Submitted by “The release of Firefox 1.5 is almost certain to drive adoption rates even higher. PCMag.com recently reviewed the new version, and found that the most noticeable improvement is the ability to reorder tabs via drag-and-drop. Navigation is significantly faster, as Mozilla has implemented ‘intelligent caching’ on the forward and back buttons. The final, gold-code release of Firefox 1.5 should arrive before the end of November.” UPDATE: One more review.
From personal use, I have to say that Firefox 1.5 does indeed seem to be pretty decent, and I really hope that it continues to drive adoption.
One thing that I do find rather interesting about it, is how the interface seems to have become more “Mac-like” in recent releases. In particular, the new Preferences window in 1.5.
One thing that I do find rather interesting about it, is how the interface seems to have become more “Mac-like” in recent releases. In particular, the new Preferences window in 1.5.
I believe the move was in line with the Gnome HIG guidelines, which favor top/horizontal sections over left-side/vertical aligned sections in the preferences everywhere.
With the latest versions of firefox I seem to have a lot of problems viewing flash content, now I’m force to use IE to view such sites (which I didn’t need to before), also after upgrading to Java 1.5.05 I’m having problems with applets, they crash very frequently its annoying, it may have to do with the Java upgrade , but it works without problems in IE also. I know Im not the only one with these problems so I hope they are addressed before 1.5 goes gold or else its thumbs down for this release.
Just don’t watch flash sites. One security problem less…
“Just don’t watch flash sites. One security problem less…”
Wow yes, I’m so stupid. I’ll just stop viewing flash and sites that use Java, you’re totally right, I guess we’re all better off that those 2 things don’t work. You rock, thanks for that enlightening, lucid and intelligent piece of advice.
actually i would say it is a excellent suggestion! Just say ‘no’!
I have been java and flash free for over a year now….
I had problems with adblock and newest flash but they were solved by installing adblock plus instead.
It’s the fault of Adblock. You have to uncheck Obj-Tags in the AdBlock preferences.
yes, i hate the new preferences window, although the win/lin versions always differed anyway, i must try the linux version later.
as far as java support not being so good, well i disable java anyway, applets are the spawn of satan.
i wonder if they’ve fixed the “open a link in a new tab and it often just times out without even putting the url in the bar so you can’t even refresh it” bug.
i’ve seen way too often this problem, firefox just times out (although the throbber keeps going, there is no network activity) and you end up with an untitled tab, most annoying when you’ve closed the parent tab.
i love firefox don’t get me wrong, but the changes from 1.0 to 1.5 are just not visible enough, i mean to the average user, it’s just drag’n’drop tabs which have been available as an extension for ages, and now that auto-update actually works, it annoys most of the users i know of so they turn it off anyway!
When that happens, you can usually hit “refresh” and it will actually refresh the correct site even though the URL isn’t in the bar. In my experience, anyway.
My favorite new feature of 1.5 is that websites which don’t load give an error page, with a “try again” button instead of a stupid popup window demanding your attention. Makes more sense with tabbed browsing.
That said, I just tried and no – if you hit stop before a slow page has loaded/timed out, there is no refresh option.
Edited 2005-11-23 20:21
oh the error page is useful then, because contrary to the previous post, if you get the untitled page with no url, refresh doesn’t work. that said, i never saw a popup either.
one thing i did notice with rc3/win was that it’s a lot slower to load.
i think they’ve already fixed the memory leaks.
a problem i have with 1.0.7/lin is that it doesn’t seem to multitask too well – for instance, load a lot of tabs and they seem to render one tab at a time and sometimes one tab can hang the whole browser for a while.
the decent back button caching sounds good – nothing more frustrating (on dialup) than going back a page and having the whole thing fetched again even though you have a 50mb cache configured!
the decent back button caching sounds good – nothing more frustrating (on dialup) than going back a page and having the whole thing fetched again even though you have a 50mb cache configured!
The whole thing wasn’t fetched again, just rerendered from cache. The new back/forward cache caches the DOM state and etc on top of that.
What you propose is exactly what drives bloatware. Firefox I love you just the way you are!
Flock. It’s based on Mozilla, and it’s pretty solid. Pages and flash that don’t work in FireFox work well in Flock…pretty cool…
I just installed it last night. It renders noticeably faster on my machine
But other than that, not many differences that I will be using. Anyone know if error pages are now included, so you don’t get a dialog box on a “page not found” error, but rather a 404 error webpage.
On Firefox 1.0, you just have to add to user.js:
//Display an error page instead of the annoying dialog box.
user_pref(“browser.xul.error_pages.enabled”, true);
I don’t know about 1.5.
The real problems is when downloading files.
If you see, the Pause function is only a joke. Press that Pause, Unpause then.. and you will notice that the download wasnt paused before, but continued anyway!
And You cant Pause, Close Firefox, Reopen Firefox and continue downloading, YET!
This is a really stupid issue in a so much hyped browser.
Does it honor gnome sessions so that you can log out and return to the pages you had open?
Does it resore pages when and if it crashes?
Can you select application to handle mime types without having to browse your filesystem?
The version I last tried crashed when closing a window or tab with an embedded video. Anyone know more of this problem (is it fixed)?
The above questions my seem somewhat trollish, but really I’m curious. If the answer is yes to all the above questions I’d probably go back to firefox.
Edited 2005-11-23 21:02
“If the answer is yes to all the above questions I’d probably go back to firefox. ”
So what else do you use then? Please don’t say Konqueror or Galeon and then have the cheek to slag-off Firefox! 😉
Epiphany actually. It’s not perfect but it works.
The SessionSaver extension saves the pages you have open, so that would solve points 1 and 2.
It won’t solve GNOME part. GNOME won’t put Firefox ins session, so next time you’ll not get FF running after login. When you run it manually, you will get your tab-session. 🙂
Try to set things right : Firefox does not put itself in session.
Galeon does, and does everything else the GP asked of Firefox. Actually, Galeon even does drag and drop reordering of tabs since a very long time.
That’s why I always say Firefox is hell compared to Galeon (and at a lesser extent, to Epiphany) in Gnome (or even in KDE).
I’ll try 1.5 when it’s out, but I don’t expect much, especially when I see the new functionalities.
It does not solve point 1, as it won’t place you on the right virtual desktop, with the right size.
I hate it if a web page has any java applets especially because the java vm consumes a lot of memory.
With Firefox this issue is even worse because it doesn’t unload the java vm when it is not used. Opera and Konqueror does unload it, why not Firefox? Konq even let’s you choose the timeout for this!
BTW, I just love Konqueror. Ever since I installed KDE I’ve not used Firefox at all. I think Fx is overhyped in every way. Even Opera beats it in many ways.
The PCMag article says that updates will be less than 500kB, which is still a lot for users on modems or slow links. Mozilla should use edelta ( http://www.diku.dk/~jacobg/edelta ) or similar executable compression technology to reduce that by a factor of 10 or more. (Just plugging my own code here ;-))
~500KiB a fat update ? Man, get with the times. It’s _not_. Not even for all the 56K people out there. Why complicate matters more, when incremental patch-updating already is a complex problem to solve elegantly on all platforms ?
What it needs to REALLY get wide spread adoption rate, is a centralized console, from which to be able to deploy it over a netowork of 100 PCs. And also so be able to update it, etc etc.
On a 56K modem, it takes about 90 seconds of your full bandwidth to get a 500kB update, this to me is a very long time which the user has to wait and pay for. By delta-compressing updates (which is dead-easy once you have the right tools for it) you improve end-user experience, speed (perhaps critical) patch deployment, and reduce server load.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
90 seconds is a long time? Seriously, if 90 seconds is a long time, you really shouldn’t be using the internet anyways. I can’t even understand why Firefox would be on your computer or any other type of web browser.