MozillaZine

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 2 Released

Wednesday July 14th, 2004

The Mozilla Foundation has just released Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 2, following a short trunk freeze that began at the end of June. In this release, users can open blocked popups and consolidate all their POP3 mail in a global inbox. Initial support for the new Netscape Plugin API extensions has also been implemented.

In May, the Foundation switched to a new milestone schedule with a longer alpha period and two alpha releases in each development cycle. The next freeze is scheduled for Wednesday 4th August, with the target for Mozilla 1.8 Beta set at couple of days later.

More information about 1.8a2 is available in the Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 2 Release Notes. Builds can be downloaded from the the mozilla1.8a2 directory on ftp.mozilla.org.

#1 roaming support

by bogdan

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 7:59 PM

Why is the roaming support not mentioned in the release notes? I didn't test it, but from the changelog I see that a number of related bugs (e.g. bug 124029) are marked as fixed now.

#2 Do 3 new features really justify a new release?

by robdogg

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 8:09 PM

With one of them being pretty inconsequential at the moment.

#3 Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new release

by jesse

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:10 PM

Go to http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.8a2/changelog.html , use the "collect buglinks" bookmarklet from http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/mozilla.html , and sort by votes. You'll see at least several bugs that could reasonably be included in the "What's New" section of the release notes.

Mozilla recently worked around a security hole in Windows, and it's good for our latest alpha to include the patch.

It was a date-driven release.

#6 Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new release

by superyooser

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:35 PM

On the trek to Firefox 1.0, Firefox 0.9 was designated to be the "Feature Complete" milestone/cutoff. See the road map: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html Almost everything from 0.9 to 1.0 is to be polishing and sweeping out the bugs.

#8 Oops! I goofed

by superyooser

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:42 PM

Sorry, this is Mozilla suite, not Firefox. I was confused. :-/

#7 Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new release

by bzbarsky

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:40 PM

Amazing how most of the work that happened on this milestone doesn't get mentioned in the two-line blurb and people assume it didn't happen...

#10 Re: Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new rel

by tatere

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 11:04 PM

Well it's not in the release notes either. So don't get snooty - or, well, OK, snooty is hard to resist, but AFTER snooty, it'd be helpful to point to something that talks about the other work that got done...

#14 Re: Re: Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new

by mlefevre

Thursday July 15th, 2004 4:06 AM

It's an alpha - more effort will probably get made to write things up when we get closer to final.

Check the rough changelog for a list of bugs http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.8a2/changelog.html

Most of the work is in the back-end though, because most of the front-end work is happening on Firefox and Thunderbird, rather than on the suite.

#18 Re: Re: Re: Do 3 new features really justify a new

by bzbarsky

Thursday July 15th, 2004 1:36 PM

> Well it's not in the release notes either.

Pretty common with the release notes... :(

> it'd be helpful to point to something that talks about the other work that got done...

http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsqueryform.cgi is your friend. ;)

#4 blocking flags

by jesse

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:11 PM

There are still several bugs with the blocking1.8a2+ flag: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?resolution=---&field0-0-0=flagtypes.name&type0-0-0=equals&value0-0-0=blocking1.8a2%2B

I understand that this is just an alpha, but I hope plusses and nominations carry over to beta. Especially the ones on security bugs.

#5 Apostrophe converted to '

by zero0w

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 9:15 PM

Just tested it on Linux, I found that all apopstrophe (') symbol in the bookmarks.html file are converted to '

I discovered this when I re-launched Mozilla 1.7, all those bookmark entries look weird in Mozilla 1.7, such as "O'Reilly" now looks like "O'Reilly". Is it really a good idea to convert the symbols to Unicode encoding all the way? What if the bookmark is to be accessed by other non-Mozilla browser later?

BTW, the bookmark export function does not work here.

#13 I see that too

by SomeGuy

Thursday July 15th, 2004 3:37 AM

I have been seeing this to under Windows recently too. It mainly seems to happen when I open an older version of Mozilla or Netscape an then open another more recent version. Very annoying and ugly. I wish someone would fix this. This is even happening in the recent nightlys even though http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245758 claims it is "fixed".

#9 Linux Xft + GTK2

by kmike

Wednesday July 14th, 2004 10:05 PM

I wish they'd finally switch on default Xft support in the official builds! Or at least provide both GTK1 and GTK2 builds.

#11 Simple question

by prometeo

Thursday July 15th, 2004 3:14 AM

Will the RSS feed mechanism be integrated back into the Suite Mail&News component? That's the only feature I'm missing from the standalone products...

#12 Movemail

by danielpunkt

Thursday July 15th, 2004 3:27 AM

Another important fix in 1.8a2 not mentioned in the release notes: Automatic mail collection is now possible with movemail (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201055)

#15 Reply

by Racer

Thursday July 15th, 2004 9:29 AM

Sorry for the spam, but are the forums working for anyone else? I'm getting redirected to http://www.infocrawler.com

#16 Reply

by Racer

Thursday July 15th, 2004 9:32 AM

The content loading from forums.mozillazine.org is: <meta http-equiv=refresh content="0; URL=http://www.infocrawler.com/toolbar/"><script> location=('http://www.infocrawler.com/toolbar/') </script>

#17 Reply

by Racer

Thursday July 15th, 2004 10:13 AM

It seems to have been fixed. Thanks.