Thursday, December 01, 2005

Firefox 1.5 released today

The Mozilla community finally released Firefox 1.5 today, with lots of improvements (mainly behind the scenes).

I'm impressed with the level of QA in this release, they had 3 real release candidates. In fact Firefox 1.5 is the exact same bits as Firefox 1.5 RC3 (which is what I'm using right now).

The things that interest me for this release include:

  • Lighting fast back/forward navigation
  • Improved update system (tiny binary diff patches)
  • Partial SVG support (wait for all the demo pages to spring up)
  • Gecko improvements (mainly CSS additions)
  • Plus lots of tiny stuff not worth mentioning

Already waiting for Firefox 2.0 (from the 1.8.1 Gecko branch) with its "Places" support (redoing bookmarks, history, feeds etc. into a new user interface and storing in a super fast SQLite DB).

Firefox 3.0 will come off the 1.9 branch, with its Gecko improvements (complete? SVG support, rewrite rendering using Cairo on all platforms, reflow rewritten) and the proposed tagging system for bookmarks (which might appear in Firefox 2.0).

Get Firefox! Download Firefox 1.5 now.

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