Mozilla Suite 1.7.10

Security upgrade available

[jdMorgan]

Following close on the heels of the Firefox 1.0.6 [mozilla.org] release, Mozilla Suite 1.7.10 [mozilla.org] is now available for download. [Release Notes [mozilla.org]]

Jim

[tedster]

Thanks for the heads up.

I am wondering about the Mozilla Composer part of the suite. Does it offer anything as a free HTML editor that puts it above some of the others? I never hear anything about it - anyone here using it?

I once had a client's web team use the version of Composer that came with Netscape 7 - it supports multiple languages more comfortably than other options I could find.

[jdMorgan]

Composer in Mozilla and Netscape should be comparable, but I'm not a big user of either. My interest is primarily in browser compatibility testing, so I tend to collect them all.

Jim

[g1smd]

The editor in Mozilla is OK. It at least produces mainly standards compliant code, unlike some other code editors that could be named.

[encyclo]

In a similar vein, the Firefox derivative Netscape 8.0.2 [browser.netscape.com] is available. The documentation is unclear, but as they say that 8.0.1 was the equivalent of Firefox 1.0.4 in terms of security patches, I assume 8.0.2 is the equivalent of either Firefox 1.0.5 or 1.0.6.

No sign of a patch for Netscape 7.2, though, which appears to have been abandoned in terms of support by Netscape. As NN8 doesn't represent a direct upgrade to 7.2 (no email client or composer, for example), it is becoming more important to switch NN7 users to the still-supported Mozilla suite.

As for the Composer, it developed out of the one in Netscape 4.7 Communicator. Although updated to a certain extent for Mozilla, it has remained a solid but quite basic wysiwyg tool. However, much like Firefox and Thunderbird were spun off from the Mozilla Suite's browser and email client respectively, a group funded by Linspire (the Linux distro) have spun off the Composer element to make Nvu:

[nvu.com...]

Nvu marks significant progress from the original Composer, and it reached its 1.0 milestone in June 2005. Well worth a try - although developed by a Linux company, there are versions for Windows and Mac OSX as well as Linux. 100% free and open source, just like Firefox.

[tedster]

Thanks, encyclo. I've downloaded NVU and plan to check it out thoroughly. The Windows version may come in handy for some clients who want to edit their pages - I currently suggest Contribute in that situation.

The open source effort has really been a heartening evolution. There are many ways in which the promise of the Internet will not really be fulfilled until standard browsing and easy authoring (at least for basic situations) are commonplace.