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A few weeks ago, I took a stab at using Mozilla 0.9.1 as my second browser. It worked reasonably well for several days, and I really liked its support of drag and drop into all the entry fields on Applelinks news posting CGI -- the only browser I've tried that does this. The new and vastly improved history support, located in the "My Sidebar" panel is also great, and was a lot is satisfyingly fast. I also like the new "Modern" theme's appearance, and the "Classic" one is not bad either.

Unfortunately, I had a few system lockup crashes that were unrelated to Mozilla (which now seems admirably stable), but which and apparently damaged the software. A reinstalled restored Mozilla's functionality, but it soon got damaged again in another crash, and I decided to give up and go back to Netscape 4.77.

However, when the next Mozilla milestone build, 0.9.2, was released about 10 days ago, I decided to download it and see if I would have better luck, now that the Mozilla folks claimed another 25 crash bugs had been squashed.

Happily, Mozilla 0.9.2 seems more robust than its immediate predecessor, and has the survived several crashes (again, none of them caused by it) without any apparent problem. It seems that Mozilla has finally reached the critical stage of development where it is capable of taking over from Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer as a day to day browser. It still needs a lot of polishing, but it is finally usable as more than an interesting experiment in beta software use.

I prefer Mozilla to its sibling, Netscape 6.1, for a couple of reasons. First, Mozilla is not larded up when with the extraneous AOL junk that Netscape is encumbered with. Secondly, milestone Mozilla builds are usually several degrees farther along in development than the ones chosen for the underpinnings of Netscape versions.

The Bookmark hang up glitch is also now less severe, and will usually clear itself in a few seconds without any help from MacsBug. Mozilla 0.9.2 also still scrolls with glacial (and jerky) slowness on the browser - challenging National Post Website (iCab handles it quickly and smoothly), and it still won't save Web pages as plain text files.

Mozilla 0.9.2 incorporates the following the following improvements:

• Continued stability improvements with 25 top crash bugs fixed since 0.9.1. These bugs were fixed thanks to data generated by users running talkback builds.
• New context sensitive help in preference dialogs and new help viewer content donated from the Netscape 6.1 PR1 release (which still needs to be Mozillafied). (Bug 46917)
• The preferences dialog now allows you to turn off animated gif images or set them to only animate once. (Bug 64831)
• The View Source window has a new toolbar for common tasks like File, Edit and View (Bug 63026)
• You can click the lock icon to see security information about the current page.
• Security UI and help is now fully integrated with the rest of the browser interface.
• To get Mozilla to spew debugging messages to the console, enable verbose mode by adding the following line to prefs.js file in your profile.

System Requirements:
• Mac OS 8.6 or later
• PowerPC 604e 266 MHz or faster processor, or G3/G4
• 64 MB RAM
• 36 MB of free hard disk space

Be forewarned, Mozilla pretty big and and RAM-hungry. 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.

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

Downloads:
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.2/

For more Mozilla news, visit:
http://www.mozillazine.org/

Charles W. Moore

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