Software update: Mozilla 1.7a

A few hours ago, Mozilla.org released the alpha version of Mozilla 1.7 to the general public. Since this is the first public alpha version, a lot of things have changed compared to the last public Mozilla version. In the browser itself, among other things, a better pop-up blocker has been added. Mozilla Mail has gained support for multiple user identities and some relatively minor tweaks have also been made.

Chatzilla has now arrived at version 0.9.59 and offers some improvements to the user interface and better support for IRC commands. A few things have also changed under the hood of the Mozilla suite. For example, the binary has been reduced by two percent and page loading times have fallen by four percent. The complete list of changes is here can be found, the release notes here and the known issues here† Below is a list of the most important changes:

browser:

• Mozilla 1.7 Alpha includes several improvements to Mozilla’s pop-up blocking features.
• First, it is now possible to fine-tune it using two preferences (dom.popup_maximum and dom.popup_allowed_events) but there’s no UI for that yet. Even without a UI, users should notice a greater variety of pop-ups blocked (primarily mouseover pop-ups) and a limit of 20 or so open at one time, regardless of whether pop-up blocking is active which provides some protection from sites that open hundreds of windows in a loop.
• 1.7a also now has UI allowing the user to review and retroactively open blocked windows. (ed. is this the context-click on the statusbar “blocked pop-up” icon? or something else?)
• Downloaded files are now moved to the target directory as soon as the user selects the desired location. This was the frequently reported bug 55690.
• There is now user interface to activate Smooth Scrolling (Preferences -> Appearance).

Mail:

• This is the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for multiple identities on the same mail account. See the Multiple Identity Support documentation for more details.
• 1.7a is also the first Mozilla 1.x release with support for relative paths for mail folders in prefs.js. This makes it easier to copy profiles around without having to fix up prefs.js afterwards.
• With Mozilla 1.7a, you can now edit address lists containing “Last, First” style names.
• When composing mail, you can now use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the To/CC/Bcc list.
• On Mac OS X, attachment file names are no longer displayed in decomposed Unicode but are converted to composed Unicode.
• All Mozilla LDAP queries now default to using LDAPv3 (previously, they used LDAPv2). There is a hidden .protocolVersion preference which can force LDAP v2 to be used on a per-server basis. LDAP autoconfig authors can force v2 also by adding a setProtocolVersion call to their JS. Details can be found by groveling through bug 198168.

chatzilla:

• Chatzilla has moved forward to version 0.9.59 which includes such improvements as:
• Support for the /ignore command.
• Font family and size can now be changed.
• Custom sounds are now working on Windows and Linux.
• Improvements to the user interface for half-op mode.

Under the hood:

• Mozilla 1.7a adds support for the unforeunload event. This lets web application developers add code that alerts the user about potential data-loss when closing a web application, or when leaving a HTML page with potentially sensitive information.
• This release has a new SVG backend. The feature is not yet enabled in the mozilla.org releases but developers may wish to compile with this feature enabled.
• Mozilla’s binary size has been decreased almost 2% since Mozilla 1.6.
• 1.7 Alpha pageload times have been improved by 4% over 1.6.
• Mozilla 1.7a handles dynamic style changes much better (see bug 15608 for details.)
• Mozilla 1.7 Alpha has upgraded the NSS libraries to version 3.9. NSS 3.9 passes all the NISCC SSL/TLS and S/MIME tests (1.6 million test cases of invalid input data) without crashes or memory leaks.

[break]Several versions are available:
Windows:
Full Installer (11.8MB)
Net Installer (235KB)
zip file (10.6MB)

Mac OS X:
disk image (14.8MB)

Linux:
Full Installer (12.4MB)
Net Installer (100KB)
tar.gz format (12.8MB)

source:
bzip (28MB)
gzip (36MB)

mirrors are here as Mozilla.org’s FTP servers are expected to suffer .