Zeo

The wait is over, Mozilla released Firefox 1.5 today.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.5:

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

mozilla.com

With bunch of masses update, dozens of enhancements which will draw many new users to the improved Web experience it affords, more natural looking GUI and also incompatible extensions.

This release offers improvements in a number of areas, including faster browsing, better caching and more protection against pop-ups and the ability to organise tabbed browsing windows. The interface looks the same and the buttons are placed in the same way as in the previous version, so if you expected some changes, you would be disappointed. The most significant changes occurred in Options menu; now, the available options are arranged horizontally, not vertically, giving it a much more organized look and the tabs to be drag & drop.

The new browser also comes with an automatic update mechanism that downloads and installs updates and patches. Mozilla kept its promise and the new browser has now a better updating system, which allows the updates to be more easily applied.

There wasn’t any difficulty installing 1.5, the usual problem are with some of the extensions which are incompatible with the 1.5 version; in order to proceed, few of incompatible extensions were disabled. Please take note, even though there is an automatic update I do believe that the updater only check mozilla.org tree when actually most of the latest extension updates available first at mozdev.org or the developer personal website.

Making sure your extension has the latest version

1. Go to browser menu bar>Tools>Extensions to open the extension popup window.
2. Click Find Updates button. As I said earlier, this only checks in Mozilla.org tree. If there’s no update please proceed to step 3.
3. Click on the extension name in the Extensions window.
4. Right click and Visit Home Page. A new tab or window will take you to the Author or developer homepage usually at mozdev.org.
5. Compare the version you install with the version in the developer homepage.

Despite of the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 release, they also unveiled the new Mozilla website today which appears to be simple look and feel design delivering a message, “The award-winning Web browser just got better. It’s free and easy to try. Join the millions of people worldwide enjoying a better Web experience” geared towards consumers in hopes of attracting new user replacing Mozilla.org for both Firefox and Thunderbird brand new home.

Don’t try it but use it!