Mozilla Releases Final Pre-Beta Milestone
Mozilla.org has taken another large step towards shipping a fully
functional version of it's open source web browser, by releasing Mozilla
Milestone 14 this afternoon. Milestone 14 is considered the last
milestone before Netscape Communicator 6.0's first beta, which will
coincide with Mozilla's second anniversary a month from now.
A recent decision by Netscape will result in cryptography (encryption) components being included in a later release of M14, a highly demanded feature by advocates of the new browser. Daniel Nunes, an "Arborist" for the mozilla source code tree, says we will probably see these additions next week. A recent post to the Mozilla.org crypto newsgroup by Bob Lord, Manager for Security Engineering at Netscape, indicated that initial support for the HTTPS protocol would be included.
Some additions implemented since M13 include drag and drop support, improved "HTML intelligent sending", the transformation from a
console to "real" Windows application, and even built in support for the finger protocol. But as always, the majority of changes from one
milestone to the next are mountains of bug fixes and performance enhancements to bring the browser closer and closer to the final product.
Milestones are relatively stabilized binaries compiled from the Mozilla source code, and have been released about once every month since Milestone 3 on March 19th, 1999. It is recommended that people not familiar with Mozilla binaries should take a good look at the release
notes, available at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/release-notes/m14.html.
This March, stay tuned to BetaNews for continued coverage of Mozilla's drive to a Communicator beta release. If you have any questions about Mozilla, do not hesitate to ask the development team.
Mozilla M14 may be downloaded from FileForum for Windows, and Linux.
The Macintosh and FreeBSD releases have not yet been uploaded to the FTP server, but continue to check for them at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/m14/.