Cool Mac Gear

I downloaded Mozilla 0.9.6 on Wednesday evening, and gave it an extensive test drive yesterday. This is, as it should be, the slickest version of Mozilla yet, which bodes well for Netsacape 6's growing cohort of fans, since 0.9.6 will likely be the base for the next Netscape 6 upgrade.

I thought at first that maybe it was just that Web traffic was light on Thankagiving Day, but my distinct impression is holding this morning that the new version is loading pages more snappily than the already impressive 0.9.5 build of Mozilla. Mozilla.org says that this milestone build contains some 1,600 bugfixes, which would seem to indicate that it will be a worthwhile download for anyone using Mozilla.

I'm happy to report that Mozilla 0.9.6 handles my acid test for browsers, the National Post homepage, with a lot more grace than previous versions. Scrolling is still not up to the standard set by iCab, but it's now acceptably fast and much smoother -- a substantial improvement from previous builds. Still no option to save pages as plain text or Web archives, unfortunately.

Mozilla is now two development versions ahead of Netscape 6 again. If you have the disk space, RAM capacity, and processor speed to support it, Mozilla can now take over from Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator 4.x with no excuses. My son reports that the OS X version ("Fizzilla") is a very decent browser now as well, which is encouraging, although he is still using IE for his main browser, regrettably.

Like Netscape Communicator, Mozilla offers an call-in-one package with browser (Navigator), e-mail (Messenger), and HTML authoring (Composer) modules in an integrated, single-application package. I have mixed feelings about this, and personally, I use other applications for the Mail and HTML editing functions, although I install them to keep an eye on how they are developing. It is possible, however, to do a custom install of just the Mozilla navigator browser module if you prefer.

Every time I've suggested that it might be wise for Mozilla/Netscape to drop the mail client and the Composer module, I get letters from folks who use them and like them, so anything that improves this browser's appeal as an alternative to the Internet Explorer juggernaut is to the good, IMHO.

New In This Release:
• Mozilla now displays page icons in the url bar (and Mozilla says we can expect support for shortcut icons (aka favicon) in Mozilla 0.9.7). Page icons can be defined in the html head section of a document like so:
<LINK REL="icon" HREF="images/mozilla-16.png" TYPE="image/png">
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="/images/global/branding/dellecomicon.ico">
• Mozilla can now display Windows .BMP and .ICO images on all platforms.
• Print Preview has been implemented.
• Macintosh Page Setup has been implemented
• Mail message "labels" support has been implemented.
• Mail "prefill mail filter" support has been implemented
• The new Search for item on the context menu lets you search for any text you highlight on a web page. Proceed as follows:
° Select some text in browser window.
° Right click in the browser window and a context menu will pop up.
° Choose the Search for item and Mozilla will search for the highlighted text at your default engine.

System Requirements - Mac
• 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
• Quicktime (Bugs 59059, 89720)
• You must have Mac OS Runtime for Java (MRJ) version 2.2 to run Java applets with Mozilla . If you have Mac OS version 8.5 through 8.6, you may need to upgrade your version of MRJ. For an upgrade, go to the Apple MRJ update download page.

If you haven't checked out Mozilla lately, version 0.9.6 is a good reason to do so.

Mozilla is freeware.

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

Charles W. Moore