Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is now available for download. Also known as the 1.8 Beta 5 milestone, this is the last beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers. The final release of Firefox 1.5, which will be widely promoted to end-users, is scheduled for later this year.
Running beautifully here, on both Windows and Linux. I had a few crashes with beta 1, but it was still very usable and enjoyable. I reckon this beauty is nearly cooked now, don’t know why the final version is taking so long!
I think they’re doing the finishing touches before they do a RC and then God willing, it will go gold. I am not sure if a RC is planned, but they should issue it anyway just in case.
Cycloneous The Warrior
As allway’s work’s 100% on Mac OSX.
Awesome stuff. It seems like a lot less of those, “window just disappears” crashes happen since beta 1!
Congrats to the Mozilla devs.
I want to replace my Operating System with firefox. How do you bootstrap it? Is it as secure as running windows + IE?
Firefox is _not_, I repeat, NOT an operating system. It is a web browser.
An operating system is a program that manages other programs and services. Firefox only browses the web.
If you want to replace your operating system, looking into thinks like “Linux”, “Mac OSX”, etc.
Firefox only aims to replace the “IE” in “windows + IE”
lol.. i’m sure he was kidding…
An operating system is a program that manages other programs and services.
Ummm…and your saying that Firefox doesn’t want to do this?
– Jesse McNelis
> If you want to replace your operating system, looking into thinks like “Linux”, “Mac OSX”, etc.
Or emacs!
>> If you want to replace your operating system, looking into thinks like “Linux”, “Mac OSX”, etc.
>Or emacs!
Now _that_ is funny!
>>> If you want to replace your operating system, looking into thinks like “Linux”, “Mac OSX”, etc.
>>Or emacs!
>Now _that_ is funny!
Err, you do know there is such a thing as EmacsOS, right?
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/vpc/images/emacsos.gif
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/vpc/misc.html (scroll down)
Of course, it was mainly a prank..
Just trying out Firefox 1.5 Beta 2. It seem not much different than Beta 1 but it is blazing fast! They’ve done an excellent job.
It starts faster (a second faster than 1.5b1 on my computer) and some pages are rendered better.
Can’t wait for 1.5 final
I hope they’re working on the memory leaks. If I keep the browser open, after a few days the memory usage goes up to around 200MB and I have to restart the browser.
The workaround at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Talk:Memory_Leak (setting “browser.cache.memory.capacity”) doesn’t seem to work.
You must browse more than I do because for me it’s usually not noticeable until after a couple weeks
, but this has been a thorn in my side too ever since I switched (first to Moz then to FF). And IMO this is a fairly significant usability issue. The typical user just sees FF “slow down”, and with the number of machines that only have 128MB or 256MB it doesn’t take much of a leak to impact performance significantly.
an operating system is the BASE program that everything else runs on top of. firefox just runs the web, not everything on your computer, therefore its NOT an os. lol.
A couple of hours and it eats up 50~90 MB of my memory! There MUST be a problem, would any of you plz e-mail me which extensions you use?
Thx in advance
rEzA
linumax_AT_gmail_DOT_com
download fast defrag
I tried out 1.5 and besides a few minor improvements, it is very similar to 1.0. This is not necessarily a bad thing since Firefox 1.0 is good enough to be my primary browser. But it seems like 1.5 is more like 1.1 than 1.5 to me. I guess it’s hard to improve an already excellent product.
Anyways, when 1.5 comes out, I will be sure to migrate to it. But I can wait and am perfectly happy with Firefox at the momment.
Opera users is growing very fast! We can say, bye bye firefox… Users wants copyright applications, they don’t want opensource software!
And wait for IE in longhorn…
The problem with browsers has security and tab browsing, now IE and Opera have both, but firefox don’t have the most important one, the security!
Can’t wait to play with internet explorer in longhorn!
As advised on http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7501, Beta 1 users who are willing to help testing the new update system must wait a couple of days before they can upgrade their Beta 1 into Beta 2 using the integrated Firefox Update.
We have also BeOS build with really fantastically improved scrolling and justified text rendering, waiting for some good soul to upload it to contrib folder.
Main benefir with those improvements is fact that for BeOS users OsNews.com don’t look and feel anymore like site with most lame design in the world:)
Whoever thinks firefox is not an OS must be out of HER mind!
*LOL*
What I find interesting, for windows users, is SVG rendering changes. Previous revisions used GDI+ graphics library, but now beta2 uses opensource Cairo library. They say its easier to manager multiple platforms with unified Cairo package.
But it will damage SVG rendering speed a bit in Windows boxes for sure.
Speed tradeoffs are a short-term issue. Long-term, the Cairo library will surpass the GDI+
“Speed tradeoffs are a short-term issue. Long-term, the Cairo library will surpass the GDI+”
What makes Cairo surpass GDI+ in a (far) future?
[quote] But it will damage SVG rendering speed a bit in Windows boxes for sure.[/quote]
if cairo is slower than GDI+, god help us all..
I don’t see how they can call this the last beta when they still haven’t fixed bugs in print preview that’s been known for ages.
One of them being the inability to use the scroll wheel of a mouse, if you move the mouse pointer into an area of the paper that is not in a rectangle containing things that should be printed.
Print margin area is a perfect example of where the scroll wheel don’t work.
One thing that I haven’t noticed in earlier versions is that it takes several seconds to open the print preview at all.
Also a new bug is that Portrait and Landscape shows exactly the same layout, with the Scale setting having no effect at all on what you see in the print preview window.
That the viewport (or what you prefer to call it) is much larger than the window is, horizontally is an annoyance.
Another annoyance that’s been there for ages is triggered by the following;
1: Change Page Style from Basic Page Style to No Style
2: Do a Print Preview
3: Close Print Preview
4: The window is back to using Basic Page Style
I haven’t had time to test it enough to determine if it still loses focus in the address bar, while claiming it still have focus there. (Caret is blinking but you can’t do anything unless you explicity force focus back there with the mouse or other.
The same lost focus issue have been there in the window where you see the web pages as well.
I don’t see how they can call this the last beta when they still haven’t fixed bugs in print preview that’s been known for ages.
Probably because while these are annoyances, they aren’t important enough to block the entire release. Personally, I’m glad because I don’t want to wait extra weeks so they can fix a couple of bugs that don’t even affect me. Although these are minor enough they could be fixed in one of the release candidates.
Don’t get me wrong, all bugs are bad and should be fixed as soon as possible. It’s just that eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns. If MS or Linus tried to fix every single bug in their OS every time they released a new version the next versions would never come out.
Can someone informed tell me exactly why there was a need for a bloated menu? What was the problem with the “old” one (in 1.0x). It seems that you can do pretty much anything with 3 or less clicks in 1.0x but the new “improved” menu makes me click at least 3 or 4 times before getting to the setting I search for. Not even mentioning how many unused space is left in the settings menu…
Am I the only one who is having problems with plugins (quicktime, flash, acrobat, etc.)??