“Firefox 1.5 is finally out the door, and Thunderbird 1.5 won’t be far behind. The new releases sport some interesting new features, including faster page navigation, redesigned preferences dialogs, a new update system, and much more. Let’s take a look at what the Mozilla Foundation has been up in the year since the first major release of Firefox.”
…and it still leaks memory like a New Orleans levy.
Overall, so much hype for a very underwhelming release.
There is an updated adblock extension on the mozilla extensions site.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=10&application…
The overhyping would be on your end. Mozilla never claimed to fix the memory leaks, though they have closed a significant number of them, especially those related to closed tabs not releasing their memory.
Use the config.trim-on-minimize tweak, and minimize your Firefox every half-hour or so. Problem solved.
It is pathetic to need to perform such regular activity to keep the application in tip-top shape.
Yes definitely. Who can possibly remember to minimize it every 30 min. Not only is it tedius, it is simply rediculous.
Well I don’t see any adds on this site, so it must be working here 🙂
Also, this is a point release and it seems to be mostly bug fixes and little tweaks here and there. Just like I like it ! Leave the big changes and the bugs they always cause for version 2.
As an aside I love updating in OsX : drag old firefox to trashcan, drag new firefox to Applications folder, done !
You don’t even need to drag the old application to the Trash … just drag the new one on top of it. It’ll ask you if you want it replaced. 😛
Good point about native 64 bit. From talking to people and reading off the web, there are a lot of folks out there who are trying Linux because of the 64 bit kernel. It would be nice to start see in applications support it, especially in two major user applications such as a browser and mail client. It would make them faster and have another edge over you know who.
Other then that I really like Firefox and Thunderbird and looking forward to the new versions (been using them since they came out), especially tabs dragging. It’s been long time coming. I like also the fact the these two have helped me introduce people to Linux since these are the two items were the one of the most people were worried about. It made for an easier migration. It would be nice to see IDENTICAL platform features as well.
I’ve already given up on the Mac version after it kept spontaneously reloading pages while I was composing blog entries in them, resulting in all my data being lost. I don’t know if the same happens with the other versions, but anyone who needs to use the browser for this purpose on the Mac should get Camino instead.
Loads Significantly Faster. I’m glad with the update.
Firefox 1.5 seems a tad faster both on Windows and Mac OS X so far here. There isn’t nothing amazing about the release, but I guess this is to be expected since it is only a point release. It is definitely worth the update though.
Somebody knows / had a link on how to compile FF 1.5 in other language than english … I know I must write:
./configure –enable-ui-local=fr-FR but compilation fails claiming there’s no fr-FR.jar around …
The version feels much faster. The SVG stuff is cool, but so far the adobe plugin workded better as it made it possible to zoom in the in the image.
It would also have been really nice if they had included XForms in the default install, and not left that to plugin developers. This is a feature that really simplyfies development of application like web pages. Having a feature like that installed by default would have made firefox a winner for intranet use.
Whith 64 bit browser you can’t see flash AFAIK, because flash is a 32 bit application. I think that you could use 64 bit firefox 1.0.7 at least in Gentoo.
Here’s what I found:
Good
——-
* Renders pages faster
* Loads faster
Bad
—–
* Still seeing pop-ups
* Breaks pages or fails to render them properly (americanexpress.com for example), but worked fine under Firefox 1.0.7.
* Update feature is buggy. I tried to update an extension, it told me to restart, after restart I had to go through the process all over again, and again, etc… finally after 5 times it said my extension was installed but incompatible (huh?)
I still prefer 1.0.7
I think it’s more like AM updated there site since 1.07
mozilla renders correctly.
Create a new profile…
There were som major under the hood changes that can cause problems for older profiles.
Most of the people that I see complaining about this kind of thing haven’t created a new profile since 0.9…
Okay I’ll try that!
When will Thunderbird have HTTP option and not just POP. With Outlook 2003 I can check my MSN, Gmail and Hotmail accounts that yes I use all the time with no problems. I like thunderbird and used it for Gmail for awhile but thunderbird still does not have all the features I need.
Not saying it should be in this release, but that would be cool if it was on the “to do” list. That webmail extension plain sux for yahoo and hotmail.
Give me a break…
MSN and Hotmail are Microsoft products, so *of course* the proprietary protocols get full support in a Microsoft EMail client.
GMail provides POP access, and works just fine in TBird, thank you very much.
And with the Webmail Extension, you *can* access Hotmail, Yahoo etc webmail accounts, though it isn’t perfect…
“With Christmas shopping season coming up, for example, it may be a good idea to erase browser history and cache to keep the rest of the family from knowing what you’ve ordered for them online”
Riiight. Christmas shopping. That’s why everyone I know clears their history and cache. Wouldn’t want Wife to know what we are shopping, right?
somehow i stopped using that firefox thingy since opera is free without banners.
although firefox would be second choice and recommended for customers and other noobs.
I tried Opera after they removed the ads, but I found that if I used the back button to go back in my browsing history about 10-12 pages, it would consistently crash. Anybody else see something like this?
I have been happy with Firefox, so I saw no need to investigate further, I just dumped Opera and kept FF.
Except Opera has problems of it’s own including rendering some pages.
In previous versions of Firefox the “Javascript Console” (found under the “Tools” menu) was used to display Javascript errors. In FF 1.5 more seems to be going on in there, including warnings about deprecated CSS. I don’t understand why non-JS errors are reported there. The extra noise has made debugging JS even more tedious than it was before. Why does FF 1.5 have this new behavior?
Advertisments are what’s keeping the diversity of free content on the net, if ads are not intrusive(ie. pop up or flashing crap) then why try to block?
Support the sites you enjoy(like this one) and live with the sponsorship and what the hell, click some once in a while!
Tarring all ads as something to be blocked is short sighted imho, keep the net free by supporting advertiser support!
dude, I think you need to go get a colonic because there ain’t something right with you.
Tarring all ads as something to be blocked is short sighted imho, keep the net free by supporting advertiser support!
First of all, ‘free’ is a misnomer. If I have to put up with ads to view the content, then the content isn’t free – it’s ad-supported. Honestly, I’d rather pay money (say a few cents a month) to access my favorite sites than put up with the ads. For the other 99.8% of sites out there, if they went away tomorrow, I wouldn’t care.
And honestly, I dind’t start blocking ads until the greedy bastards started launching 2-3 popups for page, and placed ads on web pages that made noise, followed my mouse around, and blocked the content. Hello nimrods – if something doesn’t work (eg – banners), don’t try to force it down people’s throats. The advertising industry has only themselves to blame.
And honestly, I dind’t start blocking ads until the greedy bastards started launching 2-3 popups for page, and placed ads on web pages that made noise, followed my mouse around, and blocked the content. Hello nimrods – if something doesn’t work (eg – banners), don’t try to force it down people’s throats. The advertising industry has only themselves to blame.
Same here.
There are some sites that I don’t block adds on intentionally. Others are abusive…so they get blocked.
All popups, though, get blocked. If I have to enable popups on a per-site basis for non-add content, good. If the site goes out of the way to force a popup, I consider blocking all adds on the site.
If the marketing were reasonable and focused on what I actually was interested in, that would be different. Google, for example, does things properly in this respect; low key text set aside from content.
The worst sites put links in documents based on the word used that point to vaugely appropriate adds. If it’s not a valid reference in the document, I don’t want to see it folks! Give me something I can use that isn’t mixed in with the site’s content.
Using the web on dial-up without:
*Adblock for Firefox with FilterSet.G http://www.pierceive.com
or
*Opera’s very easy (and standard) on-the-fly toggling of images
and
*Opera’s Tools > Quick Preferences disabling of plug-ins (F12 key) – so flash (and so on) doesn’t load
Without them, it’s just torture. Thank god we have these 2 great browsers that make it easy.
I like firefox, best damn browser out there but its annoying when every release breaks extensions and themes.
>I like firefox, best damn browser out there but its annoying when every release breaks extensions and themes<
that’s the point of this release, to make Firefox more modular where it can be updated instead of upgraded.
If it is in fact the ‘point of this release’…then this release is a failure.
How so? Making the changes needed *will* break the current extensions. You can’t say that it was a failure a day or two into it’s life. You can only judge that after a few months when there’s been many releases, and things still break every time. However, I have no problems with breaking extensions, so long as they are squishing bugs, and making a better browser. Evetually, things won’t break because they’re working fine, and don’t need any changes. It’s kinda how software works.
I’ve spent an hour trying to get adblock working since installing 1.5.
I’m able to get adblock to work on a win2k/xp administrator account by reinstalling.
But I cannot get it to install or work on my usual ‘user’ account which I use to surf the web >:|
Really dissapointing to have to go through crap like this >:|
Anybody else experiencing this? I’ll have to roll back a version…
Adblock Plus and FilterSet.G will solve your problem
1.5 works well with me, in fact it’s faster than my IE 6 when it comes to rendering pages. Secondly all the pages that I go to are rendered correctly. When launching the browser for the first time though, IE6 is faster.
When launching the browser for the first time though, IE6 is faster.
I suspect IE has had a head start in loading courtesy of its Windows integration.
Anyone wanting to access GMail, hotmail, etc from thunderbird can try installing Freepops: http://www.freepops.org/en/
Great program that checks HTTP mail through pop3