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.
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.