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The latest 0.9.1 " milestone" build of the Mozilla browser is touted as having 34 significant crash bugs fixed, as well as a revamped "Modern" interface theme. I had recently checked out Mozilla 0.9, and found it still quite crash prone and buggy, but this milestone build sounded promising, so i downloaded it over the weekend and checked it out.

Mozilla 0.9.1 does seem somewhat more stable than Mozilla 0.9 and earlier builds, and it has yet to crash on me (although a sporadic lockup when accessing the Bookmarks menu is still there). I also like the not radically changed but cleaner Modern theme, and the Preferences dialogue has been refined as well.

For me, the best news with this build is that the bug that made you have to quit and restart Mozilla (And Netscape 6) after logging off the Internet and redialing has finally --finally ! -- been squashed. Mozilla 0.9.1 now happily picks up where it left off.

Mozilla smoothly assimilates your Netscape 4.6 x profile when you first start it up, but for some strange reason, it imported a set of old Internet Explorer Favorites that it found somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive (I haven't head Internet Explorer installed since last October) rather than my Netscape Bookmarks.

My standard browser test page is the National Post newspaper homepage, which is a moderately graphics heavy site that iCab, my everyday browser, handles very well, but which seems to challenge some other browsers. Mozilla has never been very happy with the National Post site, and unfortunately, the new 0.9.1 build had no better luck. The page loaded slowly, and scrolling was utterly horrible -- glacially slow and jerky. Not only that, the links wouldn't work. iCab scrolls this page butter-smoothly, and has no problem with links.

Scrolling tends to be slow in general, although it is smooth on some pages. The Scrollability auto-scroller Control Panel still doesn't work with Mozilla, and double scroll buttons don't appear on all pages.

Another shortcoming is that there is still no option to save pages as plain text or Web archives -- just html.

I also find that too many pages simply refuse to load in Mozilla. Cross-checking the same pages with iCab confirms that the problem is with Mozilla.

Mozilla is also bloated and RAM-greedy. The default RAM partition is 28,672k (minimum 20,480k), and while the Mozilla application itself is only a tiny 240k, the Mozilla folder is a whopping 26.9 MB.

However, this browser is definitely getting better, and I am going to try using it as my "alternate" JavaScript savvy browser to supplement iCab in place of Communicator 4.7.6 for a while and see how that works out.

New in this version:
• Stability greatly improved since Mozilla 0.9 with 34 of our most frequently reported crash bugs fixed.
• The Modern skin has been overhauled. The new version of Modern sports a lighter and smoother look with all new icons and widgets.
• A new status bar which combines the old taskbar and statusbar into one toolbar freeing up screen real-estate (reflected in both skins)
• Typedown addressing against an LDAP server has been implemented for Mozilla Mail.
• Many performance improvements in layout and networking.
• Bi-directional text support enabled for Hebrew and Arabic thanks to the contribution by IBM. (Arabic shaping only works on Win32 right now.)
• XSLT support is now turned on although the implementation is still incomplete and has bugs.

System requirements:
• Mac OS 8.5 or higher
• PPC 604e or higher
• 64 MB RAM

For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/

Charles W. Moore

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