Mozilla (version)
Version History
Early versions of Mozilla were slow and buggy. Mozilla became about as stable as Netscape 4.7x only from 0.9.2 or 0.9.3 builds onwards. From 0.9.5 (October 12, 2001) onwards the releases have been fast and reliable, largely due to the implementation of formal code review techniques by the Mozilla project managers.
| Version | Release date | Most important changes |
|---|---|---|
| Milestone 1 | December 10, 1998 | (a.k.a. Gecko Developer Release) Conversion to the "raptor" codebase; about 100 bugfixes |
| Milestone 2 | January 31, 1999 | Platform parity (Windows / Linux / MacOS); about 85 bugfixes |
| Milestone 3 | March 19, 1999 | Simple Sidebar, Preferences |
| Milestone 4 | April 15, 1999 | Minimal Profile, Mac Mail, IMAP |
| Milestone 5 | May 5, 1999 | Component Jar Installers, XPConnect |
| Milestone 6 | May 29, 1999 | Componentization, History |
| Milestone 7 | June 22, 1999 | Necko Phase 1 |
| Milestone 8 | July 16, 1999 | Necko, XP Toolkit |
| Milestone 9 | August 26, 1999 | Necko Landing and Recovery |
| Milestone 10 | October 8, 1999 | Continued Feature Work, Performance and Stability |
| Milestone 11 | November 16, 1999 | Space and time analysis and optimizations |
| Milestone 12 | December 21, 1999 | Performance, Stabilization |
| Milestone 13 | January 26, 2000 | (a.k.a. Mozilla Alpha Release) Architectural Landings, Feature Work |
| Milestone 14 | March 1, 2000 | Focus on Clean up and Stability |
| Milestone 15 | April 18, 2000 | Crypto Landed, Webshell Update Landed, Skinable UI, Other Architectural work |
| Milestone 16 | June 13, 2000 | Autocomplete, Chatzilla, HTTP/1.1 support, skin support, full session history support |
| Milestone 17 | August 7, 2000 | Classic theme, alpha transparency, MNG support, plugin support on Linux |
| Milestone 18 | October 12, 2000 | Java support on Linux, Modern theme |
| Mozilla 0.6 | December 6, 2000 | source-only release of the base for Netscape 6.0 |
| Mozilla 0.7 | January 9, 2001 | Personal security manager; SSL and mousewheel support on MacOS; forced reloads from server |
| Mozilla 0.8 | February 14, 2001 | Find and replace; first introduction of pop-up blocking; improved bookmark manager |
| Mozilla 0.8.1 | March 26, 2001 | Improved Chatzilla and Javascript Console; initial gopher support |
| Mozilla 0.9 | May 7, 2001 | Automatic proxy configuration; personal security manager 2.0; performance improvements |
| Mozilla 0.9.1 | June 7, 2001 | 34 crasher bugs fixed; overhauled Modern theme; XSLT support; bidi support for Hebrew and Arabic |
| Mozilla 0.9.2 | June 28, 2001 | 25 crasher bugs fixed; Quick Launch (preloading to reduce startup times) implemented on Windows |
| Mozilla 0.9.3 | August 2, 2001 | More stability work (Mozilla is now considered more stable than Netscape 4.78) |
| Mozilla 0.9.2.1 | August 8, 2001 | source-only release of the base for Netscape 6.1 |
| Mozilla 0.9.4 | September 14, 2001 | Quick Launch enabled by default; Arabic language support on Linux |
| Mozilla 0.9.5 | October 12, 2001 | Tabbed Browsing; SOCKS support for almost all protocols; ECMAScript debugger Venkman |
| Mozilla 0.9.6 | November 20, 2001 | Page icons displayed in toolbar (except for favicons); print preview; BMP and ICO support on all platforms |
| Mozilla 0.9.4.1 | October 31, 2001 | source-only release of the base for Netscape 6.2 |
| Mozilla 0.9.7 | December 21, 2001 | Favicon support. |
| Mozilla 0.9.8 | February 4, 2002 | Hebrew support on Solaris; Hebrew and Arabic support on MacOS; Document Object Model inspector |
| Mozilla 0.9.9 | March 11, 2002 | New mail notification sign which appears in the Windows System tray. |
| Mozilla 1.0 RC1 | April 18, 2002 | Viewing source of cgi generated pages works, reorganized menus, new Download Manager |
| Mozilla 1.0 RC2 | May 10, 2002 | |
| Mozilla 1.0 RC3 | May 23, 2002 | 139 bug fixes since RC2. |
| Mozilla 1.0 | June 5, 2002 | First 'official' release |
| Mozilla 1.1 | August 26, 2002 | Performance, stability, compatibility and standards conformance improved |
| Mozilla 1.0.1 | September 10, 2002 | Over 650 bugfixes to 1.0. |
| Mozilla 1.2 | November 26, 2002 | Type ahead find, improved keyboard access, link prefetching |
| Mozilla 1.2.1 | December 2, 2002 | Released to correct a DHTML bug found in Mozilla 1.2 |
| Mozilla 1.0.2 | January 7, 2003 | Stability and security improvements and fixes for standards support |
| Mozilla 1.3 | March 13, 2003 | Basic junk mail classification capabilities and image auto sizing |
| Mozilla 1.3.1 | May 7, 2003 | Released to restore XPI functionality on Mac OS X |
| Mozilla 1.4b | May 7, 2003 | |
| Mozilla 1.4 RC1 | May 29, 2003 | More junk mail controls, smooth scrolling, bookmarks overhaul, streamlined pop-up blocking |
| Mozilla 1.4 RC2 | June 17, 2003 | Lots of bug fixes. |
| Mozilla 1.4 RC3 | June 24, 2003 | More bug fixes. |
| Mozilla 1.4 | June 30, 2003 | Official 1.4 release. |
| Mozilla 1.4.1 | October 12, 2003 | About 100 bug fixes, spell checker. |
| Mozilla 1.5a | July 22, 2003 | Composer improvements. MNG support removed. |
| Mozilla 1.5b | August 27, 2003 | Spellchecker for Mail/News and Composer, Color support for <HR> tags |
| Mozilla 1.5 | October 15, 2003 | |
| Mozilla 1.6a | October 31, 2003 | Mail enhancements, about:about feature |
| Mozilla 1.6b | December 9, 2003 | |
| Mozilla 1.6 | January 15, 2004 | Cross-platform NTLM Authentication, vCard support in Mail, Security Enhancements |
| Mozilla 1.7a | February 23, 2004 | Improved pop-up blocking, Added Multiple-Identity support, Chatzilla improvements |
| Mozilla 1.7b | March 19, 2004 | "Show passwords" mode for password manager and other minor additions |
| IDEAL RELEASE DATES | ||
| Mozilla 1.7 | April 14, 2004 | |
| Mozilla 1.8a | May 17, 2004 | |
| Mozilla 1.8b | June 14, 2004 | |
| Mozilla 1.8 | July 14, 2004 | |
Early reviews of Mozilla 1.0 were favorable, describing Mozilla as fast and stable, and praising new features such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking.
One advanced setting which is highly beneficial to users of Mozilla is the ability to use the pipelining feature of HTTP 1.1, which results in much faster download times for sites with multiple images.