Mozilla, Gecko Archive

The Mozilla project released its Mozilla suite 1.4, RC-1 for testing.

Mozilla.org has finally released version 0.6 of Firebird, the project formerly known as Phoenix. Version 0.6 includes a new theme as well as a host of new features. It can be downloaded from here.

In one of a string of changes, mozilla.org today announced a new plan that would have future Mozilla development work will be focussed around the soon-to-be-renamed stand-alone Phoenix browser and the Thunderbird mail and newsgroups client (also known as Minotaur). Mozilla 1.4 (an alpha released yesterday) would be the last milestone release of the traditional Mozilla browser suite and the 1.4 milestone would replace 1.0 as the stable development path.

Mozilla 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Update: On other browser news, Opera Software released Opera 7.03 for Windows and a preview release for Linux and FreeBSD. The OmniGroup released OmniWeb 4.2b2 recently as well.

Ludovic Hirlimann wrote it to tell us, "The mozilla team did it again! Mozilla 1.3a is available for downloads (check your prefered mirror for download.) New features and bugs are described here." It appears that Mozilla Mail's junk filtering has improved. In other news Netscape 7.01 was also recently released.

Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. Phoenix 0.5 (Naples) was just released for Linux and Windows. Other recent releases include Opera's 6.11 for Linux/FreeBSD and Opera 6-beta3 for Mac.

Chimera 0.6 released with new features and bug fixes. Release notes here, download from here.

Mozilla's HTML engine, named Gecko, has been powering a number of other browsers on many platforms for a while now, like Galeon, Chimera and more. Vote for your favorite one! Oh, and being on the subject, K-Meleon 0.7, Galeon 2-dev, Salamander 0.3 and Phoenix 0.4 are all very recently released.

Mozilla 1.2-Beta and Phoenix 0.3 browsers were recently released. Additionally, Opera Software released beta versions of 6.1 for Linux, Linux PPC and FreeBSD. Also, the Dillo web browser's CVS seems to not have any check-ins for 3 months now, so if you want to code for a small and fast browser for Unix, here's your chance.

Mozilla 1.0.1 is available for download now. This release is a bug fix and security follow-up to Mozilla 1.0. Mozilla 1.0 users that have not already upgraded to Mozilla 1.1 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 1.0.1. Read the release notes for more details.

The fact that Netscape 7.0 arrives hot on the heels of the similar but superior Mozilla 1.1 only serves to illuminate the small but significant differences between the two: Mozilla is highly customizable and offers a number of user options (eg. pop-up ad blocking), while Netscape forces users to accept many features and functions (eg. spyware) they probably don't want while removing some they probably do. Read the article at eWeek. In other browser news, Galeon 2.0 readies and OmniWeb 4.1.1sp2 is released.

The new version of Mozilla, 1.1, is released for many operating systems. Release notes here. Opinion: Check the screenshot, showing Mozilla's slow UI (XUL) performance on a dual Celeron @ 533. Before you comment on it, please read the already published comments, because we explain more over there. Update: I added a comment with the image attachment on Mozilla's BugZilla. There was already a bug entry for this, which suggests more people having problems with this behavior. See? I am not mad... Update2: And here is another bug submitted by someone else, with the same problem, and his shot. His bug is marked as "Verified". But it is still not fixed.

"Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you know what Mozilla is in general. For those of you in the dark, check out the overview provided by Mozilla for a decent breakdown of the project. The purpose of this review is to assess the win32 port of Mozilla 1.0 and its immediate successors (1.1a and .1b) as a milestone in the development of what may prove to be the greatest challenger to the Internet Explorer empire. We'll consider the pros and cons of Mozilla's core renderer, its implementation (Navigator), Mail, Chatzilla (an IRC client), and the bundle as a whole." Read the review over at ArsTechnica.

Linux-sxs.org features an informative article on how to compile Mozilla from source. Especially if you have switched to GCC 3.1, you can build some really optimized binaries for your Mozilla, as GCC 3.1 does better optimization in general, plus it supports special optimizations for Pentium4 or AthlonXP.