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."

Comments

Re:Google hosted homepage

[peterprior]

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 ;)

And not only that

[jandersen]

Unfortunately Firefox 1 also comes with a number of 'improvements' that are rather dubious. The two that I personally dislike are:

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/ Or chidaceae_coauthoring.htm

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

But the real question...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is when is the Mozilla Suite (which is here now, reliable and stable) going to have the new features in Firefox like live bookmarks (RSS feeds as bookmarks) and improved tab controls (a pretty killer feature as you can set URLs opened by other programs to always open in a new tab instead of 'raping' your current one). Plus, when is the suite's mail client getting the juicy new features from Thunderbird such as RSS support, saved search folders (a real killer feature) and improved grouping?

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.

Re:1.0 right now

[Asphalt]

I was skeptical, very, very, very skeptical.

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 best thing about Firefox (and OpenOffice) is

[Nice2Cats]

... that you don't have to give a rat's ass anymore about what opering system you use. I run Firebird on Linux and run Firebird on Mac OS X and would run Firebird on Windows NT at work, except for the fact that my company has a contract with Microsoft that forbids us using anything but their software. Same thing with OpenOffice.org: Who cares anymore what the operating system is? Edit the same files with the same program on different systems. All for free. Oh, and did I mention the Videl Lan Client (VLC)?

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.

Re:1.0 right now

[Masami Eiri]

in about:config, change extentions.disabledObsolete to false.

Some may still not work, but most of them probably will.

Re:No XUL?

[say]

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?

Not really

[DogDude]

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.