Firefox 1.5 RC1 Released

jgaynor writes "The Firefox team took another step towards version 1.5 this morning as it made public release candidate 1 of it's popular browser. Users running 1.5 beta should have already received notice via an automated update dialogue box. New features include improved Pop-up blocking, enhanced automated update, better OS X support and faster back and forward page navigation buttons. A full list of features can be found in the release notes as well as the downloaded page." My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded ;)

Comments

If you're gonna download it

[Stevyn]

Help them out and file bug reports since it's a release candidate. If everyone just downloaded and said nothing bad about it since it's firefox, the final version may still have some nasty bugs in it.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[iLogiK]

Help > Check for updates

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[CortoMaltese]

enhanced automated update

Yeah, right. For me, it keeps downloading and installing the 1.5 beta 2 over and over!

Kudos To The Firefox Team

[sysrpl]

Kudos to the Firefox team. My web browser notified me of this update and it was automatically applied without a hitch.

ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[1110110001]

With bug 275519 "[Mac] Support Command+Option+Arrows for tab switching (like Camino)" they decided to drop support for ctrl+tab under Mac OS X. As it's now a RC let me give you a how-to to reenable ctrl+tab. I hope it's easier in the final release (copied from my comment in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27551 9).

1) Quit Firefox
2) Go to Firefox.app, Choose Show Package Contents (my Finder show the german
text so I can only guess what's the wording in english) and go to
Contents/MacOS/chrome/
3) Backup toolkit.jar and rename it to toolkit.zip
4) unpack toolkit.zip and go to content/global/bindings/
5) open tabbrowser.xml
6) Replace (in line 1977 in my file)
          this.mTabBox.handleCtrlTab = !/Mac/.test(navigator.platform);
      with
          this.mTabBox.handleCtrlTab = true;
7) Create an archive of the content folder
8) Rename it to toolkit.jar
9) You can now use ctrl+tab again

b4n

IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[CDPatten]

IE 7 (beta) still has some pretty sweet features that this version of Firefox doesn't. One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs. For the common end user, another is the phishing filter, which is pretty good.

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff. MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

Maybe in the final release we will see some better features added.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Stevyn]

I prefer to use my short term memory to remember what the pages roughly look like since my memory is free and I don't have to upgrade it. And a phishing filter is only good for the user if it blocks every phishing scheme that will ever be created. Otherwise, they'll let their guard down over time and then get bit in the ass. A better solution may be to make the user that they are aware they're on a secure server and that the server address better match with the address in the address bar. That would be a good feature for firefox to...wait...

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[n0-0p]

The tab thing sounds interesting, so I'll give it a try and see what I think. I wouldn't use the IE anti-phishing system because it sends every URL to MS' servers for validation. I don't consider myself paranoid, but I'm not comfortable with handing over my entire browsing history to a third party.

In terms of cutting edge stuff I'd really like to see IE support SVG, XForms, more complete CSS, and other Web 2.0 features. I guess we just have different views and priorities on that one.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

IE 7 has still pretty cool features, like adressbar spoofing, statusbar spoofing, domain spoofing, titlebar spoofing, SSL spoofing, keystroke sniffing, clipboard sniffing, Cross-Site-Scripting and, of course, remote code execution. No phishing filter will help you with that. In consequence, IE can only be safely used on a trusted intranet.

In contrary, Firefox can be used on the internet - which I consider as a standard feature that IE clearly lacks of.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Scoria]

IE 7 (beta) still has some pretty sweet features that this version of Firefox doesn't. One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs.

Firefox is ultimately a lightweight browser that can be easily expanded to suit an end-user's individual preferences. There are freely available extensions that will convert Firefox into the most feature-rich browser imaginable.

For the common end user, another is the phishing filter, which is pretty good.

It's funny that you would mention it. The current development builds of Mozilla Thunderbird actually have a "scam detection" filter, even though I feel that such technology does often add a false sense of security to the equation. Maybe it will be shared with an upcoming Firefox build.

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff.

This subject has been beaten to death here at Slashdot, but I'm afraid that the Trident rendering engine is still many miles behind the competition. Gecko is definitely cutting edge by comparison, even though I understand that the Microsoft team is striving to improve their engine.

MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

If there is indeed a browser war happening, Microsoft certainly has the advantage. For most people, after all, the preinstalled Internet Explorer is synonymous with "the Internet." However, I don't believe that Firefox 1.5 will be up against Internet Explorer 7.0. Instead, it's likely that Firefox 2.0 ("The Ocho") will be released alongside Vista, and that they will directly compete for the market.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[DarkEdgeX]

IE7 won't be released until Windows Vista is released (late next year). Firefox 1.5 is coming out this year, and Firefox 2.0 is supposed to come out sometime next year (followed by a 3.0 even I think [???]). I know Ben Goodger has posted and/or linked to roadmaps in the past.. ahha, here it is--

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml

So yeah, I think the Firefox crew has some time to add in these new IE7 features (at least the ones that make sense) without having to worry too much.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Youssef Adnan]

You can get the tab preview feature in Firefox through the following extension: (compatible with FFox 1.5RC1)
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/ index.html

As for phishing, check out these extensions:
https://addons.mozilla.org/quicksearch.php?q=phish &section=A

IE has not innovated in a very long time while other have been trying hard to innovate to just get through the market leader-ship barrier that IE has put. It's going to be very challenging for the IE team to introduce any feature that would be outside the "catch-up" with other browser features. I'm glad to see that IE is going to introduce nifty features from all over the place, nonetheless.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Lomby]

Firefox 1.5 has one of the coolest features you can imagine: SVG.

Everything is well integrated with XUL/Javascript.

This opens the door to many applications that were not possible before without resorting to Java/Flash/ActiveX/...

Think of a Gantt chart editor in your browser.
Think of a graphical editor in your browser.
Think of a CAD in your browser.

SVG has the potential to move the kind of operations you can perform in a browser to the next level.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dude, what plant are you smoking? I'm pretty sure it was Firefox who came up with tabbed browsing, extensibility for custom applications, integrated pop-up blocking, and many other 'cutting edge' features. "

They were not the first for any of those 3 items you mentioned. Firefox was just playing catchup to other programs out there. It's just that they implemented them properly and all in one application.

Extensions Again

[Blahbooboo3]

Watch your extensions, some seem to not work with latest release. For me, Forecastfox and IE View.... Yes, you can modify the extension to make it work, but it's a bit of a pain and later on seemed to give me problems...

Re:Extensions Again

[Jonny_eh]

Or use this extension to allow the installation of 'incompatible' extensions.

Pop-up blocking

[Rinnt]

improved Pop-up blocking

I am *really* looking forward to pop-up blocking improvements. It seems that when I first started using firefox (back in the early days) it caught the vast majority of pop-ups. That situation seems to have gotten worse lately. For example, I visit a certain guitar tab web site. Let's say I want to view 10 different tabs at once... using Firefox's tabs, I just click away. Unfortunately, this also means I'm greated with 10 new pop ups. This happens every time and has really brought back the days before firefox (and no pop-up blocker).

Changelog

[Zouden]

If anyone's curious, here's the changelog from 1.5 Beta 2:

New browser features
* 313529 - Support importing home pages from (some) other browsers and multiple versions of Firefox Start.
* 220590 - [Mac] Delete (backspace) key should go back on Mac, too.

New web developer features
* 302188 - Support :-moz-read-only and :-moz-read-write pseudoclasses.
* 230909 - Make the dom.max_script_run_time pref work. (This pref controls the "this script is running slowly" dialog.)

New extension developer features
Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

Notable bug fixes
* 313300 - Change default for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 0 to 2. (Make "Force links that open new windows to open in... new tabs" not apply to window.open with specified width, height, or other features.)
* 312527 - Need to reduce padding for bookmark menu items.
* 245418 - Menus and contextual menus open on wrong screen when using dual screens.
* 312227 - Not able to type in textbox of the main window after download completes.
* 309027 - Saving image does not open the save location window sometimes.
* Many reliability fixes for software update.
* 284474 - Converting to UTF-8 a url with an unescaped non-ASCII chars in the query part leads to an incompaitbilty with most server-side programs. (Fixed by backing out the change for 261929, Send urls in UTF-8 by default (images/links with non-ASCII chacters not displayed).)
* 245392 - Installer options for shortcuts don't work (update/install adds unwanted icons to desktop/quick launch, creates empty folder in start menu).
* 282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com.
* 310825 - window.focus() in a background tab can steal focus from foreground tab.

General comments...

[lpangelrob]

I generally do not test software until the release candidate stage, so this is my first experience with 1.5. Here are my thoughts:

1. Nicer looking menus. A nice little visual bonus.
2. Half my extensions are busted. TargetAlert, Flashblock, SessionSaver... those are the three most important disabled ones right now. Fortunately, it appears I no longer need SlashFix or Tab Mix (try dragging the tabs around).
3. Finally, I can update more than one extension at a time.
4. What's with the OS X-like preferences panel? It seems as though in the last year, more Windows applications have been going in that direction.
5. Haven't tested out the memory leak issue yet. Leave Gmail open for a night, you'll see what I mean.

Here's a small problem...

[WWWWolf]

This is kind of off-topic but also very much on topic, because it does involve firefox update.

Does anyone know how to make SVG files, you know, scalable?

If I put images to web pages with <img> tag, and specify width and height, the image gets scaled.

But if I do what is recommended for SVG - that is, I create a PNG rendering of the image for backwards compatibility, then use <object data="foo.svg" ...><image src="foo.png" .../></object>, with width and height specified on both img and object tags, I get a properly scaled PNG image in Firefox 1.0 (which can't interpret the object type in question, so it falls back to the <img> tag, it as it should), and an improperly scaled SVG image in Firefox 1.5 and all other SVG browsers. Some SVG-enabled browsers (MSIE with AdobeSVG, FF1.0 with Inkscape plugin) show original-size SVG images, FF1.5 seems to be really nice and shows scrollbars on the image.

I tried making a small SVG file which uses <foreignObject> to scale the picture, but it didn't seem to work at all with SVG images in FF1.5, plus, it was an awful hack!

So what's supposed to be the web-standards-compliant trick of placing and arbitrary-sized SVG image on a web site, then having the browser scale the frigging scalable vector graphic file to the specified width and height?

I've looked around everywhere, nobody seems to know - anybody here know?

Re:Here's a small problem...

[jeff_schiller]

It's possible I misunderstood you, but I think the problem may be that the SVG image itself is specifying the size. Look at the element and see if the width/height are being specified. Ideally, the <svg> element should state width="100%" and height="100%". Then this should allow the user agent to properly scale the SVG image inside an <object> tag by specifying the <object>'s width/height. However if the <svg> element specifies width="400px", then maybe you're stuck because the author of the SVG has stated the width is 400 pixels, end of story.

I can't remember what the behavior of the SVG or HTML spec say with respect to this when conflicts occur... Specs like CDF will help to clarify some of these issues.

Download

[Frankie70]

My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded

So you will be reading Zonk's dupe of this story on your
newly downloaded & installed shiny Firefox.