Massless

I've been fascinated by the development of Mozilla, the open-source, start-from-scratch, Netscape-redux browser. It's recently become my primary surfing and development browser because of four features:

1. Outstanding DOM support
2. the Javascript console
3. a no pop-ups preference setting
4. and tabbed browsing

Full disclosure: I tend to browse from Windows 2000 and I really like Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 very much. (Certain security vulnerabilities notwithstanding.) IE is a superb piece of software and my switching to Mozilla isn't an anti-Microsoft gesture. Mozilla just better caters to my needs. Three of the four features I listed just aren't (yet) a part of Microsoft's browser.

The latest Mozilla version is Release Candidate 1. For those of you unfamiliar with software release cycles, you should know before you rush off and download it that this means they are still testing it but are very close to finishing a final 1.0 version. (It's been betaware, or in testing mode, for some years now.)

That means that developers of Mozilla are furiously working on bugs up until the last minute. Some of the bugs that are dearest to my heart are: (These may make no sense at all to some of you :)

1. Links don't change to the :visited color if the URL is loaded in any other window. [bug report]
2. When using tabbed browsing and activating the Javascript method window.close() the entire browser window is closed instead of just the tabbed window. [bug report].
3. The Javascript method getSelection() does not work inside input fields. [bug report]

   (Which you can test here.)

   and this one, which is inspiring a near existential crisis among UI developers:

4. What happens when a user asks for "windows opened by web pages" to open in tabs? Currently despite setting pref("browser.tabs.opentabfor.windowopen", true) windows open in a new browser window rather than in a new tab. [bug report]

Fascinating stuff. And for the more Netscape-minded, soap-opera watchers, you can always just read former Netscape employee Jamie Zawinski's bug reports.