Alerted by the vague post on the weblog of Asa Doztler:
Joe Hewitt rocks! (tomorrow's Phoenix build is worth getting). posted by asa at 9:55 PM
I looked into the buglist for Phoenix to figure out what he was talking about. After a little digging I found bug 171101 - new toolbar customization features which says:
Just creating this bug to cover all of the toolbar customization changes I am about to land, including:
* ability to customize toolbars live in the browser window, instead of a dialog
* ability to add and remove toolbars
* ability to add flexible spacers
* ability to customize placement of the personal bookmarks
Woohoo!
Browsing the CVS checkins for Mozilla, I noticed a lot of work being done on a spam blocking feature for Mozilla.
After a little digging I found the bugzilla bug associated with it, 169638.
It seems like this feature will be based around a "scoring" system that queries email to determine how likely it is to be spam. It looks like you will be able to control the sensitivity of this "scoring" via a preferences panel.
Once the spam filter has been turned on, you can view the "SPAM" folder to see what's there with the "score" for the email displayed.
As I was poking around in the Mozilla 1.2a release notes, I noticed this paragraph:
I tried it and it worked! I've been waiting for this feature for a while now, as I deal with a lot of XML in my work (shameless plug for stxx. Now you can use XML/XSL in Struts!) so this is a nice feature to finally have enabled.
If you want to try it and see how it works, follow these links:
http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/entities.xsl
http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/characters.xsl
http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/unicode.xml
Kam-Yung Soh writes: "Mozilla's skin version has been updated to 1.2. This may cause older skins, plugins and themes to break." Recent changes in the trunk make older skins incompatible with current builds. Theme developers, start updating! More information in Bug 164174 - Update skin version to 1.2 due to new incompatibilites.
Yes, that's right all you emacs users and cool feature addicts. No more playing around with prefs.js or downloading XPI's to get this feature to work.
What is it? Just start typing on a web page to highlight the matching text. This wil l find any matches in hyperlinks.
If you want to search just the text, type the "/" character before typing and it will search non-links.
It's a pretty cool feature for quickly picking out the text you are looking for on a page and is the first major step forward in browser "Find Dialog" technology since, ummm, Netscape 1 maybe?
Anyhow, download a nightly build and check it out.
Yes, it's true all you converted MacHeads (including myself now). Chimera 0.5 is released.
For those who don't know or care, Chimera is a Mac OS X browser based on the Gecko engine.
What this means is the Mozilla no longer sticks out like a sore thumb when running under OS X since it integrates fully into the OS.
Unfortunately, there is no Mac OS X implementation of the Mozilla mail client, so hopefully if Minotaur gets released, someone will port the app to Mac OS X as well.
Salon.com looks at how Mozilla is stealing Netscape's thunder in Mozilla Rising
Under Netscape's development model, its programmers work on code for Mozilla, and only after a new version of Mozilla has been determined "stable" is it re-branded and released as a Netscape product. This development system has some benefits, but it's got one big drawback: It ensures that Netscape is always behind Mozilla, releasing features that the open-source browser had months before.
All of which is to say: Netscape is doomed. If there are good reasons for Internet Explorer users to switch to Netscape, there are better reasons to switch to Mozilla, which has all the features Netscape offers and none of the downsides.
The article derails a bit when they talk to that Jakob Nielsen guy. But it comes back around when they talk to a few mozdev developers and discuss Mozilla's untapped potential as a platform to develop non-browser related applications. Overall, a very positive article about Mozilla; not so positive about Netscape.
Mozilla makes it on the Mac OSX Interface Hall of Shame:
Mozilla's user experience is in fact so bad that some of the geekier Mozilla users have started to claim that the browser is not for end users, and that it's rather a fringe browser for the web elite. This is of course hard to believe, since the project's main concept is to bring standards compliance back onto the web, and a fringe browser cannot do such a thing. It's a good thing the Gecko layout engine can be used in other browser products with relative ease.
Chimera is noticeably absent from the list.
I'm glad to see that nightly builds of Phoenix are now available. It'll be a big hit when it's officially released, and will hopefully persuade more users to switch. It's a slick browser. Some of the features:
Phoenix doesn't use Mozilla profiles, so you might want to Import your Moz bookmarks inside the Phoenix Bookmark Manager.
Will we see nightly builds of Minotaur next? I hope so.