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Firefox 1.0 Released
New Here writes "November 9 has arrived and with it comes Firefox 1.0. According to its home page, Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely, and more efficiently than with any other browser. I'm New Here, but this Firefox does sound very promising! Firefox 1.0 is available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac from the mozilla.org ftp server."
Or at least I hope so, even if IE fights back a tiny ammount we'll see a huge lot of improvements in the web generally, IE is so often the 'lowest common denominator' when it comes to designing for the web.
But for usability and speed of use I'd go with Firefox any day.
Hmmm.. a couple of theories..
;)
8 million firefox users (as of spreadfirefox.com) all hitting mozilla.org as their default start page must generate quite a lot of traffic, and the start page wasn't that useful other than telling you what you just downloaded and installed.
The other theory is that Google donated quite a bit, but I prefer the first
Unfortunately Firefox 1 also comes with a number of 'improvements' that are rather dubious. The two that I personally dislike are:
/ Or chidaceae_coauthoring.htm
1. The 'default plugin' which used to be a dynamic library called something like 'libnullplugin.so' is now statically linked in, which means that you can't just remove it. What it does is nag the you every bloody time you go to a page that wants to display something that requires a plugin; these plugins are used intensively in adverts, which is why I don't have them.
2. There has always been a way to search in the displayed page - go to 'Edit -> Find in This Page' in the menu, or press CtlF. In earlier versions you had to press the 'Find Next' button in the search dialog in order to start the search. In Firefox 1.0 the search happens as you type. Some people like it, apparently, but to me it is incredibly disruptive. There are situations where you definitely don't want this functionality; one such is if you, like me, feel it hard to concentrate on the dialog box when the background moves. Another, rather lengthy example is the following:
Assume that you work with a big text that contains a large number of complicated words, like eg (WARNING: its huge):
http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/mss/volume25
This is a botanical text about orchids in China, and it is full of exotic names. Let's say that you have found 'Hemipilia kwangsiensis', and you want to find other occurrences of 'kwangsiensis'. If you are like me, you press CtlF, type the word (none of this mouse stuff for me if I can avoid it) and press [Return]. Except that the wods you are looking for disappears as soon as you start typing, and now you have the problem of finding the original place in a text of about 900 pages printed. And all that just to be cool. It would definitely have been nice with an option that could turn it off.
Apart from that it is a good browser; definitely better than IE. I can recommend v.0.9
I don't understand why Mozilla is ignoring the suite. It's a great product and is widely used. I personally have been seriously using the suite since about 0.6 and I can't understand why everyone's gone against it. If you have even 256 MB RAM it's fast. Yes it does take longer than IE to load up, but I start up Moz when I start my PC and don't close it until I shut down.
I think it's sad the development of the suite has really slowed now.
1. Security
Any really good arguments here?
I'm not sure if you want arguments for or against Firefox, but its security track record is abysmal. There are still UI spoofing security holes relating to XUL, and some of these have been known about for a very long time. It was far worse off than Internet Explorer when it comes to unchecked buffers. Hole-for-hole, it's no better than Internet Explorer.
4. Reliability
They keep breaking themes and extensions every point release. That's unacceptable from an end-user's perspective.
ironically it's not a bug in firefox, but a bug in slashdot.
However, I (under linux) don't get this bug at all since 0.9.
I ran Linux exclusively from 1995-2000, and the lack of a STABLE web browser than would handle LOTS of Java, Flash, etc ... it sent me to Windows 2000.
I kept Linux on the server, but Windows on the Desktop.
I was really not expecting much when I downloaded Firefox 5 months ago, as I had been using IE exclusively for 4 years.
What an incredible surprise. I have not used IE at all for three months, and am considering a switch back to Linux on the desktop.
Firefox has the potential to really open some doors to not only "alterntative" browsers, but "alternative" OS'es as well.
The same might be true at some point for ThunderBird, but at the moment, KMail is just so far ahead of everything else that hurts. When that happens, though, Microsoft should be very, very afraid: If you don't need to care about the operating system anymore for 95 percent of the things you do, you don't need to pay all that money to actually buy one from them.
This was a personal annoyance of mine too, until I figured out how it works.
The "/" key invokes search, and escape will take you out of it.
I actually prefer the box at the bottom of the screen, it just take a bit of time to get used to it.
Some may still not work, but most of them probably will.
Hmmm... I wonder why they didn't create a page using XUL, like this page:
I wonder... could it be because it's ugly, looks different on different platforms, takes four times as long to load and provides no extra benefit for the user?
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Isn't the whole point behind auto update is that it does it for you, or it at least tells you that an update is available? It seems to me that auto update isn't working at all. I've gotten no notification of any kind on any of our boxes.
I don't respond to AC's.
"I guess that depends on whether you consider having someone who installs software on your machine and replaces your defaults without your knowledge a good thing. I sure don't."
Sounds pretty trollish, but I'll bite.
Say you see a little baby hitting him/herself in the head with a wooden bat and you just happen to have a nice soft rubber bat, what do you do? Duh, you swap bats. The baby won't notice, and less concussions will ensue. (Granted, if you see babies hitting themselves in the head with a wooden bat, you have bigger problems on your hands.)
Believe it or not, the average person doesn't give a flying fsck what browser is installed on their computer as long as it works. Are they motivated enough to replace their defaults or do they even know how to? No.
Do the right thing and give them a rubber bat!
I don't think they change anything major (or haven't since .9 or so). In the past (before knowing about this option), I've modified extentions manually to up the target version number to whatever I was running.
I think their way of specifying Firefox versions is rather retarded. Instead, I think each Firefox build should have a list of extention API versions it supports, and all the extentions should have an API version number instead of a Firefox version number. But, at 1.0, its probably too late to change that for the time being.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
And don't forget that many of your extensions will not be able to work with this version of Firefox. -.-
This is perhaps the one most annoying thing about Fireofox. I love it, the extension concept is fantastic, it really makes my browser the way I want it to be... but it's almost Microsoft-in-a-Can when it comes to upgrades and dealing with old extensions.
I really hope that they include SOME backwards compatability with extensions in future versions of Firefox. I had a nice set of extensions that I had give Firefox EXACTLY the behavior I wanted it to have. (Doubleclick to close tabs, smooth mouse scrolling, BugMeNot, Googlebar -- frickin' GOOGLEBAR! doesn't work yet under 1.0 -- Image Toolbar, and a bunch of others.) But as soon as I upgraded, half my extensions suddenly don't work.
Ironically, FoxyTunes, the extension that took almost forever to get ported over to MacOSX, isn't one of the ones that needs to be updated.
A message to the Firfox developers: I hope this isn't the way things are going to be for EVERY version release, otherwise people might not bother to update, and then we get the same thing that happened with Windows with people not updating their boxen.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Then explain to me why I own a 300 baud acoustically-coupled modem?
or does "acoustically-coupled" refer to something other than placing the handset in a receptacle on the modem?