Mozilla 1.7 Beta has been released. This latest version
features hundreds of improvements, including a new preference to stop sites blocking the standard
page context menu and a Password Manager option to show the actual saved passwords. The cookie
handling user interface has also been redesigned and the 'Set As Wallpaper' feature now has a
confirmation dialogue, preventing accidental wallpaper changes. Standards compliance continues to
improve, with Mozilla now understanding the CSS3 opacity property and a long-standing
bug with CSS backgrounds in tables resolved. In addition, using XMLHttpRequest and the
multipart/x-mixed-replace MIME type, servers can now push XML documents to
Mozilla.
Mail & Newsgroups has several new features in 1.7b, including support for the IMAP IDLE command, which allows the mail server to inform Mozilla of changes such as new messages, and support for MSN Authentication and Secure Password Authentication for POP3 and SMTP. Performance when downloading, viewing and saving messages is now better and the Address Book Palm synchronisation feature has been improved.
The installer releases of Mozilla 1.7 Beta now include Quality Feedback Agent again, allowing users to report crashes, and the Linux GTK2 builds have improved support for OS themes. Compared to Mozilla 1.6, 1.7b is 7% faster to start up, 8% faster to open new windows, 9% faster to load pages and 5% smaller.
Version 0.2 of Nvu, the open-souce Web publishing application based on Mozilla Composer, is now available. Based on Mozilla 1.7 Beta, Nvu 0.2 includes a new templates feature and several CSS editing enhancements.
This week sees a new effort to confirm or resolve many of the reported crashers in Bugzilla. Prompted by the presence of the Quality Feedback Agent in the latest builds, the effort starts with this Tuesday's BugDay (taking place in the #mozillazine channel on irc.mozilla.org).
Frank Hecker has posted a proposal for deciding which certificate authority certificates should ship with Mozilla.
Default artwork (the globe logo minus the fox) for Mozilla Firefox has been checked in. This artwork is built by default, with a special flag used to pull the official artwork if the build has Mozilla Foundation approval.
Autocomplete entries listed in the Mozilla Firefox Location Bar can now be deleted using Shift+ Delete (bug 171605).
Microsoft's Negotiate Authentication protocol is supported using GSSAPI on Linux and Mac OS X (bug 17578). A Windows implementation using SSPI is under development (bug 237586).
Using the SFTP gnomevfs module, Mozilla can browse file systems that the user has SSH access to on GNOME 2.6 (bug 235895).
The trunk is currently frozen for Mozilla 1.7. Check tinderbox for the latest status.