Software update: Mozilla 1.5 alpha

Mozilla users can look forward to the first public release of the 1.5 series. This one is yesterday in the form of alpha 1.5 released and is available for Windows† Linux x86 and MacOS X† The following list of changes is abandoned by the developers:

New Features and Fixes

• Many great improvements to Mozilla Composer including:
  • better resizing for images, tables and absolutely positioned objects
  • support for absolutely positioned objects, movable on the canvas using the mouse
  • support for z-index management
  • “snap to grid” when moving an absolutely positioned object
  • Source View now uses an editor instead of a simple textarea (allows find and replace)
  • numerous fixes in caret management, inline styles handling and CSS styles handling
• Chatzilla now has support for logging and lots of bug fixes.
• Dom Inspector can now display the #document node (the document root.)
• A quicksearch filter has been implemented for about:config.
• Improvements to tabbed browsing including:
  • Back and Forward navigation for tabbed browsing and bookmark groups has been improved. Users can now use the back button after loading a bookmark group to restore the previous tabs.
  • Closing a window with multiple tabs now prompts the user with a confirmation dialog (which can be disabled for future close operations.)
• It is now possible to jump from the JavaScript console to the relevant line in the View Source Window
• The ‘::’ notation for CSS pseudo-elements is now supported. The old ‘:’ notation is still supported for the various -moz-* pseudo-elements, but will NOT be supported in 1.5b. Themes should be updated to use the ‘::’ notation for pseudo-elements.

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.

• Some Mozilla users on Windows are having GDI resource problems. This is probably one of the dependencies of bug 204374.
• The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you’re using these binaries then popular plug-ins like RealPlayer, compiled with previous versions of GCC, will not work.

[break]The next beta version of the 1.5 branch is according to the roadmap expected in the first week of August. The 1.5 final will be available for download in the last week of the same month, and if all goes well, the 1.6 branch will start in October.