Monday October 27, 2003 (Status Update #216)
This status update page is updated approximately once a week. To get news in between these updates, you are invited to check out MozillaZine, a site devoted to Mozilla news and advocacy.
On Wednesday 15th October, the Mozilla Foundation launched several new end user services, including CD sales, telephone support and a beta version of a new website.
Mozilla CDs cost $3.95 (plus $3 shipping and handling, with an extra $1.00 charge for non-US orders) and include Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions of Mozilla 1.5 (with source code), Mozilla Firebird 0.7, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3, Camino 0.7 (Mac OS X only) and Bugzilla. For $16.95, users can purchase an annual subscription, which will guarantee them every major Mozilla release on CD for a year. Mozilla CDs can be purchased from MozSource at store.mozilla.org. CD order fulfillment is handled by E-FLO, the same company that deals with the sale of Netscape on CD.
Telephone support, available only for versions 1.5 and greater of the Mozilla Application Suite, is provided in partnership with DecisionOne, who also offer support for Netscape. Phone support costs $39.95 per incident and can be obtained by calling 1-888-586-4539 from within the United States. DecisionOne's Mozilla support page has more information. The Mozilla Foundation plans to begin offering email support once a suitable partner has been found. A range of free community-based support is also available.
A beta of the new mozilla.org website has also launched. The redesigned site places a much greater emphasis on the needs of end users, with a new central products section for getting the latest Mozilla releases. Development information is still there but it's a little more tucked away. Most of the site has also been updated with a warmer and friendlier look, with improved navigation that highlights the new end user services.
On the same day as the Mozilla Foundation launched its new end user services, Mozilla 1.5 was released. In addition to enhancements to tabbed browsing, Mail & Newsgroups and the DOM Inspector, this milestone also features many Composer improvements, including support for absolutely positioned elements, better resizing for images and tables, z-index management and a new snap-to-grid option. The ChatZilla IRC client has been overhauled and now includes support for logging. Mozilla 1.5 also features a spellchecker, as well as improved standards support and better performance and stability.
The latest milestone of the Mozilla Foundation's standalone browser was also released on Wednesday 15th October. Based on Mozilla 1.5, Mozilla Firebird 0.7 features several enhancements, including support for webpage content in the sidebar, autoscrolling, cookie whitelisting, a stylesheet selector, a better Options dialogue and numerous other changes.
Since then, a minor update for Mac OS X has been released. Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1 fixes several usability issues and significantly improves performance.
The third release of Mozilla Thunderbird, the standalone mail and newsgroups client, is now available. Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3 features better attachment handling, performance improvements (particularly for IMAP users), support for placing your signature above the quoted message text if you prefer to top-post, and a new POP account option to remove read messages from the server after x days.
The first nightly build of the standalone version of Composer is now available. It features customizable toolbars and version of the Orbit 3+1 theme.
ChatZilla 0.9.44 has landed on the trunk, replacing the previous 0.9.40 version. 0.9.44 fixes several charset-related issues and allows users to execute arbitary ChatZilla commands when logging on to a network.
A proposal for changing the Bugzilla product and component organization has been published. The plan calls for the default assignees and QA contacts of the major products to be changed to generic addresses, with all bugs that are not actively worked on being eventually reassigned to nobody@mozilla.org. Changes to the hierarchy of categories, products, components and subcomponents are also planned. The proposal document will be updated regularly. Feedback should be sent to bugzilla-change-plan@damowmow.com.
Site icons are back on the Personal Toolbar (bug 43687).
The elliptic curve cryptography implementation in NSS has been extended. ECC support is not built by default.
Camino's bookmarks system has been rewritten (bug 212630).
The trunk is currently frozen for Mozilla 1.6 Alpha. Check tinderbox for the latest status.
Minutes from the mozilla.org staff meeting of Monday 13th October are now available.
Third party updates from Sunday 26th October are now available.