23679 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23679 - you'll have to type it yourself, they don't allow links from Slashdot) deals with NTLM on other platforms.

    • Re:NTLM for Linux? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mr_goodwin ( 220609 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:42PM (#5932088)

      Check out the NTLM authorization proxy server here [geocities.com].


      That's what I use.

  • image blocking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rock_climbing_guy ( 630276 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:37PM (#5932054) Journal
    Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can "view image" to see blocked or not loaded images.

    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.

  • NTLM is good for some people (Score:5, Insightful)

    by koh ( 124962 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:37PM (#5932057) Journal
    Many people will consider NTLM support as superfluous pro-MS bloatware and another useless addition to Mozilla.

    I'd like to point out this is just plain wrong. There are many developers that are forced to use IE to do their job just because the company's product runs on IIS and uses NTLM.

    Mozilla supporting NTLM means better ways of testing software for these developers, as well as giving a better idea of the web homogeneity of the product.

    Free myself from IE at work ! Go for NTLM, Mozilla ! :)

  • 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".

    In the past you could still authenticate against NTLM services, though you had to type authentication information.

    Username was entered as domain\username and Password was your domain password. Perhaps now it is transparently passed by a Mozilla browser logged into an NT domain. Cool.

    .:diatonic:.
    • I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that to use NTLM authentication (over http) you have to implement the challenge response algorithm over special http headers (in addition to "NTLM" being specified as the authentication method). So I don't know what you mean by 'you could always do this.'
    • You are incorrect. Prior to this release of Mozilla you could NOT authenticate against an NTLM service w/Mozilla. If you were doing any authentication at all against IIS it would have been basic authentication.

    • Re:NTLM Authentication prior to 1.4 (Score:4, Informative)

      by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @03:42PM (#5932367)
      No, domain\username only worked for standard 'clear text' http authentication, which on IIS servers maps domain usernames like that. Actual NTLM authentication is a different protocol altogether. If a server enabled NTLM authentication but not clear-text, you were out of luck. Also, I believe that NTLM allows for transparent authentication, where your current user/domain login to Windows is used (without having to type anything), though that may just be an implementation detail of IE.

  • I realy don't care anymore about its features. Its a fine browser as it is, however launching it on a Linux or Mac boxen takes long time -- compared to Opera or IE (on a Mac). I wish they could make Mozilla a little faster and lighter, than add features to it.
    • Have you tried Firebird(or Phoenix, whatever)? I don't have a Mac, but on my old 350 PII box it Firebird loads much faster than Moz (and NS 7). Not as fast as Operas and IE, but it doesn't take forever.

    • Re:Now if it was just little faster... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:52PM (#5932130) Homepage
      I wish they could make Mozilla a little faster and lighter, than add features to it.

      They're working on this. Mozilla is currently one big app that does everything (browser, mail and news client, HTML editor, IRC client, etc. etc.). It's being split into 1) the Gecko rendering engine, 2) a browser code-named Firebird, 3) a mail client code-named Thunderbird, etc. Each application will be able to be installed separately. Once this is done, it should be easier to optimize each component for speed.

  • Try typing about:mozilla in address bar... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dubious9 ( 580994 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @02:44PM (#5932093) Journal
    And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.

    from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
    (Red Letter Edition)

    • FYI (Score:2, Informative)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )
      This has been around since Netscape Navigator 2.0 at least.. probably was in 1.0 as well.

    • That's wierd... (Score:4, Funny)

      by no reason to be here ( 218628 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @03:55PM (#5932420) Homepage
      when I typed about:mozilla into IE all I got was this blue screen...

      • Re:That's wierd... (Score:3, Informative)

        by sepluv ( 641107 )
        That is because about:mozilla on MSIE used to contain some poetry parodying about:mozilla (cannot find it now) with a blue background (some people say that it implies that NN & Moz cause BSOD's which is probs wrong). They removed the text from the page but left the function and page in.

        You can see the about:* pages for MSIE and edit them in the registry at Hkey_Local_Machine/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/AboutURLs.

  • I never thought this would have to be brought up again... What is slowing down antialias font support in Phoenix?... I don't find Phoenix any faster than Mozilla, nor does it use a great deal less memory, and the GTK2/XFT mozilla builds look so much better than Phoenix at rendering pages.

    It's not like this is a simple calculator app, it's capable of rendering large pages, enormous amounts of information, on an even slightly modern machine there must be support for Xft at the very least, so what's stopping

    • Re:Antialiased fonts (Score:3, Informative)

      by h2so4 ( 33298 )

      If you want Xft or GTK2 support now, then why not check out the cvs source and build your own? There's plenty of information on the Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] forums.

      If you don't have the time/CPU/etc, you can get Xft/GTK2 Firebird nightly builds as tarballs here [pryan.org]. RPMs of Xft builds and some other stuff are available here [ragweed.net].

  • SVG Support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pchown ( 90777 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @03:02PM (#5932181)
    Does anyone know what the current situation is with SVG? I see some of the Solaris builds support it. I heard that there was some licensing problem with libart, but surely they can work something out? They're both open source projects after all.

    • Re:SVG Support (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 11, 2003 @04:05PM (#5932467)
      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/ [mozilla.org] 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 [mozilla.org] 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.

  • FYI: How to make firebird start faster (windows) (Score:5, Informative)

    by draziw ( 7737 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @03:12PM (#5932228) Journal
    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
  • Careful if you work a lot with bookmarks, you might hit a bug where you can't delete or move bookmarks [mozilla.org] (in Linux) or the new bookmark folder setting doesn't work [mozilla.org].

    I'm looking forward to getting my bookmark functionality back in the next release...

  • The most annoying installer yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday May 11, 2003 @04:01PM (#5932443) Homepage Journal
    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!

  • Nightlies more stable (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Plug ( 14127 )
    There was a bug in Moz 1.4a (never actually searched for it so I can't give a link) but it would cause Moz to crash whenever I'd try and click on a radio button on a web page.

    So, I downloaded a nightly from a couple of weeks ago, and it was great. Divine. No problems at all.

    1.4b comes out, and then straight back into crashes at weird places (this time: if I tell /. to display some comments as nested, then reload, it will die without fail. Not sure what causes it - if I get time I'll try and figure out.
  • better late than never that this made its way here...

    # 2003-05-08 11:10:34 Mozilla 1.4b Released (articles,mozilla) (rejected)

    heh

  • XBL security change (Score:5, Informative)

    by jesser ( 77961 ) on Sunday May 11, 2003 @05:51PM (#5932927) Homepage Journal
    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 [squarefree.com] (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."

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