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What's New in Mozilla 1.7 Beta

This document outlines some of the new features implemented in Mozilla 1.7 Beta, important bugfixes and any new problems. See the "rough changelog" for a more comprehensive list of 1.7 Beta fixes. This list does not include all of the new features and fixes from 1.7 Alpha.

New Features and Fixes

Browser
  • Official Mozilla 1.7 Beta installer builds (including the OS X disk image) contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. To help us make 1.7 the most stable release yet, please submit your crash reports.
  • A new option to prevent sites using Javascript to block the browser's context menu.
  • A new set of icons for files that are associated with Mozilla.
  • Password Manager has a "show passwords" mode which will display saved passwords. You will need to enter your master password if you are using one.
  • The "Set as wallpaper" feature now has a confirmation dialog.
  • Linux GTK2 builds have improved support for OS themes.
  • Cookie dialogs have been reworked to make them more usable.
  • Date handling, especially on OS X, has been improved.
Mail
  • Many improvements to Palm Sync.
  • IMAP IDLE support has been added.
  • Support for "MSN Authentication" and cross-platform Secure Password Authentication for SMTP and POP3.
  • A new preference to "always use the default character encoding for replies" rather than using the encoding of the message being replied to.
  • Improvements to performance of downloading, viewing, and saving mail messages.
Chatzilla
  • Chatzilla now supports zooming of fonts with keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + and Ctrl -) as well as with the View menu.
  • Improved date handling; using the date/time format for the locale.
Under the Hood
  • Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.
  • A long-standing bug with CSS backgrounds on table elements has been fixed, including support for columns and proper layering (standards mode only).
  • Support for Kerberos HTTP authentication using GSSAPI (benefits Unix-like platforms including Linux and OS X).
  • Support for smb:// URLs using the gnome-vfs library (only enabled in GTK2+XFT Linux builds).
  • Support for server push of XML documents using multipart/x-mixed-replace and XMLHttpRequest.
  • Liveconnect now works when a Java applet's codebase is in a different domain.
  • Very wide images (more than 4095px) will now display on Mac.
  • Support for the CSS3 opacity property.

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.

General
  • Users with alternate themes (including "Modern") who have multiple profiles may experience a bug where certain UI widgets are displayed with the classic or "native" theme rather than as specified by the alternate theme. This bug, 237407, also impacts some users who have made theme modifications with userChrome.css.
  • Web services are not working in Mozilla 1.7 Beta. This is bug 237845.
  • IPv6 support has been disabled by default on Mac OS X. This is because on Mac OS X there is no known way to disable IPv6 DNS lookups, which can lead to severe slowdowns in the presence of broken DNS servers and/or home routers. See bug 68796 and bug 231607. On OS X 10.3, IPv6 can be re-enabled by setting the pref network.dns.disableIPv6 to false.