Mozilla 1.3

Mozilla 1.3 was released towards the end of last week. New features include Bayesian spam classification, newsgroup filters, automatic image resizing and an initial implementation of an API for rich text editing in webpages.

Unfortunately, XPInstall is broken on Macs in Mozilla 1.3 and some people appear to be affected by a leak in Mail & Newsgroups. Therefore, a 1.3.1 release is likely.

ChatZilla

ChatZilla 0.8.24 was released on Friday 7th March. It fixes several bugs, including issues with the userlist when in a channel with a user with accented characters in his or her nickname and problems with automatic and manual nickname changes made during login.

Calendar

Mike Potter reports that work on Mozilla Calendar has slowed, mainly due to a change of priorities at Mike's employer, OEone. However, development has not stopped entirely and several third parties, including groups of students at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and Pennsylvania State University, are working on Calendar.

Chimera/Camino®

Chimera, the Mozilla-based browser for Mac OS X, has been renamed to Camino® for legal reasons. The new name cleared the way for the release of Camino 0.7, which includes a new Download Manager, History Sidebar panel and a Text Encoding menu. Camino development has now moved back to trunk, resulting in a large performance win.

Phoenix

After many months and several hundred suggestions, Phoenix's new name has been chosen. It will be revealed shortly, after some final checks have been made.

Minotaur/Thunderbird

The Minotaur project started as an effort to build a standalone version of the Mozilla mail client and Thunderbird began as an attempt by the Phoenix team to create a Minotaur-based application for Phoenix users. These two projects have now been merged and a single Phoenix-style mail client, which will probably be named Thunderbird, is in development.

Minotaur 0.1 will be based on Mozilla 1.3; after this, the team plans to move to the trunk. At present, Minotaur is essentially a standalone version of Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups with a few changes, such as customizable toolbars and support for using the default browser. The Minotaur project site has been updated with information about recent changes and future plans.

MiniMo

Recently, there has been some work done on reducing Mozilla's embedding footprint. These changes, which include moving code that only the Mozilla browser needs out of the embedding product and other reduction and optimization measures, were initially made on an experimental MiniMo branch but most of the improvements have now landed on the trunk.

Major Architectural Changes to Bookmarks Code

Several bookmark issues require major code changes; a branch has been created for this purpose (bug 196756).

Cookie Code Rewrite

A rewrite of Mozilla's cookie handling code is currently in progress (bug 187304).

Tree Status

The trunk freezes for Mozilla 1.4 Alpha at midnight between Tuesday 25th March and Wednesday 26th March. drivers@mozilla.org are hoping for a swift release to maximise open development time. The current ideal release date for 1.4a is Friday 28th March. A number of Mozilla vendors have plans for the final 1.4 release.

Staff Meeting Minutes

Minutes from the mozilla.org staff meetings of Wednesday 5th March and Wednesday 12th March are now available.

Independent Status Reports

Third party updates from Wednesday 5th March and Wednesday 12th March are now available.

New Status Update Page Maintainer

The status update page is now maintained by Alex Bishop (of MozillaZine fame). Alex takes over from Tim Rowley, who has done a fantastic job maintaining this page for the last three years. If you're aware of any interesting developments that you think should be in the next update, please send an email to alexbishopuk@yahoo.com.