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What's New in Mozilla 1.7 RC 2

This document outlines some of the new features implemented in Mozilla 1.7 RC 2, important bugfixes and any new problems. See the "rough changelog" for a more comprehensive list of 1.7 RC 2 fixes. This list includes all of the new features and fixes from 1.7 Alpha and 1.7 Beta.

New Features and Fixes

Browser
  • Official Mozilla 1.7 RC 2 builds for Windows, Linux, and Mac all contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. 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 on Windows.
  • 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.
  • It is now possible to fine-tune Mozilla's pop-up blocking 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.
  • 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
  • Many improvements to Palm Sync.
  • IMAP IDLE support has been added.
  • Support for "MSN Authentication" and Secure Password Authentication using SSPI NTLM auth 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.
  • Support for multiple identities on the same mail account. See the Multiple Identity Support documentation for more details.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • Support for the /ignore command.
  • The ability to change the font family and size.
  • Working custom sounds on Windows and Linux.
  • Improvements to the preferences panel and the user interface for half-op mode.
Under the Hood
  • Size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster to open a window, has 9% faster page loading, and is 5% smaller in binary size.
  • A long-standing bug with CSS backgrounds on table elements has been fixed (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.
  • Mozilla 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 handles dynamic style changes much better (see bug 15608 for details.)
  • Mozilla 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.

General
  • Users experiencing bug 76831, a very long delay restoring Mozilla after it has been minimized for several hours (Windows machines only), may find relief by setting the config.trim_on_minimize preference to false. See comment 0 and comment 303 in the bug for details.
  • 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.
  • A common crash can be fixed by upgrading Java version to 1.4.2.