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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 ;)
Help > Check for updates
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...
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.
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.
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.
Do you like German cars?
You can get the tab preview feature in Firefox through the following extension: (compatible with FFox 1.5RC1)/ index.html
h §ion=A
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview
As for phishing, check out these extensions:
https://addons.mozilla.org/quicksearch.php?q=phis
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.
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?
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.
"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.