Cameron Kaiser, on the Mac OS 9 List:
It’s been a long time coming, but Classilla 9.3.1 is (finally) released. Due to TenFourFox taking up a large amount of time to stay on the Mozilla treadmill, plus my MDD [Power Mac G4] blowing out its second power supply during development, this took around seven months to get out and I do not intend to let it slip that long again.
It is also not as far as long as I would like it to be, and I did not have time to incorporate the French localization a user sent to me, nor was I able to complete the security rollup in full. Still, all security updates between 1.3 and 1.7.12 (and a bit of 1.7.13) were reviewed, over 100, and nearly half were actual vulnerabilities that were repaired in 9.3.1.
In addition, several crash bugs were fixed, some minor layout updates made, flyout and CSS hover menus are more reliable, Byblos properly works when you back up to a parsed page, and you can change your mail client in about:config to use an external agent.
There are three major changes/updates as well:
- Classilla can now use its HTML parser to parse WML and Mobile XHTML pages, which means a lot more mobile sites work properly.
- You can now change your user agent by site. The “branch” is anything under classilla.sitecontrol. If you create a preference classilla.sitecontrol.www.floodgap.com and give it the value a (a single letter a), the generic Classilla/CFM user agent is sent instead. There will be other single letter aliases available later.
If you make the preference more than one character, that becomes the user agent sent to the site.
Otherwise, the default user agent is sent. This pref branch will be exposed to the interface around 9.3.3 or 9.3.4, but you can change it from about:config now. There are three defaults in there already (the hard whitelist from 9.3.0).
- Classilla no longer automatically imports your Sherlock search services since they are tragically out of date and worse, could leak data. You can turn them back on if you really want, but it will be no longer supported. A new, refreshed set of search engines is now being included and built.
9.3.2 will continue the security rollup through 1.9.2 (Firefox 3.6) and 9.3.3 hopefully bringing the entire browser finally to security parity with Firefox and TenFourFox.
9.3.1 was tested on my MDD G4, my Power Mac 7300 with G4/800, my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh with G3/500 and my PowerBook 1400 with G3/466, all running 9.1 or 9.2.2.
There is still a long way to go, but it’s getting there.
I’m proud to be a small part of this project, since I’m taking care of the Italian localisation. That, too, is (slowly) getting there, and I’m looking into a few issues that arose upon reassembling the localisation files while Classilla was between version 9.2.3 and 9.3.0. Hopefully, by the time Classilla reaches version 9.3.3, Italian users will be able to browse the Web using a browser that speaks their language.
For more information on Classilla and for downloading the latest version, head to Classilla.org.
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