What's new in Firefox 0.9
New features
- Data Migration. Import bookmarks, saved passwords,
cookies, history, form auto-complete data, and options from Internet
Explorer. Import some of these things from the Mozilla suite, Netscape
4, and Opera.
- Extension/theme manager.
- Update notification.
- Help.
- 210043 - "Copy Image" on image context menus (Windows and Mac).
- There is a new option to prevent sites from disabling the context menu under Options > Web Features > Advanced.
- 182928 - Set as Wallpaper dialog that lets you choose tiled/centered/stretched. The dialog also prevents you from accidentally setting a porn image as your wallpaper, blowing away your previous wallpaper, etc.
- 189888 - Show a warning dialog when closing a multi-tabbed browser window.
- 176675 - Dragging text to search bar should search for it; dragging URL to address bar should go there.
- 171605 - Allow deletion of form auto-complete results (Shift+Delete).
- 64485 - [Linux] Intellimouse Explorer Backwards and Forwards button support.
- Support for smb:// and sftp:// URLs in Linux/GTK2 builds using the gnome-vfs library.
- Linux/GTK2 installer.
- Linux/GTK2 version now includes the Talkback crash reporting utility.
- Right-click a form textbox and select "Add keyword for this search" to set up bookmark keywords easily.
- Address bar auto-fill (inline auto-complete) with hidden pref "browser.urlbar.autoFill".
Major improvements
- New default theme. A new theme, Winstripe, replaces Qute as the default theme. Winstripe is based on Firefox's Mac OS X theme, Pinstripe.
- Improved stability. Many users of Firefox nightly builds reported crashes using the included Talkback utility, allowing Firefox developers to identify the the most common crashes and fix them.
- Smaller download. The Windows installer version now uses 7-zip compression instead of standard zip compression (244026), and some cruft from the Mozilla suite was removed (243091), resulting in a 4.7MB download.
- 216432 - Don't steal associations for images, xml, xul, and the ftp protocol.
- 197919 - It it now harder for sites to evade the pop-up blocker (whitelist of events that are allowed to pop up new windows).
- Make newer versions of the Windows Media Player control work in Firefox [Installer].
- 231995 - String changes made Firefox 3% faster.
- 55690
- Files being downloaded are now moved to the target directory (with a
temporary ".part" extension) as soon as the user selects the desired
location.
- 58305 - "Find in This Page" now searches in form textboxes and textareas.
- 56472 - Focusing form element does not clear selected text in page.
- History and Bookmarks now work better with IDN.
- 92769 - Unblock port 1080.
- Very wide images (more than 4095px) will now display on Mac.
New web developer features
- 68215
- onbeforeunload event. This lets web application developers add code
that alerts the user about potential data-loss when closing a web
application, or when leaving a HTML page with potentially sensitive
information.
- 93156 - CSS3 opacity. (-moz-opacity is now an alias for opacity.)
- 15608 - Adjacent combinators now work dynamically (e.g. :hover +).
- 230343 - CSS2.1 cursor:progress (hourglass, beach ball, etc).
- 135141 - ~ (indirect adjacent combinator).
- Support for Kerberos HTTP authentication using GSSAPI (benefits Unix-like platforms including Linux and OS X).
- Liveconnect now works when a Java applet's codebase is in a different domain.
Notable bug fixes
- 205893 - Loading lots of images makes Firefox stop repainting.
- 229600 - Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions.
- 57607 - background images do not load in background windows.
- 217369 - gamespot.com pages sometimes too wide/messed up on first load.
- 204706 - the cursor should remain at the end of the text field when arrowing down through completions.
- 56219 - [Linux] Can't paste over 4000 bytes from another app into Mozilla.
- 184433
- Internet Keywords triggered by "connection refused" errors (e.g.
http://localhost/ went to http://www.localhost.com.au/ if no server was
running on localhost).
- 192022 - Web page progress bar in status bar rarely works when browsing, stays blank.
- 54538 - selecting sometimes jump-scrolls down a page or more (e.g. while scrolling by dragging) (WFM).
- 197375 - Hebrew or Arabic text reversed by copy/paste.
- 205550 - Mozilla web services (WSDL, SOAP) leak memory.
- 240759 - DNS cache stops working.
More information