Firefox 1.5 was released earlier today, but due to Mozilla moving from mozilla.org to mozilla.com the download link was slightly hidden. Thankfully Mozilla have corrected that in the last few hours (mostly), but I’ll put a link here anyway.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ [1]
When I started using it I noticed instantly that the menus have changed appearance slightly and now look similar to those seen in Open Office. The tabs are now sortable, RSS/Atom feed notification icon now appears in the address bar rather than the status bar, the options window has been reorganised to make it easier to use, and some dialog boxes have been improved. Another thing I had heard about and checked out for myself is the fact that a lot of the dialog box spawning errors (such as site not found) now bring up an error page, similar to the way Internet Explorer handles it. This is good in some ways and bad in others, but the page looks nice and friendly so overall I’ll say it’s good.
Here is an example of an error page generated when I deliberately misspelled the URL for this site. (Click to enlarge)
[2]
Other notable improvements include
- Faster “back” and “forward” browsing
- Improvements to the Gecko rendering engine, with support for new standars, and even better support for older ones
- Optionally automatic updates. Updates are also now “update size” rather than the old full reinstall system
- The ability to clear the private data (browsing history, cookies, saved passwords etc) with a “tools” menu entry or key combination (presumably with confirmation dialog box, I haven’t tried it yet).
Update: Just tried it out and it sure beats going through parts of the options window to find the data to clear!
- New levels of disabled person accessibility to the browser. Firefox 1.5 is the first browser to ever meet US government accessibility standards for people with physical impairments.
- And lots more…
If you haven’t done so already, I strongly suggest that you give Firefox a try, I use it and love it, and it happily and easily imports settings from other browsers.
That link again
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ [1]
Samuel
Comments Disabled To "Firefox 1.5 Is Out"
#1 Comment By Some Guy On December 1, 2005 @ 3:26 am
They’ve been working on that for a long time, as you might have read in [3].
It was in a few earlier builds of Gecko but disabled by default. Could be enabled through the about:config page – now it is enabled by default.
Basically the page is rendered and then the presentation layout is cached – instead of just the source and the images etc.
Overall the UI seems much faster too. Don’t like the new Options dialog though, but I’ll get used to it.
#2 Comment By Samuel On December 1, 2005 @ 3:34 am
I did notice that a hard refresh of the “Mozilla Start” page took about a quarter of the time it used to. I’ll take some time to get used to the new options dialog too, but it all looks pretty good.
I haven’t read Asa Dotzler’s blog, but I will check it out.