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Firefox 1.5 RC2 Available

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the so-close-you-can-taste-it dept.

ltwally writes "Although not posted on the Mozilla website yet, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is out. You can grab it here. As of right now, it is available for Linux (i686), Mac OS X and Windows. Happy updating!"

39 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. If you have 1.5 RC1... by puppetman · · Score: 5, Informative

    It will automagically do the update (after asking you first). Mine did about 3 hours ago.

    My Help->About still says plain old 1.5, however.

    1. Re:If you have 1.5 RC1... by gardyloo · · Score: 3, Funny

      Did the same for me, but after the restart Slashdot's live bookmark wouldn't load...

          Yeah, that's called a "feature".

    2. Re:If you have 1.5 RC1... by gregbains · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mine didn't automatically do this, but a quick help->update and all sorted, thanks again Slashdot for keeping me up to date :)

    3. Re:If you have 1.5 RC1... by Martin+Blank · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's new to 1.5, and is an attempt to improve office productivity.

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
  2. Only en-US so far... by iworm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The update, at the time of posting, is only available for en-US builds so far. Now I know that that's all that matters, but if you're running RC1 non-en-US then the update might be a little time away yet.

    Perchance that's why it's not been publicised yet, and further perchance that's what the poster or editors might have noticed? Sorry, dreaming there for a moment...

  3. What exactly is wrong... by sczimme · · Score: 3, Insightful


    ltwally writes "Although not posted on the Mozilla website yet, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is out. You can grab it here.

    What exactly is wrong with waiting for the official announcement? Posting the link - and inciting a /.ing - seems like a rude gesture toward an organization techies generally profess to love. Did it occur to anyone that maybe the mozilla folks didn't feel ready to announce the release?? If they did, don't you think the announcement would have been added to their site? (Despite the summary, it appears that 1.5 RC2 was actually there yesterday (09 Nov).)

    --
    I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
    1. Re:What exactly is wrong... by Miphnik · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The official announcement many of us have already received is Firefox updating itself with the new release. Not much point in keeping it quiet if the Mozilla folks have already released it!

      --
      "My order takes pride in knowing all that can be known, and most of all the rest..." --Galen
    2. Re:What exactly is wrong... by the+real+darkskye · · Score: 4, Informative

      There is nothing wrong for people updating from 1.5-beta or 1.5-RC1 as the update is only around 360Kb.

      Its probabably preferable for moz.org to let as many people grab the tiny update before anouncing the availablility of the 5Mb full installer.

      When 1.5 goes gold however, you will have a very valid point, because I know that _I_ will be replacing my existing Firefox Setup 1.5 Beta 1.exe with the final version.

      --
      Music is everybody's possession.
      It's only publishers who think that people own it.
      Fuck Beta
      ~John Lenno
  4. advancements/innovation? by xikzantric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It seems like most of the advances that Firefox made vs. IE have now been neutralized (popup blocking, tabbed browsing, etc.). What new ideas/innovations are the Firefox team making these days to stand out in the browser wars?

    1. Re:advancements/innovation? by zulux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It seems like most of the advances that Firefox made vs. IE have now been neutralized [snip] What new ideas/innovations are the Firefox team making these days to stand out in the browser wars?

      Security.

      Internet Explorer still is an ActiveX exploit away from wiping you files.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    2. Re:advancements/innovation? by sedyn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Despite all those features, as long as technical people can recommend firefox as a means to prevent spy/ad-ware to non-technical people it'll continue to spread.

      Innovation is great, but adding features for the sake of adding features is what caused a lot of trouble for IE in the first place.

      --
      Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
    3. Re:advancements/innovation? by Ythan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think extension support is the single most significant feature of Firefox. Sure you can add functionality to IE but it's not as easy as packaging up some Javascript. This extensibility lets Firefox support new and unimagined features without adding bloat. It wouldn't surprise me if IE moves in this direction eventually just to stay competitive.

    4. Re:advancements/innovation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why is it that someone who says the exact same thing I said a few posts up gets modded insightful, but I get nothing??? Are the mods THAT lazy???

      Not lazy at all. We just hate you.

      HTH

    5. Re:advancements/innovation? by WiFiBro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And they are even working on an amazing copy of the Web Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and some sort of GreaseMonkey userscript tool.

      Well the best reason is of course to look cool and impress your family at birthday parties. A good second is MS-bashing, always fun.

      For me, I love Firefox because
        - I can start typing in a page and FIND things
        - I can easily write userscripts for Greasemonkey to improve websites. For example on a forum I can keep my personal blacklist, reorder the page, detect trolls easily, etc.
        - a very very easy search engine chooser built-in.
        - a very clean RSS checker extension (Sage) without the need of nasty things.

      As a developer:
        - it actually gives meaningful errors, contrary to IE.

      As a geek:
        - the wonderful new toy called Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG), check out the amazing 'living; images at http://overstimulate.com/projects/canvas/

    6. Re:advancements/innovation? by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: 3, Informative

      memory problems

      I haven't seen any memory leaks since I upgraded to 1.5. Normally if I leave Firefox
      pointing to a page that refreshes often, the memory will swell to 150MB on my Windows box within 24 hours.

      But I haven't seen that problem with 1.5.

      --
      94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
    7. Re:advancements/innovation? by digidave · · Score: 4, Informative

      What are they doing? With 1.5...

      1. Improved the rendering engine (through Gecko)
      2. Better tab behaviour (drag and drop placement, better default behaviour)
      3. New faster updates that don't require a reinstall
      4. SVG support

      And more, but I can't remember every big change from the changelog at the moment. Don't forget that this is a minor release, not a major release. It's mostly refining and improving features from 1.0. You can expect bigger changes in 2.0. With any luck, 2.0 will be out in time to greet IE 7.

      --
      The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
    8. Re:advancements/innovation? by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Informative

      Just in case some don't know, in the upcoming IE 7, ActiveX is at least now an opt-in feature.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    9. Re:advancements/innovation? by rizole · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Are you on crack? Just check out these babies and then come back and talk to me about innovation:

      Bork Bork Bork

      Eggon

      Firesomething

      It's not just about tabs and security you know. Firefox extends and enhances my productivity and gives me extra functionality, functionality that makes my co-workers all go "Ooooohhhhhh...that's so coool! Show me how to do that"
      In an increasingly technologically savvy and cynical workforce (our admin is incompetent and an asshole) I'm re-introducing a sense of wonderment in technology by showing my colleagues how to find out what the weather is doing right now without compromising the pile of shite that is our network.
      Back in the day, all this PC, IT, WWW stuff was new, exciting and compelling. There were problems but this was a new fronter and most of us seemed to want to make it a nice place to be.
      Things have moved on, grown up and become less romantic but for me and my colleagues firefox is reinvigorating the interest in computing and giving us all a little frisson of excitement. We can play without getting fucked.
      And if we can play without getting fucked that means that we can learn and grow.
      I'm sorry that my stance is so idealised and romanicised but the innovation and ideas that are coming out of the firefox team is to provide me and my friends and colleagues with a product that does not allow bad people to violate our growth and health.

  5. Re:Fire--- by EnronHaliburton2004 · · Score: 4, Funny

    And perhaps you should ask on the Ubuntu forums? We're not really technical here, we just pretend to be ;)

    --
    94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
  6. Re:load time by avkb03 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Modify your shortcut: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" /Prefetch:1

  7. Please save Mozilla.org some bandwidth by Critical_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're running RC1 already, the posted links have .MAR files available to perform an update without redownloading the entire binary. Windows users should be careful because .MAR is associated with Microsoft Access in Office 2003 (maybe earlier versions but this is all I checked with). Anyway, info on how to update with .MAR files is here:

    Manually Installing a MAR File

    ----
    Car pictures gallery

  8. Re:Repeated updates by Morgon · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is a bug in RC1 - the only "what's new" entry for RC2 is "several fixes to automated update system". I was getting the same thing on Beta 2 for RC1 - I eventually uninstalled Beta2 to install RC1 fresh.
    The transition from RC1 to RC2 was smooth, however.

    http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1 .5.html

    --
    [DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
  9. Changelog by Anti-Trend · · Score: 4, Informative
    I went to hunt down the changelog, and since I had to compile a list of changes from a few sources I will go ahead and reproduce the whole thing here:

    * Fixed: 314241 - "Report broken web site" toolbar button is broken when using "small icons".

    * Fixed: 313490 - Enable IDN for .org.

    * Fixed: 313894 - Reporter chrome is registered twice.

    * Fixed: 313360 - Profile locking doesn't work if the profile is located on a FAT partition.

    * Fixed: 314754 - "Extension compatibility updates" check never completes.

    * Fixed: 314684 - Endless update loop from firefox 1.5 beta2 to 1.5 rc1 if 1.0.x was ever installed

    * Fixed: 312777 - Negative margins cause floated elements to be placed to the right of incorrect earlier boxes (since March 2005).

    * Fixed: 312363 - document.write into iframe results in broken-lock icon

    * WFM: 314484 - Firefox 1.5 RC1 topcrash [@ 0xffffff4d] [@ js_GC]

    * Fixed: 309044 - Flashplayer 8 "Bad NPObject as private data!"

    * Fixed: 314258 - ExtensionItemUpdater:checkForDone: Failure in listener's onAddonUpdateEnded.

    * Fixed: 315017 - [Linux] Undetermined progressmeter doesn't work.

    * Fixed: A few potential security holes.

    * Fixed: 313414 - Add a way to do "sandboxed" http connections that don't modify the cookie list.

    * Fixed: 314465 - Implement a non-copyingCompareUTF8toUTF16.

    * Fixed: 263042 - Ship both autocomplete impls with the new-toolkit

    * Fixed: 264308 - Implement DOM Level 3 UserData API.

    * Fixed: 314218 - New version of JEP (0.9.5+a), please land on trunk and branch.

    * Fixed: 147670 - Wrong (last or empty) tooltip text displayed for dropdown list menu items.

    * Fixed: 226094 - Support JavaScript Core for WinXP AMD64.

    * Fixed: 314549 - Various bugs involving containers not actually fixed for subframes.

    * Fixed: 312036 - History.dat contains entries deleted from the "date and site" view.

    * Fixed: Several fixes for specific DHTML performance tests.

    * Fixed: 312804 - No longer shows loading-image.gif when loading images

    * Fixed: 309706 - Stack overflow crash [@ jpinscp.dll + 0xaa87] (since Sept 22).

    --
    Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
    1. Re:Changelog by jesser · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you're going to copy information from The Burning Edge without attribution, at least get it right. You included several bugs that were only fixed on the trunk.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
  10. Hooray, SVG support! by Max+Threshold · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now I can embed SVG images into my pages. Exported from OpenOffice Draw, of course. "This site best viewed with a modern browser. Get Firefox 1.5 now, you Neanderthal!"

    1. Re:Hooray, SVG support! by redcliffe · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well it doesn't seem to work with the w3c's svg test suite....

  11. Re:load time by WiFiBro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes to me that was the most noticable change. Especially the first time you run it is very fast. They also worked on the speed of going forward and backward.

  12. Does it fix the friggin' clipboard bug? by Maxmin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Under Windows XP, Firefox has become my browser of unchoice, because it's clipboard functionality is totally borked. I posted to bugzilla, and saw that about a million other people have too.

    --
    O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
    1. Re:Does it fix the friggin' clipboard bug? by DarkEdgeX · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, this happens to me as well. I usually do Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy from the address bar to an open chat window in another application, and sometimes it will, for seemingly no reason, not work. Sometimes I'll even try Ctrl+X (cut), and sure enough, when I do this the text disappears from the address bar (indicating it recognized the cut operation), but it still won't paste! Just to verify it's not the chat app but Firefox, I open Notepad and still can't paste.

      Oddly, if I beat the unholy shit out of Ctrl+C it will, sometimes, eventually work. Sometimes.

      --
      All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
    2. Re:Does it fix the friggin' clipboard bug? by matvei · · Score: 3, Informative
      1. Go to about:config
      2. Double click on middlemouse.contentLoadURL

      Tada! No page loading on middle click on the page. If you meant something else, check out the other middle* options.
  13. Re:load time by Ythan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Debunked, but still a common misconception.

  14. Firefox 1.5rc2 is nearly ready to be announced by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Firefox 1.5rc2 release is nearly ready to be announced. When it is, we'll update our website to point you to the installer files with links that use our load balancer. A note: going to our FTP site directly will hammer all mirrors evenly which is bad for those smaller mirrors that aren't as bandwidth-laden as our bigger mirrors.

    If you can't wait for your Firefox 1.5rc2 fix, though, feel free to download Firefox 1.5b2 or 1.5rc1 and then use software update (Help -> Check for Updates...) to grab the 1.5rc2 update. The updates for both to 1.5rc2 are less than a meg!

    Chase, the build/release guy at Mozilla

  15. Release notes here: by David+McBride · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1 .5.html

  16. Re:Repeated updates by kaptron · · Score: 3, Funny

    What could Sony possibly have to do with this? Oh wait, just came across something called $sys$firefox_install...

    /me runs as sharp objects are hurled in my direction

  17. Re:Adblock Extension by grondu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Switch to Adblock Plus http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2662 91

    --

    I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist

  18. Re:Firefox "update" feature sucks by alfrin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do you pay any attention? The new 1.5 Firefox has binary updates, eliminated that problem all together.

  19. Re:Repeated updates by masklinn · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you are using a Beta version (and not a Release Candidate), then it checks on the Beta/Dev branches, which means that it has a news version (new build) pretty much every day.

    Try doing this: go to the config page (type about:config in the address bar), then search for "app.update" and set the values:

    app.update.channel to release app.update.url to https://aus2.mozilla.org/update/1/%PRODUCT%/%VER SION%/%BUILD_ID%/%BUILD_TARGET%/%LOCALE%/%CHANNEL% /update.xml app.update.details to http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases /

    That should do the trick and grab the updates from the Release files (aka stable branch) instead of the beta/dev files

    --
    "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
  20. Re:YEAH by robfoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I also had problems with 1.5 and adblock, but turning off Adblock's 'Obj-Tabs' feature seemed to fix it.

  21. Why there is no "RC2" in the version string by Anthracks · · Score: 3, Informative

    IANAMD (I am not a Mozilla developer), but I assume there is no RC2 in the version string because for once they are actually adhering to the meaning of "release candidate". If they find no show-stopping bugs in this build, the exact same file you just downloaded will be rechristened "Firefox 1.5". If they had to change anything (even the version string), it wasn't technically a "candidate for release".

    --
    Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.