Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

By: Mr. Wilson on September 10, 2005
2 comments
The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 1.5 Beta 1. Give it a try, if you enjoy playing around with beta software (and are willing to put up with the risks). My immediate reactions:
  • 1.5 is much faster than the 1.0.x versions. Pages render more quickly and back/forward navigation is faster. I haven't seen any benchmarks yet, but my observations tell me there has been a dramatic improvement in the speed department
  • Most of my plugins don't work yet with 1.5. :-( I hope the various plugin developers get on the ball this weekend and release updated versions.
  • There are some bugs in the printing and print preview functions. Yes, that's bugs plural. I found three bugs just in normal use (one involving weird scroll wheel behavior in print preview, one involving the layout incorrectly refreshing when switching from portrait to landscape and back in print preview, and one involving magically disappearing content [!!!] in both print and print preview).
  • Another bug, or at least a poor user experience, appears on the extensions window -- the scrollbar disappears if the window is below a certain size.
  • The new error pages (rather than pop-up alerts) caught me off-guard. I suppose I like them; now the user doesn't have to click "OK" to dismiss error messages.
  • Tab re-ordering is cool, but I'm not sure I'm crazy about the implementation as it stands right now. It's not quite as slick as I had envisioned.
Overall I've been very pleased with the product, considering it's just a Beta 1. A lot of time and effort went into it. I look forward to the final, to be released in late October or early November.

Comments

See what your friends and neighbors have to say about this.

Steve
September 10, 2005 at 3:26AM

I’ll probably have to wait for the final release even though the back/forward navigation speed increase is tempting.  I have way too many plug-ins running to bet they’ll all work in the 1.5 beta.

Mr. Wilson
September 10, 2005 at 4:12AM

Yeah, the broken plugins are a bummer. The two biggest hits for me were Adblock and the Web Developer Toolbar. Both of those are really popular, though, so I don’t imagine there will be much downtime. Hopefully they’ll be fixed by the time I go back to work on Monday. In the mean time, I’m keeping 1.0.6 on my home machine. It’s too bad, though; the difference in rendering speed is really noticeable.

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