mozilla

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 RC1

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Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 has come and gone without a word from me. To catch you up, all but two of my fifteen extensions are working now: ReloadEvery and Wikipedia. Someone on my earlier post mentioned they had a working copy of ReloadEvery, but I may just end up removing it from my extension list. I’ve survived without it for this long. Anyway, I didn’t start this post to talk about Beta 2.

I’m excited to announce that Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is available! If no glaring bugs are found in the release candidate, it should become the live release within a week or two.

I haven’t found anything really new in RC1. It’s pretty much just a cleaned up version of Betas 1 and 2. In case you didn’t read my last post, the new features include an improved options panel, faster back and forward navigation, a slick new auto-updater, shiny new error pages, a new “clear private data” dialog, and drag-n-drop browser tabs. I’m excited for this to be coming out of beta so I can recommend it to all my friends. It really is a marked improvement over the 1.0.x series.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

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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.

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Nudge, Nudge

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I’ve installed the excellent “Spread Firefox WordPress plugin”:http://www.martinet.nl/wp-site/spread-firefox-wordpress-plugin and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’ve used it to add a fairly unobtrusive bar across the top of my site (it only appears in Internet Explorer) to alert IE users to the inferiority of their browser. It shouldn’t get in anyone’s way, though I hope it encourages a few folks to switch.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2

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Firefox 1.0.2 was released about an hour ago. According to “Asa”:http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007795.html, it’s a “proactive update to fix a bug that makes users vulnerable to a buffer overflow in GIF image processing.”

It probably won’t show up on auto-update for a few days, so if you like being on the leading edge, you should download it from the web. Happy browsing!

Edit @ 4:30pm: A friend here at work noticed the automatic update icon on his Firefox toolbar just now. Looks like they are pushing it today afterall.

Tech Recap

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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and many important things have happened in the tech world.

First off, “Thunderbird 1.0”:http://www.getthunderbird.com has been released. I haven’t noticed much in the way of new features since 0.7, but it seems to be extremely stable and sports a stylish new default theme (although that may have debuted in version 0.9, which I somehow completely skipped over).

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Mozilla Firefox

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Mozilla Firefox 1.0 out of the box

After much anticipation, Mozilla Firefox was released today — no longer a “technology preview,” but a full-blown, stable release version. More amazing than that, for the first time I was able to run a flawless update using the new updater!

I couldn’t be more excited about this release. It’s great to be able to whole-heartedly recommend Firefox to friends without having to explain what a technology preview is and answer the inevitable question, “If it’s just a preview, does that mean it’s not stable?”. I’m confident this new release will kick the browser war up to a new level.

Have you rediscovered the web, yet? You have no more excuse. Do it today!

RC1

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Firefox is a step closer to coming out of beta. Version 1.0 RC1 was released this morning, but it’s not a regular update. If you’d like to test it out, see the “software update “:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/qa/softwareupdate.html page.

I’ll probably wait to install it tomorrow morning. I should have a little time then to write a review if I find any new features/bug fixes worth mentioning.

Two Words

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A friend of mine has been using Firefox for a few months now. Today he popped up on my instant messenger and asked me:

bq. Joey… in two words, what is the best thing about firefox? My friend is looking over my shoulder, and I’m not the biggest advocate… I’m not even sure why I use it, but I do.

The ensuing conversation was a lot of fun, and we both agreed that the “two word” format was effective and entertaining. He also asked that I post the list on my site as a ready reference.

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