What's new in Deer Park Alpha 1

This page lists the improvements in trunk build (as of May 14, 2005) over Firefox 1.0. Trunk builds, including alphas and betas, will be labelled "Deer Park" until Firefox 1.1 nears.

To get an idea of the changes that might happen between now and Firefox 1.1, read Firefox 1.1 plan, Firefox 1.1 team, Firefox 1.1 bug report, or the list of bugs marked as blocking-aviary1.1+.

New features

I helped to compile the official changelogs:

• New Browser Features
• New Web Developer Features
• New Extension Developer Features

Notable bug fixes

• Web page rendering and interaction
  • 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
  • 238493 - Ads on Gamespot flicker into other parts of the page during page load.
  • 95227 - Make it possible to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages.
  • 47350 - Current scroll position not retained, reloading or going back to multipart/x-mixed-replace (e.g. Bugzilla bug lists).
  • 56314 - Reverse selection colors when page background is similar to default selection background.
  • 274553 - Blocking iframes either via an extension or userchrome.css breaks find toolbar search.
  • 103638 - Targets with same name in different windows open in wrong window with javascript.
  • 62384 - Text Zoom doesn't change dropdown height (without reload).
  • 97283 - Mouse wheel scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
  • 251986 - Keyboard scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
  • 209020 - Meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" broken if midas was ever used in that browser window.
  • 198155 - Midas html editing mode persists after leaving the page that enabled it.
  • 21616 - Space after ::first-letter pseudo-element line is larger than between other lines (improvement in first-letter drop-caps appearance?).
  • 273785 - Plugins not scanned/detected on startup (empty plug-ins dialog in downloads, open-with dialog for PDFs).
  • 76197 - Scrollbars should look disabled when there's nowhere to scroll (not yet fixed on Mac).
  • 151375 - Focus outline should be drawn outside of element.
  • 133165 - Focus outline should include larger descendants of inline elements.
  • 65917 - :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated.
  • 20022 - :hover state not set until mouse move.
  • 278531 - Generic request prioritization (loadgroup prioritization) (e.g. for each HTTP host, load images with lower priority than pages).
• Improved error pages. To enable error pages, go to about:config and set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to true.
  • 157004 - Error pages should be stored in history and show the original URL in the address bar.
  • 237244 - "Try Again" on XUL error pages does not repost form data.
• Downloads
  • 239006 - Download manager doesn't account for filesize when presenting combined percentages.
  • 245829 - Download manager progress and title do not update correctly, wrong number of files and percentage after finishing or cancelling a download.
  • 249677 - Cancel does not delete temporary file in helper app dialog, if default action is save.
• Accessibility
  • 175893 - Make XUL <tab>'s focusable.
  • 162081 - Wrong letter is underlined as accesskey / mnemonic when widget direction is RTL.
  • Many keyboard accessibility fixes.
  • Many screen-reader accessibility fixes.
• Speed and memory-use improvements
  • 227361 - Don't reflow documents in background tabs until window resizing is complete.
  • 131456 - Memory use does not go down after closing tabs.
  • Many other speed and memory-use improvements.
• Windows-specific bugs
  • 16940 - [Windows] IME is now disabled for password fields.
  • 255123 - [Windows] Opening URL from another app focuses an existing window before opening a new window.
  • 171349 - [Win98] Firefox icon is Win98's standard icon (taskbar & upper lefthand corner of app).
  • 284716 - [Win2k/WinXP] Create DDBs in nsImageWin::Optimize. (Fixes several performance bugs with large images, such as slow scrolling on exactaudiocopy.de.)
  • 231300 - [Windows] Clearing cache is slow (nsLocalFile::MoveTo is slow to move directories).
• Mac-specific bugs
  • 222364 - [Mac] Don't use sheet for the about box.
  • 273217 - [Mac] Lots of menu items are enabled that shouldn't be when no windows are open, and many menu items that are correctly enabled do not work.
  • 187508 - [Mac] Follow "full keyboard access" setting in System Preferences for tabbing navigation.
  • 151249 - [Mac] Middle click on link does nothing on Mac OS X (should open link in new tab).
  • 220589 - Cmd-Enter and Cmd-Shift-Enter should work like win/lin builds.
  • 239218 - Menus are nonfunctional when 'tools' have focus (Downloads / Extensions / Theme Managers, JavaScript Console and Page Info window).
• Linux-specific bugs
  • 241245 - [Linux] Auto download to 'Desktop' downloads to home directory on Linux.
  • 238854 - [GTK2] Changing GNOME2 theme doesn't apply until restarting Mozilla.
• 57724 - View Source corrects for parser errors and shows slightly different source than what was sent by the server.
• 269259 - When upgrading an extension, its metadata is not updated from the new install.rdf.
• 69114 - Opening Internet Shortcuts (.url files) doesn't work (using File | Open or file protocol)
• 245163 - Right-click context menu is cut off/disappearing/offscreen when it contains too many items (items added by extensions).
• 275430 - Change default for "open links from other applications" to be "a new tab in the most recent window" instead of "the most recent tab/window". (?)
• 253950 - Less confusing UI when default profile is locked on startup.

More information

• Changelog for previous release (Firefox 1.0.4)
• Changelogs for other releases
• The Burning Edge (nightly build changelog)