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What's New in Mozilla 1.7 Alpha

This document outlines some of the new features implemented in Mozilla 1.7 Alpha, important bugfixes and any new problems. See the "rough changelog" for a more comprehensive list of fixes.

New Features and Fixes

Browser
  • Mozilla 1.7 Alpha includes several improvements to Mozilla's pop-up blocking features.
    • First, it is now possible to fine-tune it using two preferences (dom.popup_maximum and dom.popup_allowed_events) but there's no UI for that yet. Even without a UI, users should notice a greater variety of pop-ups blocked (primarily mouseover pop-ups) and a limit of 20 or so open at one time, regardless of whether pop-up blocking is active which provides some protection from sites that open hundreds of windows in a loop.
    • 1.7 Alpha also allows the user to review and retroactively open blocked windows via context (right-click) menu on the statusbar "blocked pop-up" icon.
  • Downloaded files are now moved to the target directory as soon as the user selects the desired location. This was the frequently reported bug 55690.
  • There is now user interface to activate Smooth Scrolling (Preferences -> Appearance).
Mail
  • This is the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for multiple identities on the same mail account. See the Multiple Identity Support documentation for more details.
  • 1.7 Alpha is also the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for relative paths for mail folders in prefs.js. This makes it easier to copy profiles around without having to fix up prefs.js afterwards.
  • With Mozilla 1.7 Alpha, you can now edit address lists containing "Last, First" style names.
  • When composing mail, you can now use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the To/CC/Bcc list.
  • On Mac OS X, attachment file names are no longer displayed in decomposed Unicode but are converted to composed Unicode.
  • All Mozilla LDAP queries now default to using LDAPv3 (previously, they used LDAPv2). There is a hidden .protocolVersion preference which can force LDAP v2 to be used on a per-server basis. LDAP autoconfig authors can force v2 also by adding a setProtocolVersion call to their JS. Details can be found by grovelling through bug 198168.
Chatzilla
  • Chatzilla has moved forward to version 0.9.59 which includes such improvements as:
    • Support for the /ignore command.
    • Font family and size can now be changed.
    • Custom sounds are now working on Windows and Linux.
    • Improvements to the user interface for half-op mode.
Under the Hood
  • Mozilla 1.7 Alpha adds support for the onbeforeunload event. This lets web application developers add code that alerts the user about potential data-loss when closing a web application, or when leaving a HTML page with potentially sensitive information.
  • This release has a new SVG backend. The feature is not yet enabled in the mozilla.org releases but developers may wish to compile with this feature enabled.
  • Mozilla's binary size has been decreased almost 2% since Mozilla 1.6.
  • 1.7 Alpha pageload times have been improved by 4% over 1.6.
  • Mozilla 1.7 Alpha handles dynamic style changes much better (see bug 15608 for details.)
  • Mozilla 1.7 Alpha has upgraded the NSS libraries to version 3.9. NSS 3.9 passes all the NISCC SSL/TLS and S/MIME tests (1.6 million test cases of invalid input data) without crashes or memory leaks.

New Issues

These are items that have been added to the Known Issues page since the last milestone, although the bugs themselves may have existed previously.

L10n
  • Locale switching from the Mozilla Preferences window does not work in 1.7 Alpha. To switch locales, users will need to manually edit the chrome.rdf file, replacing, for example, all en-US with de-AT, and US with AT in selectedLocale lines