Mozilla Firefox 1.5 RC3 Released

Jasper Bryant-Greene writes "It doesn't look like the official website has updated yet, but Firefox 1.5 RC3 has been just been released. MozillaZine has the scoop."

Comments

Well

[dep01]

I hope IE is updating their notes on what to incorporate in to IE7 *rolls eyes*

Yea but...

[MtViewGuy]

Any news about when will the Mozilla Foundation release the final version? Hopefully, it will be around the first two weeks of December 2005.

Re:Yea but...

[dep01]

Just in time for the christmas rush :)

Re:Yea but...

[mlefevre]

They haven't officially announced a date, but they are expecting to release 1.5 final by the end of this month. But of course it depends on feedback from testing RC3, sorting out the publicity stuff, localisations, etc etc.

Re:Yea but...

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, the main reason why I am expecting within the first two weeks in December for final release is that this coming week is Thanksgiving holiday week in the USA, and a lot of testers might be out on vacation. I hope the Mozilla Foundation folks account for this and aim for a early December release.

Update now popup is too forceful

[LiquidCoooled]

I was in the middle of typing a posting and this thing popped up taking away focus.
Didn't have full time to check, but hitting return would/could have started the update process off without informed consent.

I realise they want to get it updated, but I think the new regime is just a bit too forceful - it should be on application startup and not checking whilst I'm browsing.

Re:Update now popup is too forceful

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the middle of typing a posting and this thing popped up taking away focus.

Actually this is very common behaviour in most Windows (and to a certain extent OSX) apps. I don't know how many times I've been typing away in App A, when App B decides it needs to throw up some stupid dialog right when I'm pressing the key, leading to me wondering WTF I just said ok to. This is a general design flaw in many/most windowing systems today as they assume that the user tends not to multitask much, which may be true for many/most, but certainly not true for me.

Re:Update now popup is too forceful

[Southpaw018]

I believe this was addressed as part of the RC2 to RC3 update in the "Background tab steals foreground focus" bug.

Re:Update now popup is too forceful

[Pieroxy]

The worst one is when you're downloading some stuff with IE. Hopefully this happens only once per windows install (when you download Firefox).

IE is downloading its stuff in windows temp folder. If you are unlucky and decided to save the file in another drive, at the end of the download it will move the file to wherever you wanted it. The move dialog then pops up and the selected button is... Cancel !!!

So if you happen to press Space or Enter at that time, you are in fact cancelling your download.

Just plain insane.

Re:Update now popup is too forceful

[Omestes]

Better solution, don't steel focus, EVER. A program does not need my immediate attention, EVER. Even if it is a terrible virus that will kill my hard drive, or a new version of FF that is SO much better than the previous, it can wait until I finish answering that email, or typing that /. response.

I have enough distractions on my computer taking my productivity away, that I don't need one more. Steeling focus is a design flaw, period. There is no reason for it. It is bad usability, in that programs in the back ground are there for a reason, I don't need to be reminded that they exist. As for FF, I really don't need it to check for updates, and it really doesn't have to ruin my work-flow (/. reading?) for a silly update.

I like how OS X does it in theory, by bouncing a dock icon. Tasteful, subtle, and not to attention grabbing. Windows does it all wrong, though I've noticed a move on some Mac developers to do the "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!! NOW!" thing to.

Why do we care?

[TheZeusJuice]

Not to be a troll or anything, but why does slashdot deam every minor release of Firefox to be worthy of a story? Its no different from any other OSS. And also, anyone who uses Firefox would notice and know what the little green upward-pointing arrow on the upper-right-hand corner means.

Re:Why do we care?

[dep01]

I love firefox.... and slashdot.... but good point, actually. "News for Nerds. Stuff that MATTERS." -- Does another RC matter? Not a whole heck of a lot. Tell me when Firefox 1.5 final is out.. Enough of the RC updates.

Re:Why do we care?

[squoozer]

It is a little different to every other piece of OSS in one really important way - loads of people use it. It is the one real shining jewel of the OSS community so we should give it plenty of column inches.

Before I get flamed out of existance I am not saying that there aren't other good pieces of OSS - there are plenty - but Firefox / Mozilla is the _only_ one that a good number of non-geeks use (although I imagine Azureus comes close but that's a bit hard to promote).

Re:Why do we care?

[TubeSteak]

Actually, I never noticed a green arrow

As for why /. considers FF updates to be important, it might have something to do with the fact that FireFox seems to be one of the few (only?) reasons MS is bothering to add features to Internet Explorer.

Or it could just be that /nerds like to keep, one of the few pieces of software they interact with constantly, updated. I'm sure once MS starts cracking out Windows updates we'll see more "Critical Update" articles and that trend is vulnerable to the exact same criticism: why does slashdot deam every minor update of windows to be worthy of a story? Its no different from any other commercial software.*

*I might be stretching that one a bit, but you get the point. When all else fails, most nerds like the default setting to include as much information as possible. Which is worse: losing a few seconds of your life scanning and dismissing /. articles you don't care about or never seeing an article you might find important because someone else (/. editors) didn't think it was anything special? /end

Re:Why do we care?

[Jesus 2.0]

Not to be a troll or anything, but why does slashdot deam every minor release of Firefox to be worthy of a story? Its no different from any other OSS.

You just answered your own question. Slashdot deems every minor release of every OSS thing to be incredible breaking news.

I can't count the number of times I've seen front page Slashdot posts that essentially boil down to:

ThingYouNeverHeardOf 0.6.3 Released

Slashdot user Doofus reports that ThingYouNeverHeardOf 0.6.3 has been released. Many cool new features in this version, such as the blarglefier tool no longer causing a crash when run under Ubuntu 4.6. Licensed under the GPL! Is this the end for Microsoft?

Half the time, they never even give you a hint as to what ThingYouNeverHeardOf is supposed to be used for. Is it an email client? Is it an IDE? Is it a MIDI playback library? Does it cook my eggs? Who knows.

Another RC already?

[the computer guy nex]

I love FireFox as much as the next guy but we need to stop bragging about "100 million downloads !!!" when a new version is out every few weeks.

Re:Another RC already?

[blazerw11]

IE with a Linux distribution

NOOOOOOO! Why would you want that?

Unknown upgrade

[at_18]

My firefox prompted me a few hours ago about an "important upgrade", which I did. But it didn't say what this upgrade was about, and therefore I don't know if I'm running RC3 or not. It would be nice to know what has been downloaded.

Much faster, Plugins are updated, Source

[tronicum]

I tried RC1 and now I swichted at my work PC to RC3, too. It checks if your plugins are working and gets you the latest updates (in my case adblock+ and pdf download). Compared to the 1.4 debian package it renders pages much faster, but (at least with Linux) the font rendering changed a bit. Even this textarea text is now smoothed (a bit to much for my taste) but I enoy the speed.

Good work Mozilla. I can't wait to see the source to look if they cleaned it up yeat. Last time I built mozilla from scratch is was filled with switches which where not supported for ages (like native qt support).

old bug still not fixed

[potaz]

And the truncating title text bug that arbitrarily drops information from websites still hasn't been fixed. It's now five years old! Hooray!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375

I think Moz is a great project, but I use Opera because things like this are allowed to linger for um, half a decade, instead of being fixed.

Bugs solved from RC2

[darteaga]

http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/200 5/11/17/15rc3-available/

Notice that RC will be the final version if there are no new bugs.

Re:A bit late :P

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It may say "Firefox 1.5" in the About box, but it is one of RC2 or RC3 at this point. It doesn't say "RC" in the version string because then it would not, in fact, be a candidate for release; they would have to change the version string and rebuild.

Mozilla are doing thing The Right Way, which is rare these days. They even follow the proper definition of Alpha & Beta, which is even rarer.

Re:This Is Was On Digg.com Yesterday

[Bullfish]

So, this happens on sites all over the net. News is disseminated instantly over a large number of sites instantaneously. What makes slashdot good are the users who make good comments. You want a better site, quit whining and do that. The commentary is why I come here and digg's is not that good. Tech news I can get almost anywhere.

As for politics, more and more it is impacting the nerds of world due to nervous politicians and evil content companies pressuring them. We would be remiss to ignore it.

This thread is for FF RC3. I got mine automatically yesterday with no hitches. Considering how the last time I got an upgrade message it flopped about four times, this was an improvement.

has been just been released

[thebdj]

has been just been released

I hear the new RC has a grammar and spell check that automatically fixes slashdot before it loads...

Re:Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

[dolphinling]

To quote Asa Dotzler,

For those wondering why this is called Firefox 1.5 and not Firefox 1.5 RC2, it's because this is a genuine release candidate. The build you have, if no problems are found, will be Firefox 1.5. If we called it RC2 in the actual client, it wouldn't be a real release candidate because we'd have to make changes to the name and then create new builds.

Parent is not a troll!

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

It is serious. I have the same issues, up to 1.5 rc2 and the 1.0.x series.

I just upgraded tp rc3 but its too early to tell if that was fixed.

The parent should be modded up - this is a LONGSTANDING issue that has not gotten any attention.

I have 1GB of RAM (FF usually peaks at about 160MB for me before I restart it) so I dont care that much, but I know lots of users on lo-mem systems who are highly annoyed by this behavior and switched to Opera. I think this kind of thing should be a high priority critical/major bug and receive attention ASAP.

Way ahead of you!

[hkmwbz]

If they are wondering what Firefox will be implementing, they might as well look here ;-)