Aktuelles im Detail

New betas of Firefox, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird are now available.
They feature improved video performance and font selection, as well
as enhancements featured in previous betas such as printing support
and memory management improvements. They also have two known bugs.

* Firefox v4.0b8pre:
ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/incoming/mozilla/firefox-20101204.zip
or
e-vertise.com/warpzilla/firefox-20101204.zip
* Seamonkey v2.1b2pre:
ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/incoming/mozilla/seamonkey-20101204.zip
or
e-vertise.com/warpzilla/seamonkey-20101204.zip

* Thunderbird v3.3a2pre:
ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/incoming/mozilla/thunderbird-20101204.zip
or
e-vertise.com/warpzilla/thunderbird-20101204.zip

Video
-----
Dramatic reductions in CPU usage will be seen when viewing OGG videos,
and to a lesser extent, WebM videos thanks to a patch from Dave Yeo.

Users of the SNAP and GenGradd video drivers running their displays in
full-color mode (i.e. 16m colors) should see a noticeable improvement
in video performance thanks to the implementation of DIVE. Sadly, the
Panorama driver can not be supported if its "Shadow Buffer" is enabled.
See the 'Notes' section below for details on how to disable or tune
DIVE support.

Font Selection
--------------
A patch from Alex Taylor improves font selection when less common font
weights such as "Thin" or "Heavy" are specified.

Ko Myung-hun has supplied a patch to select DBCS fonts correctly,
especially when the fontname is encoded in the native character set.

Previous Enhancements
---------------------
Printing Support: All native printer drivers will work if their output
resolution is set to 360 DPI or less. Mozilla's built-in Postscript
support is also available for use, as is its PDF support. Please read
PRINTING.txt in the exe's directory for details.

Memory Management: With a few trivial exceptions, the Mozilla apps no
longer use any shared memory beyond what is needed to load their dlls.
Problems that have been attributed to low or no shared memory should
not occur.

Copy Link Location: A bug that caused characters to be deleted from URLs
when using the 'Copy Link Location' menu item has been fixed.

Bugs
----
Seamonkey and Thunderbird always start in Offline mode regardless of
the settings you select.

All three apps will occasionally "smear" the video when scrolling. In
most cases, the easiest workaround is to resize the window slightly to
force its redisplay.

Notes
-----
DIVE lets an app bypass PM's graphics subsystem and write directly to
your video card's memory. This improves display speed but can cause
problems on some systems, particularly corruption caused by the mouse
pointer. Use the following to disable DIVE or tune its performance:

To disable DIVE support:
- uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when possible".
In Firefox, it's on the Options dialog's 'Advanced->General' tab.
In Seamonkey, this is in Preferences under 'Appearance->Content'.
Thunderbird does not provide this option.
- start the app in "safe mode" (use "/safe-mode" on the command line)
- add "SET MOZ_ACCELERATED=0" to config.sys.

To eliminate mouse-pointer corruption (required for SNAP in VBE mode):
- add "SET MOZ_ACCELERATED=1" to config.sys.

To eliminate mouse-pointer flickering (may cause video corruption):
- add "SET MOZ_ACCELERATED=2" to config.sys.

Support
-------
Community support for these betas and all Mozilla apps is available
through the newsgroups 'mozilla.dev.ports.os2' or 'comp.os.os2.apps'.
Messages posted to other forums may not be seen by the developers.

Rich Walsh <richATe-vertiseDOTcom>