Mozilla, Gecko Archive

Yes, it is here! After years of waiting, many developer releases and many betas, Mozilla 1.0 has finally been released. Everyone give it a try! Unfortunately, most of the mirrors do not seem to carry the final 1.0 version yet, and the main server seems already loaded.

Mozilla Release Candidate 3 has been released. According to the Mozilla website, this is to be the last release before 1.0. Looking at the what's new, the team has squashed 143 bugs since RC2.

"As the leader of the Mozilla.org project, an AOL-funded open-source Web browser technology, Baker has been trying to stoke the fire she helped light in 1998. Mozilla, which was created using Netscape's browser code, found support among a legion of software developers intent on blocking the juggernaut advance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Making sure that's a prediction and not a pipe dream is going to be Baker's challenge. She recently offered her thoughts to CNET News.com on why, despite the heavy odds against it, Mozilla will triumph." Read the interview at News.com.

"We've waited more than four years for Mozilla, the Netscape-backed open-source browser--and we're still waiting for the completed version. But Mozilla has finally posted its official Release Candidate 1 (RC 1) and plans to release the final soon." Read the review at ZDNews. NewsForge also runs an editorial for Mozilla: "Three reasons to fall in love with Mozilla". Tabbed browsing is one of the reasons, and indeed a very handy feature.

"Mozilla, the long-awaited open-source version of the Netscape browser, is to release its first beta-test version aimed at a broad audience in the next few days. The three-year-old project has begun to finalize a version of the Mozilla code for wider testing release, which could lead directly to the release of version 1.0 of the software. Previous beta, or test, versions have been aimed at the developer community." Read the report at ZDNews. In related news, Opera has just released Opera 6b1 for QNX.

Mozilla 1.0 is only one month away according to the latest roadmap. Today, the Mozilla folks released version 0.9.9 which brings MathML, TTF support under Unix, ZLib security fixes, SOAP scripts support and many additional bug fixes.

While Mozilla 1.0 is expected in May, the Mac folks released Chimera, a browser which is using the Gecko rendering engine wrapped with a native Cocoa GUI. In other Mac application releases news, Alias|Wavefront released the Mac-based Maya Personal Learning Edition for free.

Mozilla.org released the latest Mozilla 0.9.8 Milestone. New to this release are improved Address Book functionality, page setup(for printing), MNG/JNG support, native-style widgets on Windows XP and MacOSX, dynamic theme switching, improved BiDi support, speed, stability and footprint improvements and more. This release also brings the first BeZilla version that it is actually... usable under BeOS. Two ex-Be engineers have contributed large chunks of code to the BeZilla team during the past month and massively optimized the BeOS version.

Mozilla.org made available for download binaries of the Mozilla 0.9.6 Milestone. New to this milestone are fixes for about 1,600 bugs including: Mozilla now displays page icons in the url bar (Expect support for shortcut icons (aka favicon) in Mozilla 0.9.7). Mozilla can now display Windows .BMP and .ICO images on all platforms. Print Preview has been implemented. Macintosh Page Setup has been implemented. Mail message "labels" support has been implemented. Mail "prefill mail filter" support has been implemented. The new Search for item on the context menu lets you search for any text you highlight on a web page. In related news, Netscpape 6.2 and also Netscape 4.79 (based on the old 4.x codebase) were released very recently.

AOL Time Warner's Netscape division placed its Netscape 6.2 (NS 6.2) browser-suite upgrade for the Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows platforms on its FTP servers today. In related news, K-Meleon 0.6 for Windows released today while Galeon for Unix is marching for version 1.0. Both applications are trimmed down Mozilla-based browsers, specifically coded for speed and efficiency. Update: MozillaNews.org wrote a review of the latest browser suite from Netscape.

Mozilla 0.94 has been released and here you can read the Release Notes. New features, among others, include better IMAP, LDAP and MIME support. The Mozilla team writes: "The Windows-only Quick Launch feature (-turbo) is enabled by default in this release for installer builds, although you can turn it off in the installer or in Advanced Preferences. We are hoping community members will test this feature for us. The performance increase is not as great as it used to be; however, Quick Launch now works with multiple profiles."

MozillaZine reports that the next minor version of Mozilla, 0.9.4 should be out soon, while MozillaQuest reports that this release is scheduled for September 7th. MozillaQuest also reports that version 1.0 is set back for release to 2002 when previous roadmaps had set this release for December 2001.