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Mozilla M16 review

June 28, 2000
Jerry Gildner

After a few months of waiting, the new Mozilla Milestone has been released. Development Milestone M16 became available on June 13, 2000. Let's check it out, shall we?

Installation is a simple untar of the binary into the directory of your choice. Launch Mozilla with a "./mozilla" command and you now have the new Mozilla running on your system. Now let's take a look at what is new.

The Mozilla Modern theme. At first glance I noticed that session history is now tracked. You can use the drop down box on the address bar to see where you have been. The forward and back buttons also allow the user to move through the history of their session. This is still being developed, so a few bugs remain.

Another option that has been added is the implementation of skin switching, allowing you to choose the and look and feel of the browser with a few different themes. Check some of them out at http://www.mozillazine.org/chrome zone/.

The Mozilla Modern theme. Chatzilla, a built in IRC client, has also been added. The interface currently works on Mac, Linux and Win32 platforms. The interface is command-line-based and is still only for experienced IRC users. so if you are looking for a graphics-based chat utility, this is not for you.

Other additions include Composer, which now has HTML source display as well as in-line preview, auto completion of mail and URLs, the introduction of an online/off-line button, and a subscribe button for news accounts.

Mozilla is definitely progressing, but with progress comes bugs. The Milestone M16 is not free from them, but remember, this is not the finished product yet. Keep an eye on the progress at http://www.mozilla.org/ and check out the Milestone builds of the "browser to replace all browsers".