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What's New in Mozilla 1.8 Alpha6

This document outlines some of the new features implemented in Mozilla 1.8 Alpha6, important bugfixes and any new problems. See the "rough changelog" for a more comprehensive list of 1.8 Alpha6 fixes.

New Features and Fixes

Browser
  • (Linux, Windows) When Caret Browsing (F7) mode is on, the Home and End keys now move to the start or end of the line, rather than the document.
  • (Windows) "Set As Wallpaper" no longer requires Administrator privileges.
  • (Linux) The Print dialog now has a "Print to File" checkbox to prompt for a file.
  • The Page Info window has been improved.
  • The context menu key now shows the context menu at a useful position.
  • (Windows) Clipboard copying now matches IE more closely (copies address of page too).
  • (Windows 9x) Alt+Tab keystrokes no longer activate the menu bar.
  • You can now specify the default directory for downloads. Previously Mozilla would always suggest the previously used directory.
Mail
  • There is a new option "Preserve threading when sorting messages" for MailNews. With this enabled, clicking on a column header to sort your messages no longer turns off the threaded message grouping. This way it is easier to sort threads by arbitrary sort criteria.
  • You can now hide the folder pane from the View - Show/Hide submenu.
  • You can now search and create views for flagged messages.
  • Email addresses can now be copied from the address book sidebar.
  • You can now filter and search for messages by size.
  • Mozilla Mail now supports the Outlook 2003-style three column layout.
  • You no longer need to close and reopen Mail to change the layout.
Chatzilla A new version of ChatZilla has landed, 0.9.67. New features include:
  • A Join Channel dialog
  • New plugin API
  • Ability to open links in your default browser
  • Alises can now have parameters
  • /wii was added
And of course, bugs fixed:
  • Crash only on Mac when opening ChatZilla's preferences
  • URL linking stopping prematurely
  • Remember away status on reconnect
  • Some /whois bugs
  • Some emoticon bugs
Under the Hood
  • The XML parser used by Mozilla was upgraded to a newer version (from Expat 1.2 to Expat 1.95.7). Because of that upgrade, Mozilla complies better with both the XML specification and the Namespaces in XML specification. Starting with 1.8a6, Mozilla will reject some invalid XML documents that it used to accept in prior versions. This has already led to some problems with extensions that used invalid XML documents, but the only solution is to correct those documents. Here are some of the wellformedness errors that Mozilla catches since the upgrade: - Invalid entity names (for example entity names containing a colon) - Undeclared prefixes - Multiple attributes with same localname and different prefixes bound to the same namespace names - Redeclaration of reserved prefixes and namesapce names
  • We paint now the borders in border collapse mode (this is also triggered when frames, rules or groups are specified on tables, and ms excel uses it for html export) more correctly when we are in rtl mode (arabic, hebrew language). Just compare the testcases in the bugs with ff 1.0 to see what this means. This got fixed by bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174470 and cleaned up by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267420 .
  • Lots of stability and security fixes
  • Major improvements to textarea parsing: bug 88952 and various dependencies
  • Some parsing errors are now marked in red in view-source.
  • New permission manager back end landed.
  • Bug 201897 -- layout of auto-width absolutely positioned elements wrong.