Mozilla 1.6 Gets Better for Business

There are also several small usability improvements in the mail client, including the ability to define how long content stays on the mail server, the ability to more effectively manage the view in threads and the option to place the senders signature above quoted materials—useful for those who dont want their signature at the bottom of a long, quoted message.

There are almost no changes in the Mozilla 1.6 browser itself, other than under-the-hood improvements to the rendering engine and in standards support.

Probably the most significant new feature is the reintroduction of the Translate page option, which now uses the Google translator. Although this is handy for viewing in English pages composed in different languages, it doesnt provide much of an advantage over simply bookmarking the Google translator Web page. Also, in our tests, some pages that translated in other browsers failed to translate in Mozilla 1.6. The Translate feature translates to English by default and can be changed only by manually editing configuration files.

We liked the new ability to enter "about:about" in the address bar to view the available abouts (for example, about:plugins or about:config) in Mozilla. This will be most useful for those who need to find detailed information about the browser suite but cant remember the various about: options from which to do this.

While Mozilla is adding small features to the suite, we would love to see support for FTP upload. Although we could browse and download from FTP sites using Mozilla, we had to go to a command prompt, a dedicated FTP client or Microsoft Corp.s Internet Explorer to upload content.

Labs Director Jim Rapoza can be reached at jim_rapoza@ziffdavis.com.