It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten how fun it is to upgrade my browser. Sure, we’ve had the security updates, but there’ve really been no new features for almost a year.
Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 changes all that with a slew of new bells and whistles, including a super-simple “Clear Private Data” dialog, better popup blocking, drag and drop re-orderable tabs, quicker back and forward navigation, and a shiny new automatic update system.
Additional updates include better support for CSS2 and CSS3, support for scalable vector graphics and JavaScript 1.6, and improved accessibility for screen readers. Especially spiffy are the pretty new error pages. No longer will modal message boxes alert you of broken pages and nonexistent domains.
I’m mildly dissappointed that several of my extensions haven’t yet been updated:
* ForecastFox
* HTML Validator (based on Tidy)
* Stop-or-Reload Button
* IE View
* ReloadEvery
* All-in-One Gestures
* BBCode
* Timestamp
* Web Developer
* Wikipedia
All-in-all, though, this is a great release. I can’t wait until it comes out of beta.
I’m sure they’ll update soon enough…
I downloaded my copy this morning and so far I’m quite happy with it. Still waiting on some particular Mac OS X interface improvements, but the browser itself is a work of art. I need to spend some time exploring the new features and really get familiar with it all. But yes, I agree that upgrades are always a lot of fun. Kinda like unwrapping presents at Christmas.
I’ve just installed Firefox 1.5 Beta, and I’m quite impressed with its features. I’ve noticed when you click tabs the tab opens really quickly. I love the new page that shows when a page can’t be found, I hated those boxes.
All that I want is the extensions to be updated for this version.
Oh, and for some reason, Adblock (an extension that removes specified banner ads and iframes) was blocking all instances of Flash. I disabled the extension, and now Flash movies work again. I hope they fix the problem soon.
Rainer: oh, that must have been why I had that, too.
IE View has, in fact, been updated. Unfortunately it took a few days for the overwhelmed updates.mozilla.org server to allow me to upload the new version. FYI, you can always check the IE View homepage (http://ieview.mozdev.org/) for the very latest version.
Sorry for the delay – and if you do have any problems, please let me know.
Paul Roub said:
bq. IE View has, in fact, been updated.
Paul, thanks for letting me know about the update. IE View is definitely one of the most useful extensions and it’s good to see that you’re on top of things.
As an aside, I hadn’t thought to try downloading my extensions directly from their homepages. I didn’t realize (though I should have figured) the update server was overwhelmed. I went searching and found that a couple more of my favorite extensions have also been updated. I’ve crossed them off the list above.
I have a version of ReloadEvery that works for me. I basically just updated it to work for the beta version. No problems yet. The author is not planning to update it for beta releases. If you would like to try my version, you can contact me at [email protected] or JPSchmigel on AIM.