I see Mozilla have released Firefox 1.5 Beta 1.
According to the Release Notes here’s what’s new in this release:
- 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.
- List of notable bug fixes since Deer Park Alpha 2
What’s cool in this release is the drag and drop re-ordering for tabs – not nearly as important as the security fixes, or the Clear Private Data feature – but it is something I have wanted in a browser for a long time.
Also, on the Mac side of things – there is better support for OS X and you can now minimise your windows complete with Genie effect, using CMD-M!
The downside is that most of my favourite extensions were disabled after the install as they were incompatible with 1.5 – with the notable exception of my favourite extension Adblock – had Adblock been disabled, I’d have gone back to 1.06.
Hat tip to Michael – on whose blog I saw mention of this release first.
Comments
3 responses to “Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 released”
I don’t like the way when you click in the menu bar it doesn’t highlight the entire URL like it did before.
I hadn’t spotted that change in behaviour Twenty, tbh.
I think I prefer it though – when I click in the menu bar, I’m more often than not editing the uri rather than changing it completely so now I don’t have to de-select the entire uri to select the bit I want to edit.
[…] I see Mozilla have released RC2 of Firefox 1.5. RC2 means release candidate 2 – in other words this is not a completed product, it is released as a beta. The release notes for Firefox 1.5 note that RC2 gives several fixes to automated update system over RC1. While RC1 has lots of updates over Firefox 1.0 as you’d expect, as noted here previously. […]