M9 Release Notes

Related links

• For more information about known problems, you can also view an up-to-date list of fixed bugs.
• For status and notes on features in each milestone, see the milestone page.

• READ THIS Before You Install
• Installing the M9 Release Build
• Installation Instructions - Unix
• Installation Instructions - Win32
• Installation Instructions - Mac OS
• Uninstalling the M9 Release Build
• Files Created or Used
• Limited Support Features
• Available Navigator Functionality
• Available Mail/News Functionality
• Available Editor Functionality
• Available Gecko Functionality
• Known Issues
• General Browser Issues
• Issues with Bookmarks and History
• Sidebar Issues
• Issues With Profiles
• Issues With Preferences
• Editor Issues
• Java Issues
• Javascript Issues
• Issues With Small Fonts on Linux
• Known Issues in Mail and News
• International Issues

READ THIS Before You Install

Install into a clean directory, or delete previous builds before installing. Installing on top of previous milestone builds or released product builds may cause problems. Incompatibilities may be introduced from milestone to milestone while the software is under development.

On Linux systems that use glibc 2.0 (such as RedHat 5.2), there are problems with dl functions (dlopen(), dlsym()) not being thread safe. This might cause your M9 build to randomly crash at startup. If this happens to you, try running the application a few more times. The bits posted on ftp.mozilla.org are built on RedHat 6.0, which uses glibc 2.1 and does not have this problem. For more details, see bug 8849.

Do not use Java Plugin 1.3. It doesn't work with the most recent mozilla builds, and crashes will result. Make sure there are no files named *npjava*.* in either the bin/;lugins directory or the NS4.x plugins directory. This problem is being addressed. For more information about this bug, see bug 5369.

Proxies are not working in this release. If you attempt to use this build from behind a proxy, you will experience bugs. See bugs 8559 and 6540. This problem is scheduled to be fix in the M10 release. (See also bug 10276.)

Installing the M9 Release Build

Installation Instructions -- Unix

1. Create a directory named "mozilla" and move the tar.gz file into the mozilla directory.

 

 
 
 
 
 

mkdir mozilla ;
mv mozilla*.tar.gz mozilla
 

2. Change to the mozilla directory and untar the archive. This will create a directory called "package".

 

 
 
 
 
 

cd mozilla ;
gzip -dc mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-M8.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
 

3. Change to the "package" directory.

 

 
 
 
 
 

mv mozilla*.tar.gz ../ ;
cd package
 

4. Run mozilla with the run script:

 

 
 
 
 
 

./mozilla-apprunner.sh

Mail Instructions for Unix

Installation Instructions -- Win32

1. Click once on the mozilla-win32.zip link. The file will be downloaded to your default folder.

 
2. Click on the mozilla-win32.zip file to launch WinZip.

 
3. After clicking "I Agree" to terms of WinZip shareware, click the Extract button in the WinZip tool bar. An x86 folder with application and associated files will be unzipped.

 
4. Select Apprunner from x86 folder to launch the program.

 
• Run "apprunner.exe" to use browser and mail.

 
• Run "viewer.exe" to run only the gecko layout engine

Mail Instructions for Win32

Installation Instructions -- Mac OS

1. Click once on the mozilla-mac.sea.bin link. The file will be downloaded to your default folder (usually the desktop) and StuffIt™ will start up and convert it to mozilla-mac.sea for you. Then StuffIt will open up mozilla-mac.sea and convert it to a folder called mozilla-mac for you.
2. Open the mozilla-mac folder and double-click the file "apprunner." (Note: you no longer need the .bin or .sea files.)

If you do not have StuffIt Expander™ installed or your browser is not properly configured:

1. Make sure you have StuffIt™ somewhere on your hard drive.
2. Click and hold the mozilla-mac.sea.bin link.
3. Choose "Save this link as...".

You will see a file dialog box where you can select where you want to save the file (for example, your Desktop).
4. Click the Save button.
5. Double-click on the newly created icon "mozilla-mac.sea.bin".
6. StuffIt™ will start up and simultaneously create a file "mozilla-mac.sea", and a folder called "mozilla-mac."
7. Open the mozilla-mac folder and double-click the file "apprunner." (Note: you no longer need the .bin or .sea files.)

Mail Instructions for Macintosh

Uninstalling the M9 Release Build

Linux

• Remove the /package directory where you installed Seamonkey

 
• Remove the ~/.mozilla directory, which contains profile information

Windows

• Delete the \x86rel directory where you installed Seamonkey

 
• Delete c:\windows\mozregistry.dat

 
• Delete the user profile directory, \users50

Mac OS

• Remove the the folder Mozilla in the Documents folder

 
• Remove the file "Mozilla Registry" in the System Folder | Preferences folder

 
• Remove the folder where you installed Seamonkey (probably mozilla-mac-M9)

Files Created or Used

*Note:"cookperm.txt" ("cookperm" on Unix) is a file used to selectively accept cookies from certain sites and not from others. It is used only if you set your preferences so you see a warning before accepting cookies. To do that, hand edit the prefs.js file to include:

 
user.pref ("network.cookie.rememberAboutCookies", true);

Limited Support Features

Available Navigator Functionality

Available Mail/News Functionality

Additional Mail Functionality

• The multiple POP accounts feature is available for you to try out. In your preferences file, add another account name to this line:

 

 
 
 
 
 

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account1,account2");
 

• You will need to have identity and server information for the second account. For example:

 

 
 
 
 
 

user_pref("mail.account.account2.identities", id2"); user_pref("mail.account.account2.server", "server2");

where id2 and server2 preference lines exist and point to actual servers, etc.
 

• You can use the Address Book window and the Select Address dialog. The Personal Address Book is working for adding cards, editing cards, and deleting cards. LDAP and additional address books are not working yet. The data is stored in a file called "abook.mab". It is not yet possible to use the address book data from the mail compose window.

Available Editor Functionality

Available Gecko Functionality

Known Issues

General Browser Issues

• Selecting "Submit" on a form may cause a crash. (bug 11883)

 
• If about:blank is the href for a linked stylesheet, a crash will occur. (bug 10273)

 
• Calling a blocking read on nsHTTPChannel will cause a crash. (bug 11112)

 
• A crash may occur if you print from Apprunner and then reload the page. (bug 12023)

 
• (Linux only) In 256 colors, loading the test10.html document in Apprunner will cause a crash. (bug 11090)

 
• Loading problems (possible crash or freeze) sometimes occur on pages that contain applets.

 
• Pages that contain pop-up user authentication will cause problems (possible browser hang or crash). (bug 12137)

 
• Sites that set multiple cookies will not work correctly. (bug 11630)

 
• You may not be able to log in to some sites because of problems with cookies. (bug 11610)

 
• Plugins that use streaming, such as audio or video, will not work. (bug 11376)

 
• FTP is not functional in M9. (bug 10737)

 
• Several problems are under investigation for the URL http://my.netscape.com. The first time you log into My Netscape, you will have to click the button twice to open your personal page.

 
• The following toolbar and menu items are either not fully functional or disabled:

 
• The Back, Forward, and Stop buttons often appear to be inactive (grayed) when they are actually active. Although mousing over them or clicking them may produce no visual feedback, the appropriate action is taken. (bug 7909)

 
• The Back button doesn't work with manually entered URLs or URLs accessed through bookmarks

 
• The Stop button fails intermittently

 
• The Close menu item doesn't work (use the close box to close windows)

 
• Print (toolbar button & menu item) and Print Preview fail intermittently

 
• Keyboard shortcuts/command keys are not available for most menu items with the exception of the following for the mail compose and editor window: Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-V (paste), Ctrl-Z (undo). and Ctrl-Y(redo) and their Mac OS equivalents. The old Unix equivalents (using Alt- instead of Ctrl-) don't work; use Ctrl- .

 
• Within Viewer, many options within the Debug & Tools menu items are not currently working or produce unpredictable results.

 
• Windows only:

 
• Links on pages that use CSS do not work.

 
• If you have a second video display monitor connected to your computer, links displayed on that monitor will not work.

 
• Selecting the Print option causes crashes.

 
• The Wallet feature does not work correctly.

 
• Mac OS only:
 
• Apprunner will not launch if you change the Seamonkey folder name to include a forward slash ("/"). (bug 8503)

 
• If an included .css file is missing, the application will crash.

 
• Cookies are not yet ready.

 
• The throbber, mozilla animation in the upper right corner of a page, may not work while the page is loading, though the page still loads.

 
• Linux only:

 
• The Back and Forward buttons do not work for manually entered URLs.

 
• The throbber, mozilla animation in the upper right corner of a page, may not work while the page is loading, though the page still loads.
• Solaris only:

 
• The Copy command in the browser's Edit menu is not working. (bug 6253)

Issues with Bookmarks and History

• MacOS: Bookmarks do not appear when you select Manage Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu.

 
• The Manage Bookmarks option is not working correctly. (bug 10807.)

 
• Double-clicking a bookmarks folder spawns a new window. (bug 10811.)

 
• (Mac OS only) Adding a bookmark does not dynamically update the UI. (bug 7142.)

Sidebar Issues

• You cannot yet add or remove sidebar panels using the UI.

 
• Changes you make in the Customization dialog will not be reflected in the Sidebar.

 
• General Sidebar UI is not finished.

Issues With Profiles

• IMPORTANT: All the information regarding profiles is stored in the registry file. The registry file gets created even if you have used earlier versions of Apprunner. When you check out a new build, make sure you delete or rename the following items before you install, build, and run the new executable:

 
• Windows mozregistry.dat ( c:\winnt or c:\windows or equivalent),
• Mac OS Mozilla Registry (System Folder:Preferences),
• Linux registry (~/.mozilla/)

 
• The ProfileManager feature has been added. You open Profile Manager with the command line argument : -ProfileManager. The Profile Manager user interface appears, supporting creating a new profile, and deleting and renaming existing profiles. When you finish any of the tasks you can click Exit to quit the Profile Manager. You can click a Start Communicator button to start Apprunner with a selected profile. Also, users can migrate 4.5 Communicator profiles (Windows only, for now).

 
• Various command line options to create and manage profiles are:

# apprunner -P <Profilename>

Runs Apprunner with the <Profilename>.

# apprunner -CreateProfile "<Profilename> <ProfileDir>"

Creates a profile (i.e., <Profilename>) and creates a directory at the specified location i.e., <Profiledir> and launches Apprunner.

# apprunner -CreateProfile <Profilename>

Creates a profile and creates a profile directory under default profile location.

# apprunner -ProfileWizard

Launches the Create Profile Wizard to create a new profile. The Create Profile Wizard lets users create a new profile at the default location or the location of their choice. At the end of the process a profile is created and marked as the current profile, and Apprunner is launched with that profile. The wizard is currently just two screens. Mail and News related preferences/information will be collected by a different application.

# apprunner -ProfileManager

Brings up Profile Manager for managing profiles. Users can select a profile and click on the Start Communicator button to launch Apprunner with the chosen profile. The current profile (usually the last used profile) appears preselected.

# apprunner

Several scenarios:
number of profiles = 0  -->  Brings up Create Profile Wizard
number of profiles = 1  -->  Launches Apprunner directly with that profile
number of profiles > 1  -->  Brings up Profile Manager

Default profile locations for profile directories are <3 levels up from the exe location>\Users50,  on Windows :Documents:Mozilla:Users50:  on Mac OS, and ~/.mozilla on Linux.

• Profile Migration (on Windows only): 4.5 profiles now can be migrated to 5.0. In the process of migration, 4.5 profile information is undisturbed. In 5.0 the new location for the migrated profiles is the default location as mentioned in the above paragraph. Migration is functional on Windows only, but will soon be extended to the Mac OS. (A date for Linux availability is currently unknown.)

 

 
 
 
 
 

To migrate 4.5 profiles, run Apprunner with the command line option -installer. The profile to be migrated is listed as <profilename> - migrate in the Profile Manager's list box. Users can select a profile to be migrated and click on the Migrate button. If the migration is done successfully, the suffix ' - migrate' disappears in the display, marking that profile as a 5.0 profile. Currently, only the prefs.js file and mail and news folders are copied in the migration process. Users cannot rename or start Communicator with a profile that must be migrated. With the changes that went in at the end of M7, it is required to create a 5.0 profile before using the migration service. This will be fixed in M8 (so that there is no dependency on having a 5.0 profile).
 

• Mac OS only: In creating your default profile, don't use spaces in the profile name. The actual folder will be named with "%20" for each space you include. As a result, if you use Messenger, your mail folders will not load or display. (bug 6744)

 
• To use mail, you must manually set up your prefs.js file, following the directions in the "mozilla mail/news prefs" document. Then copy your prefs.js file to the location where your new profile is created after using the Profile Manager/Wizard. If you have previously used Messenger and have all your mail preferences set, just copy the prefs.js to the profile location/directory.

 
• If the Bookmarks menu has only the Add Current Page and Manage Bookmarks menu items, and they are not followed by a list of bookmarks, then bookmarking will not work correctly until you do one of the following:

 
• Migrate an old 4.x profile over to Seamonkey, or

 
• Create a new profile by following these steps:

 
1. Remove your current profiles and mozregistry.

 
2. For Windows, remove the "mozregistry.dat" file in your Windows (or winnt) directory; also remove the entire "Users50" directory.

 
3. For Mac OS, remove the "Mozilla Registry" file from your Preferences folder (System Folder|Preferences|Mozilla Registry). Then remove the "Users50" folder from the Documents folder that was placed on your hard drive when you installed Seamonkey (documents|mozilla|Users50).

 
4. For Linux, remove the .mozilla/ directory.

 
5. Launch Seamonkey and create your new profile. The menus should now appear and behave normally.
(See also bug 9505)

Issues With Preferences

• The preferences UI is not functional in the 8.5 release.

 
• Information about preferences related to saving username/password or form data:
 
• To see a warning prompt before saving username/password or form data, set the following preference (by hand) in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("wallet.useDialogs", true);

This pref is false by default, so saving will be done silently. This is done because there currently are no dialog boxes and the warning prompt would occur in the console window.
 

• To suppress saving of form data altogether, set the following preference (by hand) in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("wallet.captureForms", false);

This preference is true by default.
 

• To supress saving of username/password, set the following preference (by hand) in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("network.singon.rememberSignons", false);

This preference is true by default.

• (Windows only) Preferences now load, but are not completely functional.

 

Editor Issues

• In Forms, the Text Input and Select objects do not submit the values assigned to  them through HTML code. (bug 12475)

• The Editor API logging feature is disabled for M9.

• Using the pulldowns menus in the Editor window causes the browser window to move to the foreground, making it problematic to continue selecting any item from an Editor menu.  (bug 12094)

• In the Format menu, if you choose Apply Style Sheet and then choose Oldstyle or one of the other W3C style sheets at the bottom of the submenu, a crash will occur.

 
• The editor doesn't launch on the Mac OS. (bug 9701)

 
• Ctrl-I/B/U causes text to disappear (bug 8123)

 
• List items don't show levels (disc, square, numbers, etc.) (bug 8435)

 
• Printing is not working. (bug 8806)

 
• Preview is not working. (bug 9200)

 
• The Image dialog is not fully implemented. (bugs 9751, 9753, 9754, 9755, and 9757)

 
• Table editing needs to be implemented. (bug 6256)

 
• Linux: Apprunner may crash on launch. (bug 8849)

 
• Linux (Solaris) only: Highlighting doesn't work. (bug 10699)

 
• Linux only: Pull-down menus don't work in the editor. (bug 11583)

Java Issues

• If you have installed the latest JRE 1.2 from Sun Microsystems, you may crash at startup if the Java plugin is present. To fix this, remove the following dlls from the Plugins folder located in your 4.5 (or later) Communicator directory: npjava32.dll, npjava12.dll and npjava11.dll.

 
• On Linux, Java is not yet implemented.

Javascript Issues

• document.write fails to write HTML tags and any text written before the last tag. (bug 11141)

 
• JavaScript alert dialogs are not being displayed. (bug 4279)

 
• None of the JavaScript window.xxx() functions work with AppRunner windows. Windows can be opened using the ToolkitCore, but those windows don't play well with most of the JavaScript properties and methods.

 
• "javascript:" is not working.

Issues With Small Fonts on Linux

• If the fonts are too small in your environment, it may be possible to alleviate this by setting a preference in Mozilla. Add a line like the following to the preferences file (~/.mozilla/prefs.js):

user_pref("browser.screen_resolution", 120);

This sets the dpi to 120. If you set the pref to zero (0), Mozilla will use the X server's dpi value. If the pref is not set, it uses the default value of 96.

There is some info about setting the X server's DPI value at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/dpi.html.

If your fonts are still too small (or too large) after setting the DPI correctly, you can adjust the font size as follows:
setenv GECKO_FONT_SIZE_FACTOR 1.5

Note that the latter only affects fonts. The screen_resolution preference affects anything that specifies absolute size (e.g. CSS "pt" points).

Known Issues in Mail and News

• Password dialog for mail accounts:

 
• If you have biff on, the password dialog may comes up at the time interval you have set. The dialog may not appear in the front where you will notice it. If the password dialog is up, when you are composing a message you will notice that moving from field to field in the addressing pane is difficult. Performance will be affected in other windows. (bug 11765)

 
• If you type in the incorrect password and click OK, Messenger will lock up. (bug 11980)

 
• If you have biff set to true, and the time interval has passed before you cancel a password dialog, you will get another password dialog after cancelling. (bug 12347)

 
• A crash will occur after you get messages for a POP account if there is a typo in the prefs.js file for the "mail.server.server1.userName" statement. For instance, if the "N" in "userName" is lowercase, a crash will occur. Workaround: Fix the typo.(bug 10170)

 
• Collapsing the addressing pane in the mail compose window may result in a crash. As a workaround, do not collapse the addressing pane. (bug 11856)

 
• New mail messages are not placed correctly in the sort-ordered messages. (bug 8529)

 
• After choosing Send Later from the compose window and exiting Apprunner, you may need to manually close the Apprunner application console. (bug 9791)

 
• Multiple selections in a Messenger window my cause a crash. For example, if you select a message and the scroll down the thread pane list to select a range of messages, the application may crash. (bug 9119)

 
• When you address a message to both an email address and a newsgroup, the message is not sent properly to the email address. Address newsgroup and email messages separately. (bug 9508)

 
• Currently, the Delete key does not delete messages. Choose Delete from the Edit menu, or use the Delete toolbar button to delete messages.(bug 8985)

 
• When the contents of an address card do not fit on a single pane in the address book window, the scroll bar may not appear. (bug 8252)

 
• Replying to the news message does not automatically fill in the name of the newsgroup in the compose window addressing area. Currently, you must manually input the name of the newsgroup. (bug 6931)

 
• When addressing a message to multiple recipients, use a comma to separate the recipients. If you use a semicolon, a program crash may occur.(bug 8276)

 
• If you compose and post 10-15 news messages, messages may not be displayed in the message pane afterwards, and you may be prevented from opening other Navigator windows, or from doing any task that requires URLs. Exit and restart Apprunner. (bug 8515)

 
• Although you can bring up the Search and Filters dialogs, backend code for these features has not been implemented so you will not be able to perform any functions in these dialogs.

 
• See also the information on the prefs.js file, earlier in this document.

 
• When you select an unread message with the message pane collapsed, the message is marked as read. (bug 6485)

 
• If you have local folders with more than 1,000 messages, don't point the Mail application at your actual local folder hierarchy. Larger folders may take too long to load and may consume vast amounts of memory.

 
• Vcards in mail are not fully functional and may cause failures when clicked.

 
• Mac OS only:

 
• Sending plain text mail messages from Messenger will cause your system to freeze. As a workaround, continue to use the html compose window. (bug 11861)

 
• After startup, you must click inside the browser window to bring it to the front before using any of the menus. (bug 9701)

 
• Selecting the panels in succession in the Account Manager dialog may result in a crash. (bug 7568)

 
• In creating your default profile, don't use spaces in the profile name. The actual folder will be named with "%20" for each space you include. As a result, if you use Messenger, your mail folders will not load or display. (bug 6744)

 
• Linux only:

 
• Text under the toolbar buttons is not readable. For a workaround, see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/dpi.html.

 
• Selecting the panels in succession in the Account Manager dialog may result in a crash. (bug 7568)

 
• Issues in the Mail Compose window:

 
• (Windows only) To access the drop down list boxes in the addressing fields, use the down arrow key to scroll the list of choices (such as "from:," "cc:" or "newsgroup:" etc.). Alternatively, you can collapse then expand the addressing panel before choosing from the list. (Data you enter prior to collapsing the panel will be lost. Enter your recipients after collapsing the panel.) (bug 9537)

 
• The cursor does not appear in the message field until you begin typing.

 
• The received message does not wrap lines, so you may want to embed hard returns in your messages.

 
• Messages may contain either too much vertical white space or not enough.

 
• If you are using plain text (instead of HTML) for messages, you may need to press Enter twice at the end of a line to move the cursor to the next line.

 
• To use the plain text compose window, add this line to your preference file:

 

 
 
 
 
 

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.send_html", false);

M9 International Issues

General:

I18n Engineering and Milestone Tasks document is now available here.
I18n Beta 1 Feature Plan is now available here.
I18n Beta 1 Mail/News Functional specifications are now available here.
 
• If you have used an earlier version of Mozilla 5.0, we recommend that you delete the file called mozregistry.dat (Win) or registry (Unix/Mac) before you run M9 apprunner. (Don't delete Netscape Registry file for Mac, which is for Communicator 4.x.) Read the section in the Release Notes called Files Used or Created to find out where you can find these files.
• Also read the Installation instructions for your platform carefully in this Release Notes.
• When you start M9 after having deleted mozregistry.dat or registry, you will be asked to create a new profile. If you name an existing profile, that profile will be used. Otherwise "Default" profile will be created. If this latter happens, you can replace the prefs.js file in the Default folder with the one from an existing profile directory. (Note that the default profile name changed from prefs50.js (of M8 and earlier) to prefs.js in M9.)
• If you want to report international bugs, use the Bugzilla. If you have a question or comment, post a news article to: netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n.

• There have been a number of improvements via international bug fixes. Mozilla should be more stable and usable than M8 in displaying pages in all the Character sets we support.
• The new network lib is now in Mozilla: Necko has landed. Network protocol-related performance should improve considerably. We need your help in testing a variety of network protocols. Our implementation should meet the requirements of network-related RFCs. If you find a problem, please file a bug or let us know at: netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n.
• Display of non-ASCII form elements is now possible with the use of the new GFX widget. Because it still has some bugs left, the GFX widget is not turned on as the default yet but you can use it with the following prefs.js setting. Try non-ASCII form elements with this feature turned on. If you find problems with form elements, please file a bug here. Note: Turning this widget on has various side effects, particularly in Editor and Mail. So, use it with caution.

 

 
 
 
 
 

user_pref("nglayout.widget.mode", 2);

• M9 converter(s): There are no new converters in M9.  See here for a list of all the converters at M9. (Note: Not all menu items may be displayed in the Character Set menu for Windows and Unix clients because the menu does not scroll yet, but they can be enabled by simple modification of appropriate .xul and .dtd files. See below for details on how to modify these files.)
• Unix charset testing:  As mentioned in the M7 Release Notes, the display for the supported charsets except Armenian, Thai, and Vietnamese should be working now.  We would like users to continue to look at various Unix charsets and file a bug if a problem is found. The list of the supported charsets at M9 can be found below. Please download the Unix binary and check out our support for these character sets. (Note: You need appropriate fonts to display these languages -- pcf.gz format on Linux. Visit this site for ISO and Cyrillic BDF fonts, and this site for multi-byte language fonts. For converting from BDF to PCF format fonts, use bdftopcf utility.)
• Charset Auto-detection modules:
• now can be selected via a prefs.js setting: Auto charset detection is currently not turned on by default. As mentioned in the M8 notes, several charset detection modules (CJK + Russian & Ukrainian) had been checked into the code. In M9 we made it possible for you to designate your favorite auto-charset detector (one at a time) via the following entry in your prefs.js  file:

 

 
 
 
 
 

user_pref("intl.charset.detector", "chardet_name");

** Valid values for chardet_name are: japsm, kopsm, cjkpsm, zhpsm, zhtwpsm, zhcnpsm, ruprob, ukprob. See here for details.

As reported before, unit testing can be done via a utility called "Detectch.exe" found in the same directory as the "apprunner.exe" file. Read the usage instruction here.
 

• Japanese auto-detection module has been revised for M9: We need a lot of users testing Japanese auto-detection module under many different conditions and pages. Let us know if the new module is working as intended. Bugzilla or netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n.
• XPIDL interfaces have been checked in for:
• nsILocale, strres, and date/time formatting. See here for details and examples.
• Mac: Baltic display: ISO-8859-13: You may experience a problem in Baltic ISO-8859-13 display in that some of the uppercase characters may be missing the diacritical marks above them showing only the base characters. The same problem might also exist for Baltic ISO-8859-4 display.  See Bug 9165.
• One Workaround:
• 1) Install a Central European script bundle (CE) from this Apple file. (You need DiskCopy utility to mount this image). After you mount this disk image, rather than using the Installer, open the System file directory by double-clicking on it. In it, you will find among others, CE (script), Slovak (keyboard layout), and slovensk (keyboard layout). Drag these files to your current System Folder. Mac OS will then place them in the right places.
• 2) Next, get the fonts for Central European from this Apple file. Once you mount this image file with DiskCopy, you will find a number of CE fonts. Drag and drop them onto your System Folder. Mac OS will then place them in an appropriate folder.
• 3) After steps 1 and 2 are completed, re-start your Mac. You should now see ISO-8859-13 (also ISO-88594) characters correctly.
• On Mac: At M6, multi-font rendering code was re-written to improve on display performance. We are still evaluating this code for M9 and we would like people to continue to evaluate performance for this feature, particularly performance/speed issues in loading. If you find performance problems, please file a bug.
• View | Character Set menu:  You can switch to different Character coding upon encountering a page which does not have a  meta charset tag. You will not see a checkmark next to the menu item yet, however.
• View | Character Set menu Display problem workaround: The list is currently too long and unwieldy -- overall charset menu specs are under consideration.
• There is no scrollable menu yet for Unix and Windows clients. Thus the Character set menu items may not be all visible on these platforms even if your monitor size is 21-inch. If you have this problem and would like to try a workaround, please read this file.
• On Mac: Pages with multiple-frame and other special conditions may not finish loading easily. Under such a condition, changing a charset menu selection may not reload the pages under a new encoding. If you encounter this problem, click on the Reload button or click into the location bar and hit the "Enter" key. This should complete the loading process and then you can switch to another encoding using the View | Character Set menu. See Bug 9715 for details.

Editor: For IME specifications, see this document by Tague Griffith.
• Editor has now a Character Set menu: With this menu, you can now save editor documents into different encodings. On a new document, change the encoding to the one you would like to save the document in and then use Bugs or comments to: Bugzilla or netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n.
• Currently this menu does not reload a document. It can only be used to save a document into a different charset at the save time. This menu will be re-worked extensively for M10/M11.
• CJK IME candidate window for inline input is now positioned slightly to the right and below the active input area. Bugs or comments to: Bugzilla or netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n.
• Input Method support has been improved through several other bug fixes.
• It would be very helpful to us if users can look at commercial CJK IMEs for Windows an Mac to let us know  how they work with the current 5.0 IME support. File a bug if you find any problems.
• What has been enabled up to M9: (Still awaiting the new Ender/Editor enablement.)
• CJK IMEs on Windows and Mac.
• Keyboard support for many one-byte languages on Windows: Please file a bug if you find a problem in your language or keyboard.
• Keyboard support for many one-byte languages on Mac: Roman Australian,  Brazilian, British, Canadian-CSA, Canadian-ISO, Canadian-French, Dutch, dv-Dvorak, dq-Dvorak-Qwerty, Finnish, Flemish, French, French-numerical, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Spanish-ISO, Swedish, Swiss French, Swiss German, Cyrillic Bulgarian, Cyrillic-Qwerty, Russian, Ukrainian.

• Localization framework has been explicitly defined:
• A large percentage of  localizable strings have now been extracted from .xul into .dtd (or property files) files. The .dtd files are found under  ../chrome/component_name/locale/en-US directory. They match the names of the corresponding .xul files which are placed under: ../chrome/component_name/content/default directory.  (Note: property files, which can also be localized, are found under ../res directory but currently there are only a few examples of this type of files.)
• To extract .XUL entities into DTD files for localization, read this document. Here are a set of steps needed to create a localized .dtd resource files.
• XUL/XML/RDF files assume the default charset to be in UTF-8. If you change UI strings to your favorite language, they should show OK as long as the localized files use UTF-8 charset. (You can change menus to Japanese, for example, in ..chrome/navigator/locale/en-US/navigator.dtd file using the method suggested above and then convert the DTD file to UTF-8.) The menu items generally cannot be in languages your system does not support, e.g.  no Japanese menu for US Windows is possible at the moment.
• DTD/XML encoding definition is not supported yet -- therefore you cannot use charsets other than UTF-8 as the resource file charset.  We assume UTF-8 as default. Cf. Bug 4431.
• UTF-8 conversion utility:
• Use convenient converter utilities such as "uniconv" (for Windows and Unix) or "native2ascii" utility included in the latest JDK.
• New Character Set conversion utility!: Mozilla now has its own Character Encoding conversion utility (courtesy of Frank Tang) in the binary distribution. It is called nsconv and is installed in the same directory as your apprunner executable. You can use any Character set names recognizable to Mozilla in the use of utility. Here's the basic command line for using this utility:
nsconv -f source_charsetname -t target_charsetname source_filename > new_filename
• String Resource/Bundle Fallback mechanism: Basic fallback for choosing locale-specific string resource files have been checked in. A self-test unit is available in "Stringbu.exe" program found in the same directory where the "apprunner.exe" is located. See Bug 8188 for details on how to use the test program.

• Preferences file: prefs.js (Note the change from prefs50.js used up to M8. You can make a copy of prefs50.js and name it prefs.js.)
• Important: Though this may not be documented elsewhere, if you want to display mail messages on Windows platforms, you must have an existing directory called "C:\Temp". It must be this exact name.  For example, "C:\Tmp" will not do -  and it must exist on the C drive. If the directory with this name does not exist on your C drive, create one yourself because Mozilla at present cannot display a message unless it can create a temporary file in this directory.
• Password: Starting with M9, Mozilla now ignores the password provided in the prefs.js file. You will be asked to provide a password via a dialog prompt.
• Mail (POP & IMAP) and News viewing does not work unless you have a correct prefs.js file in the correct location for your platform. Read this page and set up the correct preferences before you do any mail testing. For the location of the prefs.js file, read the installation instructions for your platform on this page - see above.
• In addition to the general preferences items, international users might want to pay attention to the following lines in the prefs.js. The first control which auto-detection module to use for mail attachments, the second controls HTML/Plain Text mail option, the third and the fourth are musts for sending out properly MIME-encoded mail body and headers, respectively. If you want to send Plain text mail, set the second option's value to "false".  Basic HTML mail send is working for Latin 1, Japanese, UTF-8 and probably other languages supported in the Character Set menu for Mail Composer.  Here are the relevant prefs.js settings.
• user_pref("intl.charset.detector", "chardet_name");   <-- use charset detector to detect attachment encodings.
• Valid values for chardet_name are: japsm, kopsm, cjkpsm, zhpsm, zhtwpsm, zhcnpsm, ruprob, ukprob. See here for detail
• user_pref("mail.identity.idX.compose_html", true);  <-- default is "true"
• ... where "X" in 'idX' should be replaced by a number which corresponds to your account identities number, e.g. id0, id1, etc.
• The above is for HTML mail send. For Plain Text mail send, change the value to "false".
• Prior to M8, this was controlled by:  user_pref("mail.identity.idX.send_html", false);  <-- this has been obsoleted.
• user_pref("mail.strictly_mime", true);  //No need to set this line unless you want a false value.
• user_pref("mail.strictly_mime_headers", true);      //No need to set this line unless you want a false value.
• Downloading POP mail for the first time:
• If the POP Mail directory designated in your prefs.js file contains no existing folder (i.e. new), it may require patience to get your mail downloaded for the first time. Here are some suggestions to get through this initial stage:
• When you first open the POP server folder, make sure to wait to until the "progress status" bar at bottom left of your window has stopped being "active". If you try to get new msgs while the progress bar is still active, Mozilla is very likely to freeze. One way to stop the "progress bar" is to select an existing message in one of your local folders. (Just copy a small mailbox file from 4.x client into the mail directory for 5.0 and use it for this purpose.)
• Once the progress bar has stopped being active, press "Get Msgs" button. This will bring up the password prompt, provide the correct password and press OK. Now wait patiently until the mail is completely downloaded from your POP mail server. POP mail downloading is very slow right now and depending on how many messages the server has, it may take 5-10 minutes for the downloading to complete. We recommend not using a mailbox if it contains more than 100-200 messages.
• The POP option is for leaving mail behind on the server after the messages have been downloaded. We recommend that you use a test mail account for this purpose rather than using your regular mail account.
• Japanese attachments auto-detection improved further for M9: The Japanese auto-detection module has been improved. There is no need to set Character Set menu for Japanese file attachments. (currently there is a bug which corrupts EUC-JP page display.)  You just need to set an appropriate (japsm) auto-detection module in the pres.js file. Display of non-ASCII attachment names is also working.
• View | Character Set menu and thread pane reloading:
• The menu change causes the thread pane to reload properly. This makes it possible to display non-MIME-encoded headers which don't match the current Character Set menu setting.  Headers in the message viewing window still have a problem of displaying non-MIME-encoded headers.
• IMAP Latin 1 folder name: displays OK. Multi-byte folder names (e.g. CJK) don't work yet.
• International Sorting in Thread pane headers:  now works well in the Subject headers. For Sender headers, there is a bug which had been fixed for M10 but not for this release-- see Bug 8455. Sorting should be done according to the sort default for the language of your operating system. Date/Time sorting now seems to be working as it should rather than alphabetically as in M8.
• International Date/Time format:  now works for NT4 only for all locales. (On all other platforms, it works for Latin1 locale only.) The format will be used according to your OS's date/time format setting. See Bug 9229.
• Multi-lingual mail viewing: This is working on all platforms.
• Multilingual viewing is working on IMAP, POP3 and NNTP servers as long as the messages contain properly MIME-encoded headers and body with correct charset parameters.
• View | Character Set menu is currently not working to override wrong MIME charset label, or view msgs which have no MIME charset (except for Latin 1) specified.
• If you have a multilingual font or several fonts which together cover the Unicode ranges (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean fonts + Pan-European fonts), we use them in displaying mail messages and headers for all the languages we support. We pay attention to the charset parameter in the Content-Type header and switch to an appropriate font. The Character Set menu is not needed to switch to different language views unless the message you're viewing is incorrectly labeled. If you would like a basic mono-weight multi-lingual font, you can get Bitstream Cyberbit font 2.0 here.
• Attachments should be viewable if they are of the same charset as the main body of the mail. You can also turn on an appropriate auto-charset detector as discussed above.
• View | Character Set menu for New Mail Compose window is working for sending mail for many additional languages. Switch to the charset you want to compose a message in and then compose the message.  You will not see a checkmark next to the menu item yet, however.
• Sending Latin 1 & Japanese attachments: is generally working now for attaching local files. File | Send Page is not working currently.
• Message Send Status summary for Latin 1 and Japanese: No indicates that the functionality is not working well.
 

Message send feature	Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1)	Japanese (iso-2022-jp)
Header (subject, address)	Yes	No (Awaiting new Ender widget)
Body - HTML	Yes (HTML entities are used for 8-bit characters)	Yes
Body - plain	Yes	Yes
Reply/forward header	Yes	No (Awaiting new Ender widget)
Reply/forward body html	Yes -- POP mail, No -- IMAP/NEWS (quotes accented characters wrong)	Yes -- POP mail, No -- IMAP/NEWS (quotes JPN characters in raw JIS)
Reply/forward body plain	No - POP (quotes accented characters wrong), Yes - IMAP, NO - News	No - POP (corrupts data as in quoting),  NO - IMAP/NEWS (quotes raw JIS characters)
Send/View Attachment(s)	Yes (Send - local file only. View - can be viewed inline if attachment has a meta charset tag or auto-detection is on and detects the charset. Otherwise just as a link.)	Yes (Send - local file only. View - an be viewed inline if attachment has a meta charset tag or auto-detection is on and detects the charset. Otherwise just as a link.)
Copy/paste into headers and body	Yes (accented characters copy OK)	No (for both headers and body)

• Composing Latin 1 Mail:
• Copying/pasting accented characters into the headers and  body works
• Keyboard input into headers (e.g. subject) also works for accented characters. Using the English keyboard for Latin 1 high-bit input, ALTGr + 0+Number Keypad method works, e.g. Right ALT key + 0232.
• Make sure to switch the View | Character Set  to your chosen Character set name before you send out a message.
• Basic MIME compliance is there: Header Q encoding, and Body QP encoding for accented characters.
• Composing Japanese mail: works both for HTML and Plain text mail now.
• Basic Japanese input works for body.  Japanese input/copying  into Subject header does not work yet, however. We are awaiting the arrival of new Ender/Editor widgets for this feature.
• Mail goes out in ISO-2022-JP.  Header is B-encoded. (The Kanji-in escape sequence is now correct -- that of JISX0208-1990/83. )
• Make sure to switch the View | Character Set  to Japanese (ISO-2022-JP) before you send out a message.
• Sending other charset mail -- is enabled. Please try out these new charsets! For example, Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, UTF-8, etc.
• Though the mail text body can sense what keyboard you have selected and will switch font accordingly, there may be mapping bugs with some international keyboards.  Copy/paste may work better. If you find a bug with your charset/language, please file it here.
• Reply/Forward: is not working all that well yet. Under POP mail, Mozilla more or less quotes original mail correctly in header and body  and sends it out. Under IMAP/News mail, quoting is faulty with Latin 1 and Japanese mail body. If the original mail has a multi-part structure containing web page attachments, there are some problems sending such mail. Sometimes it simply does not go out.
• Viewing News: is working. Multilingual news articles viewing works if they have correct MIME charsets indicated in the articles. Be warned, however, that newsgroups postings are not always MIME-compliant and this could defeat our charset honoring mechanism.

• We don't currently test these platforms for international features. Though we cannot vouch for accuracy, many of our Windows features should be available on these platforms also.  Linux mail is somewhat behind Windows and Mac, however.

Features that are not supported in M9:

• No CJK IME support on Linux.
• No posting non-ASCII forms data -- GFX widget dependent. See above.
• No CJK printing on Linux.
• HTTP charset won't be handled -- until the next release.
 

Single-byte:

• Western (ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252, MacRoman), Central European  (ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250, MacCE), South European/Esperanto/Maltese (ISO-8859-3), Baltic/North European (ISO-8859-4, Windows-1257), Baltic/North European (ISO-8859-13), Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251, KOI8-R,  ISO-IR-111 aka ECMA-Cyrillic, MacCyrillic, CP-866), Arabic (ISO-8859-6, Windows-1256) - (not in spec, might be removed from commercial build later) , Greek (ISO-8859-7, Windows-1253, MacGreek), Hebrew (ISO-8859-8 aka Windows-1255) - (not in spec, might be removed from commercial build later), Turkish (ISO-8859-9 aka Latin5, Windows-1254, MacTurkish), Nordic/North European (ISO-8859-10 aka Latin6), Celtic (ISO-8859-14), Western (ISO-8859-15), Armenian (ARMISCII-8), Thai (TIS-620 aka Windows-874), Ukrainian (KOI8-U, MacUkrainian), Vietnamese (VISCII, Windows-1258, VIET-VPS, VIET-TCVN5712), other Mac encodings (MacCroatian, MacIcelandic, MacRomanian).

• Japanese (Shift_JIS, EUC-JP), Traditional Chinese (Big5, EUC-TW), Simplified Chinese (GB2312), Unicode (UTF-8, UCS-2, UCS-4), Korean (EUC-KR), Western (T.61-8bit) - support this for LDAP v2 and X.500.

• Japanese (ISO-2022-JP), Unicode (UTF-7, IMAP4-modified-UTF7- Needed for IMAP folder names)