Mozilla, Gecko Archive

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.

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.

"Netscape 7.0 is the latest version developed around a technology called Gecko, which was created by the AOL-funded Mozilla open source browser movement. Will it lure consumers back from Microsoft?" Read the article at ZDNews.

"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.

"America Online on Tuesday fired the first shot in what may signal the rekindling of the Web browser wars against Microsoft. The Internet giant launched CompuServe 7.0 with Netscape bundled as its default browser. CompuServe, AOL's other online service, previously used Microsoft's Internet Explorer as its default browser, and AOL itself continues to use IE. "We're backing the product because we think it's a good one and we want to put it in users' hands, and CompuServe is a good place to get it out there," AOL spokesman Josh Danson said." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.

"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.

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

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.

This milestone version, features basic S/MIME support, 'favicon' support and the Document Inspector, a tool to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. Download from mozilla.org.

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.

Tuxia Labs announced a new release of NxZilla, a set of libraries that allow Mozilla to be used with a Nano-X server. This release includes a number of improvements over the last release, including True type font support, image alpha and scaling improvements, as well as UI and general bug fixes.

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."