The new diff panel in 1.9.x no longer indicates when a file has changed permissions. Prior to 1.9 the old and new permissions were displayed, even when the file contents were otherwise unchanged. I am attaching screen shots of the diff view of such a file in both 1.8.1 and 1.9.2 to illustrate the difference.

(The context is that I use Microsoft's git-tf utility to access a code base stored on a TFS server which does not retain Unix file permissions, so when I pull a script file it often has its execute permission bit stripped in the commit but has no other changes.)