OSNews

I have been using the RCs extensively as my primary browser. The latest RC3, at least on my Mac, really does seem to have some major improvement on page load speeds.

Same here. I did a pointless and useless benchmark [ http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2005/11/20/firefox-vs-safari/ ] that also showed that Firefox is making huge strides, and is now comparable to Safari in speed (on the Mac, obviously).

What I'd like to see is Camino vs. Safari, Camino is even faster than Firefox due to native interface, widgets and other things

Well, if there is enough demand for it, I might try to make that poor benchmark of mine slightly less crude by measuring multiple times, using more browsers, caching websites locally, etc.

The biggest hurdle is me only having one Mac.

A RAM faliure on my Mac just put out my Mac Mini yesterday; great timing :/

Video Slots says - Well done very nice blog, best regards from video slots
at http://www.streetslots.com

Have you installed filterset.g along with adblock? You need definitions such as these for Adblock to work.

Adblock Plus works ok with 1.5RC3

Just install 1.5RC3 and it will update itself to final version when the final version is released

Ok I just updated, and I'm less than impressed. Half my extensions aren't compatible, and for some reason I have no scroll bars (though I can scroll via mouse/keyboard). Lots of other stuff that's borked as well, but as this isn't a bug thread I'll leave it be and report everything over at mozilla (unless anyone really wants to know).

Back to 1.0.7 for me, and hopefully the RTM will be better.

With those errors, did you delete all the old settings, uninstall the old version (delete the empty directories) then do a clean reinstall of Firefox? you might find that there is something borken with the configuraiton files; as for the disappearing scroll bar, that is sometimes due to borken extensions.

As for incompatible extensions, it is'nt Firefox developers duty to perpetually provide backwards compatibility for those who create extensions, also, most extension people, I would say, are more concerned about getting theirs ready for their final release, not an RC every couple of days.

Nah, I don't have the patience/time for all that ;-). Besides, I don't want to lose my old settings, I want an upgrade.

Understood about the extension devs; I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes. So I'll just hang out and wait for the RTM. The good news is that going back to 1.0.7 was a snap...I was almost having a heart attack over here thinking I was gonna have to start from scratch.

Ah, its all good; I admit, I love to have the latest bleeding edge things; but in my old age (24 years), I'm limping along with zimmer frame, I have to take things a little easier these days :-)

I'm going to skip 1.5 and wait till 2.0, which apparently when it is going to be completely have the whole graphical user interface etc. based ontop of Cairo; which should make portabibility alot easier.

What I would like to see are nicer XUL widgets used; the XUL form widgets on MacOS X, quite frankly, are hideous to say the least - if native ones aren't available for some reason, atleast provide some nice sexy looking ones that are atleast appealing to the eye - yes, I know there is a seperate download, but it would be nice for it to become the default/defacto standard for shipping Firefox.

As for Thunderbird; I'm not happy with how things are; it seems to hang, especially newsgroups with lots of postings; the speed of opening up mail is less that desirable; have they ever thought of putting a embedded database for the backend; somelike Cloudscape, SQLite or Firebird, which would provide teh snappiness that plebs like me want, as well as full text searching (yeah!)

I lost my scroll bars along the way with one of the alpha releases. I believe it turned out to be a problem with my theme (Noia 2.0 extreme), not an extension.

That's the theme I'm using, so that must be it. The entry for Noia claims compat with 1.0 - 1.6a1; I'd say disappearing scroll bars is a pretty big incompatibility though. I'll let them know.

Jayson, I just updated my wife's PC to 1.5RC3 - scroll bar disappeared, then updated Noia to 2.991 and scroll bar is back.

I using that same theme and I haven't got any problems(Installed clean after installing 1.5)

Speaking about Thunderbird, I had similar problem when transfering user mail from Windows to Fedora. The problem was the way the path is done on Windows/Fedora Thunder so I had to manually edit path in profile.ini. Make sure to not transfer chrome directory as it corrupt the whole XUL interface.

Firefox 1.5 RC3 is nice as web developers tool. I recently installed Foxpose which is the Expose version of Firefox.

KDE uses alot of shared libraries, resulting in the need not to load seperate libraries for each application loaded - hence teh snappiness (tm). Firefox, however, heavily relies on its own set of libraries, coupled with GTK - assuming that you aren't using Qt.

Its basically a weigh up between - teh snappy (tm) or teh portaibility (tm); I'm sure when the coders were designing Firefox they concluded that processor speed could always account for the extra overhead, but the extra work required to port things vs. the possible speedup making it more native couldn't be justified given the current level of resources within the Mozilla Inc.

"the possible speedup making it more native couldn't be justified"

Firefox 1.5RC3 is more native on Linux just more native on a GTK2 and GNOME. It now uses the GTK file dialog and ot seems to have overall specifically speeded up. It feels to be the natural native Browser on my desktop, more so than Epiphany. I only wish OOo2 would look as integrated on my GNOME desktop (get the fscking fonts right) and feel as fast and responsive.

The point you make about needing to load extra libraries on top of the KDE ones suggests forrestm might find Firefox running a lot faster if he upgraded the RAM in his machine from 128 MB.

I too only have 128 MB RAM (I always seem to put of upgrading it) on my 700MHz box and as I said RC3 seems to be the fastest Firefox yet, but I guess it is in part because its pretty much totally a GTK2 app running under GNOME.

Edited 2005-11-21 05:16

The one thing I always suggest people to do, if they have a desktop is to upgrade the memory to the max that can be supported - you'll find that the performance boost will be noticable - and the fact that memory is so cheap these days, so why not?

As for Firefox and nativeness; with the move to Cairo, the speed should improve alot; as for GNOME and Firefox nativeness, I really can't speak as I have only used Firefox on Linux a few times - most of the time I used to use Konqueror :-)

Regards to OpenOffice.org 2.0 - its not too bad; I've seen the SuSE KDE integrated version, and it is pretty damn good - what I would like to see, however, is for SUN to put some more effort into getting Groupware completed for OpenOffice.org 2.0 so that we have complete office suite based off the same base; I'd also like to see OpenOffice.org move a single backend like Cairo so that rather than the UI having to be ported to differing platforms, it'll just be a matter of porting Cairo to it - which would make a native MacOS X version achievable in a short space of time.