XML News from Saturday, October 8, 2005

The Mozilla Project has posted the second beta of Firefox 1.5. The automatic update classifies this as Firefox 1.4.1. New features in 1.5 for XML developers include:

• CSS @-moz-document selector for matching on site/document URL, useful in user stylesheets
• SVG support is now turned on by default.
• XML Events in JavaScript
• An extension to support XForms
• CSS 2 quotes support
• CSS 2 counters support
• Lots of neat CSS 3 features
• URIs are now always encoded in UTF-8

Other new features in 1.5 include:

• Sanitize "provides an easy way to quickly remove browsing history, cookies, cache, saved form information, and other personal data. The items to be removed can be customized, and the feature can be activated using either a keyboard shortcut or through a menu item."
• When viewing images, tab icons now display thumbnails of the displayed image.
• "Much faster session history navigation. The feature is off by default but can be enabled for testing purposes by setting the browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers preference to a nonzero number."
• FTP users are prompted for a name and password if anonymous access fails.
• Report a broken website wizard
• Changes made in the Preferences window now apply immediately
• Searchable download actions manager
• Searchable cookie manager

" This release does not contain any major new features since Beta 1. Improvements to automated update system, Web site rendering and performance, along with several security fixes are included in this release Beta 1 users that want to help test software update, should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days. The incremental update from Beta 1 to Beta 2 is 700K bytes." I've been using this version since the alpha 2 release a few months ago. It feels a little slower than 1.0 but otherwise has been quite stable.