1. General

Mozilla 1.4 is fully functional technology for those interested in seeing Mozilla technology, and those who want to create Mozilla-based products and packages. Mozilla is free software, so any person or company is free to alter and redistribute it under the terms of the licence.

While Mozilla 1.4 (as released by mozilla.org) is ready to be used comfortably by the general user – and those wanting to use Mozilla as released by mozilla.org are more than welcome to do so – mozilla.org has no resources to offer end-user support. However, mozilla.org always invites new testers and bug reporters.

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First, uninstall Mozilla, as detailed for your operating system in the Mozilla 1.4 Release Notes, then install the new version. You should never install a new version of Mozilla over a previous one.

If your plug-ins folder is inside the Mozilla application folder, you may wish to save it elsewhere beforehand so as to restore it after reinstalling. You can also keep your plug-ins folder in your profile. Go to Help | About Plug-ins to see the locations of the plug-ins Mozilla is currently using.

Uninstalling Mozilla this way will leave your profile and your user preferences intact. You may lose access to some add-ins and have to reinstall them. Themes and the spellchecker (if installed) should be detected by the new installation.

When you install a newer version of Mozilla, you should create a fresh profile, rather than try to use the profile left over from the old version. Sharing a profile between different versions of Mozilla can lead to profile corruption.

If you have problems with a new installation of Mozilla, see Troubleshooting.

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See the add-ons page. A large number of development projects can be found at MozDev.

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Keyboard shortcuts are listed at http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/moz_shortcuts.html.

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As well as the preferences found under Edit | Preferences (Mac OS X: Mozilla | Preferences), the advanced user has fine control over a tremendous number of Mozilla parameters. First be sure to read Customizing Mozilla, Hidden Mail Compose Prefs and Hidden Address Book Prefs. Also, entering about:config in the address bar will list every configurable variable in Mozilla.

To set a hidden preference, exit Mozilla (including Quick Launch), go to your profile folder, back up your prefs.js file in case of problems, and create (or edit) the file user.js . Enter lines such as:

user_pref("extensions.irc.nickname", "MyName")

Restart Mozilla for your changes to take effect.

user.js is a user-created file that lets you keep your custom preferences in a file that Mozilla will not alter (unlike prefs.js). This allows you to keep track of what you have done.

Take great care when tweaking hidden preferences. If you make a mistake that renders Mozilla unusable, delete user.js and restore prefs.js from the backed-up copy. (Having no prefs.js will restore all Mozilla preferences to their defaults, and Mozilla will forget the existence of your mail and news accounts. Your POP mail files will still be there for recovery.)

An experimental preferences tweaking application for Windows is available at TweakMoz.

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A crash recovery project is in development at http://recall.mozdev.org/.

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AIM is a proprietary AOL product and is integrated only with Netscape. You can still use the stand-alone version of AIM, or the Java version (if you have the Java plug-in installed).

There is also a Jabber instant messaging client for Mozilla in development at Jabberzilla.

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These sites contain Mozilla news and resources:

• MozillaZine – including comments on nightly test builds
• MozillaNews
• BlogZilla – news and tips
• MozillaZine developer weblogs

There is also a page of Mozilla promotional banners for your website.

You can also make your own T-shirt from shirt2.gif or shirt3.gif with an inkjet printer and T-shirt transfer paper (it’s an open source project, after all), or buy a MozillaZine shirt.

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