And Mozilla 0.9.7 has been released. New stuff that grabbed my attention:

  • the DOM Inspector is now available in all full builds (until now, it wasn’t available for the Mac. This is a slick little tool that I’ve found myself using all the time.
  • longdesc support on images. Excellent accessibility bonus.
  • Digest authentication support. This is considerably more secure way to restrict access to certain directories or files on a web server than the heretofore popular Basic Authentication (which passes usernames and password in the clear). Internet Explorer has supported this for some time. I honestly didn’t realize that Mozilla didn’t.
  • Fine-grained JavaScript control. Now you can disable those annoying pop-up and pop-under windows through the GUI instead of having to edit text files.

There are of course other good additions, this is just what excited me. Mozilla continues to be an excellent browser, and (as the DOM Inspector demonstrates) a good foundation for browser-based applications. It has excellent standards support, becomes more and more user-friendly (with things like tabbed windows and pop-up killers), and so far as we know doesn’t open up your whole computer to attack. If you haven’t yet, I recommend giving it a shot. If you’re a web developer, you really have to.