What's New in Mozilla 1.4

This document outlines some of the new features implemented in Mozilla 1.4, important bugfixes and any new problems. It is by no means a comprehensive list of new features, fixes or bugs.

New Features and Fixes

Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use "windows integrated security".
Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a "delete junk mail" menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
Users can now specify "blank page," "home page," or "Last page visited" for each of first window, new window and new tab.
Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML mail compose.
Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can "view image" to see blocked or not loaded images.
"Launch file" after downloading has been enabled for .exe files
It is possible to build Mozilla for Win32 using GCC. See the win32 build instructions for details.
Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented
Mozilla 1.4 contains thousands of additional bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.

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.

The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you're using these binaries then you will need the 3.2 version of the Java Plugin from Sun J2SE v 1.4.2 (or the Blackdown JDK 1.4.1 compiled with GCC 3.2.) The Sun Java Plugin is compatible with modern Linux versions like Red Hat 8 or later and SuSE 8.1 or later (the plugin depends on a newer version of libgcc_s.so, installing the GCC supplements for Red Hat 7.3 -GCC 3.1 Compiler Suite for Red Hat Linux 7.3 - may allow for some older Red Hat Linux to run the plugin) Users of older Linux versions should either install the egcs 1.1.2 build of Mozilla and the JRE 1.4.1 or wait for a Mozilla version compiled specifically for their Linux distribution.
If you're using the Linux GCC 3.2 binaries compiled by mozilla.org then JavaScript access to Flash will not work.
If you are experiencing crashes on startup in xpcom.dll it is very likely that there is an incompatibility with some third-party extension. To work around this problem, uninstall your previous version of Mozilla, and completely delete the Mozilla install directory before performing the new install. You will not lose your profile data (such as bookmarks, preferences and cookies) but any third party extensions and plugins may be lost.