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

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

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.

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?