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Firefox 1.5 Released

Little things I've noticed

It's nice so far, I like the improvements.

It's good that they've fixed the scrolling issue. On my iBook with 1.0.7 scrolling up and down through a page would work but going side to side would go back and forth. I got used to it but I always wanted to be able to scroll side to side. Glad to see they fixed this.

Unfortunately javascript still doesn't work. I've heard this is a security issue and that is why they don't support it as well but it kind of sucks to have to have IE on my new laptop just so I can test my code for school. Oh well.

It's definitely nice and I can't wait to find out other things about it.
 
jrbsman said:
It's good that they've fixed the scrolling issue. On my iBook with 1.0.7 scrolling up and down through a page would work but going side to side would go back and forth. I got used to it but I always wanted to be able to scroll side to side. Glad to see they fixed this.
Click to expand...

Yes, I had that same issue in 1.0.7 with my Mighty Mouse. That was fixed in RC3. I'm really glad they fixed it. Such an awesome browser. I love it.
 
The download is on the main Firefox page now. I'm giving this a try. Safari has been acting wierd for me a few too many times.
 
Nermal said:
It turns out that it's identical to RC3. They obviously found nothing wrong with it :)

Edit: Mitthrawnuruodo says that the final version is a bit smaller than RC3. Maybe only the Windows versions are identical.
Click to expand...

If that's the case, I'm surprised that the page back image buffer bug is gone. I think they did something with that between RC3 and the production version. It seems slighty slower paging back but always seems to have the correct content. That's a winner!

Now, on to Thunderbird version 1.5.
 
bousozoku said:
I think they did something with that between RC3 and the production version.
Click to expand...

With the Windows version, RC3 and Final both had the same filesize and MD5 sum.

Edit: I've just compared the MD5 sums of the Mac versions of RC3 and Final, and they're identical. Weird.
 
I used FireFox back in my Windows days. I tried out FireFox on the Mac. I found it too slow to open the program and the text didn't render to what I liked. I just tried out FireFox 1.5 and Safari 2.0 had me back in 5 minutes. I even prefer the keyboard commands in FireFox over Safari. I've just grown to love how Safari renders pages and the RSS feed. My widgets take care of most of what FireFox has to offer through extensions.

Well I tried it out again.. :(
 
Nermal said:
It turns out that it's identical to RC3. They obviously found nothing wrong with it :)

Edit: Mitthrawnuruodo says that the final version is a bit smaller than RC3. Maybe only the Windows versions are identical.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm not so sure, any more... to put it mildly... :eek:

When I copied over the final version from the dmg it said it was 27 and something MB. That was noticeably smaller than my old Firefox.app which weighed in at just over 30 MB (originally RC1, updated via RC2 to RC3 with Firefox' own updater.app). So far, so good...

But now, after reinstalling some languages for SpellBound (which were, at the time, mysteriously disappeared) Firefox.app takes up 32.4 MB. I found that the dictionary files were put into Contents/MacOS/components/myspell inside the Firefox.app. So my initial report that the final was smaller than RC3, is almost certainly wrong and the difference is probably just the dictionaries of the 3 languages I had installed under RC3 (I now have 4, which is why it's even larger...) and maybe some other extensions...

Edit:
Nermal said:
With the Windows version, RC3 and Final both had the same filesize and MD5 sum.

Edit: I've just compared the MD5 sums of the Mac versions of RC3 and Final, and they're identical. Weird.
Click to expand...
Not so weird, at all... You were right all along... ;)

Edit2: Which again more than explains why Firefox' own updater was quite sure I didn't need any updates... :D
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
Firefox makes a copy of the bookmarks file every time the program is started (plus one copy a day into the bookmarksbackup folder). Bloody annoying. :mad: Anyone else has this problem?
Click to expand...

I was actually very thankful for this. When I first started using RC3, something went titsup, and my bookmarks file (200KB) disappeared, including a bunch of important and obscure bookmarks that I'd just added a few days ago.

After a few days of frustration, I thought to do a search in Finder for 'bookmarks' and lo and behold, I was able to grab a backup bookmark file from the day before the mixup happened.

RedTomato <--Happy days were here again...
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
Firefox makes a copy of the bookmarks file every time the program is started (plus one copy a day into the bookmarksbackup folder). Bloody annoying. :mad: Anyone else has this problem? (And, yes, I've ditched pref files, even my whole profiles folder and redownloaded Firefox...)
Click to expand...

Yes, I found this too. WTF? Though I noticed that they dated from before the newest installation. Is this something peculiar to FF?

It also messed up my search engines and for some reason when I installed new ones, they were installed under the used profile rather than in the 'package contents' area.

YOJ
 
Eidorian said:
...
Well I tried it out again.. :(
Click to expand...

That's better than the Mac-o-lytes. Day-in, day-out, I like Firefox better than anything else, including Safari and Camino.
 
I use Firefox at school, and I love it. I will certainly use it when I get my Powerbook (whenever that will be). I love the tabs that don't slow anything down. I am so used to that from Mozilla that I would miss it with using anything else on a Mac. Of course my old macs only have IE because I never bothered to get anything else, but they are so slow they don't go on the web very often anyhow.
 
RedTomato said:
I was actually very thankful for this. When I first started using RC3, something went titsup, and my bookmarks file (200KB) disappeared, including a bunch of important and obscure bookmarks that I'd just added a few days ago.

After a few days of frustration, I thought to do a search in Finder for 'bookmarks' and lo and behold, I was able to grab a backup bookmark file from the day before the mixup happened.
Click to expand...
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the bookmarks.bak file, not really the daily once in the bookmarksbackup folder, either. I understand, and can maybe even appreciate those, but why, oh why, make yet other duplicates? And it's not few, some times I have trashed 20 or 30 at the time... one for every time I've started FF since I last trashed all those extra bookmarks files... that's just too much... :(

I hope it was an RC-thing and that it slows down, at least, now with the final version... ;)
 
Marky_Mark said:
I'm not trying to be contentious or inflamatory here, but I'm genuinely interested to understand what the differences are that make Firefox better than Safari. I'm a recent switcher and pretty ignorant of the finer details, but so far, Safari has been fine, except for the slight delay in loading pages. It handles all the graphics ok, all the plugins seem to function correctly, and the interface is pretty nice after IE on XP. Is there a compelling reason to go FF instead?

Thanks for your help! :)
Click to expand...

FF currently has the best rendering engine (Gecko) around. For the end
user, this means that when opening a webpage, it is displayed (rendered)
much more faster than other browsers.
As well, the extension mechanism in FF is awesome. The Adblock extension
OWNS. If you install Adblock along with a good list (to block), you will
rarely encounter any kind of distracting Ad while surfing the web. Yeah, FF
is a slick piece of software.
 
Compile 'em all said:
FF currently has the best rendering engine (Gecko) around. For the end
user, this means that when opening a webpage, it is displayed (rendered)
much more faster than other browsers.
As well, the extension mechanism in FF is awesome. The Adblock extension
OWNS. If you install Adblock along with a good list (to block), you will
rarely encounter any kind of distracting Ad while surfing the web. Yeah, FF
is a slick piece of software.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback - I did download Firefox last night and use it for a while, but got frustrated that I couldn't import my Safari bookmarks into FF easily, the pages seemed to take just as long to load as they did in Safari, and using the double-finger scroll on my iBook kept taking me back and forth through the history if I didn't concentrate on staying dead vertical in my actions. In the end I got a bit tee'd off and went back to using Safari.
:(

I will give it a better run over the weekend, but I guess it's down to personal preferences at the end of the day. I'm actually quite happy with Safari right now and you do have to wonder if life's too short to worry about this sort of thing! :eek:

Thanks again for your help!
 
I just upgraded to 1.5 and am, in my manner of expecting nothing, quite impressed.

In particular there were two minor, but sufficiently persistent to be very bothersome, issues with Firefox 1.0.x I experienced.

First of all, command clicking or just clicking for too long on the background of a page brought up a menu. A menu too stubborn to go away by clicking on the background again. Time after time, I would have to select an inoffensive option (select all, for instance) just to get the menu to disappear

With 1.5? Menu appears, click on background, menu disappears. Beautiful!

My second issue involved pop-up ads, which are annoying enough in and of themselves. In this case though, certain pop up ads would make the main Firefox window "freeze." I would have to close all the pop-ups to even be able to do anything with the browser. ANNOYING!

With 1.5? Pop-ups are back to their familiar level of aggravation.

My only hope in the future is a good, in-browser PDF reader for Firefox. All the current solutions I've found just don't cut it, turning me back to Safari each time.
 
chucknorris said:
My only hope in the future is a good, in-browser PDF reader for Firefox. All the current solutions I've found just don't cut it, turning me back to Safari each time.
Click to expand...
There's an extention called PDF Download, which claims to give you more options when it comes to PDFs... :)

Edit: That didn't work exactly as I hoped... :eek: on to look for a PDF plugin... :)
 
Marky_Mark said:
... using the double-finger scroll on my iBook kept taking me back and forth through the history if I didn't concentrate on staying dead vertical in my actions...
Click to expand...

Visit this site and go about to the middle of the page to the section titled "Scrolling seems to be a little jumpy sometimes, what's up with that?" It tells you how to fix it from going back and forward through your history. It shouldn't matter whether you're using iScroll2 or not. I had this same problem, but this fix worked perfectly so give it a try. As for having issues getting Safari bookmarks over shouldn't be any trouble, give the gelp file a read if you can't get it to work.

Also one of the things I love about FF are the extensions especially Adblock. I also like Greasemonkey so I can take full control of the web, hehe :)
 
jrbsman said:
Unfortunately javascript still doesn't work. I've heard this is a security issue and that is why they don't support it as well but it kind of sucks to have to have IE on my new laptop just so I can test my code for school. Oh well.
Click to expand...

What type of javascript isn't working for you? I use javascript all the time on my sites and have never found it not to work. If you have any examples I might be able to tell you why they aren't working. Also you may want to check the "Content" portion of FF's preferences and look at the advanced javascript options to see if it set to block some javascript techniques you're using.
 
trainguy77 said:
This is what i use its great!
http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/

It works fine of firefox. It gives me all the control i need!:)

EDIT: it is free for personal and educational use only.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that worked great (also along with the above mentioned PDF Download extention).

I saw it, but was scared off by the $69 price tag. But when you mentioned that it was free for private/edu users I gave it a shot... :)
 
Marky_Mark said:
the double-finger scroll on my iBook kept taking me back and forth through the history if I didn't concentrate on staying dead vertical in my actions. In the end I got a bit tee'd off and went back to using Safari.
Click to expand...


Same here. I would be trying to scroll down on my touchpad and it would jump back 6 pages. if 1.5 solves that I'm hooked. My favorite part is that it warns you when you're about to close a window with multiple tabs. I don't know how many times I've closed about 6 tabs when I meant to only close a single one in safari.
 
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