Mozilla Firefox 1.5 to be released November 29th
Word has it that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 will be released Tuesday, November 29th, 2005. It’s gone through three release candidates and a number of betas. I think there are some good improvements from what I’ve seen of the 1.5 release candidates. One of the features I like is the auto-update feature allowing updates from within the browser to automatically happen. (Also, the updates can be done on a smaller scale than the old “download the whole thing and reinstall the whole application.”)
As you can see, I heavily recommend Firefox on this site. It has fewer unpatched security risks than Internet Explorer and I don’t think I’ve seen people get into as much spyware trouble with Firefox. Firefox does a good job rendering pages (in many ways tru-er to html and css standards than Internet Explorer.)
The adbar above is for Mozilla Firefox with the Google toolbar. For a long time I was anti-toolbar. It made no difference if it was from “spywaresrus” or Google, but somewhere in the last year or so I’ve tried the Google toolbar on firefox. Now, my first reaction was that it was redundant. Of course, Firefox has the built in search bar. I’ve used other browsers with nice built in search functions. Why have an add-on toolbar for that. There are a couple of reasons. 1) the toolbar gives a way of checking pagerank for sites. (For site developers this can be a useful/interesting tool.) 2) Google toolbar does a better job of remembering searches for me than Firefox’s built in bar… when I’m searching on a topic and subtle variations in search terms make a difference, I’ll switch the toolbar on. 3) Much like Google cache, the toolbar can highlight search terms in a page. Very usefull.
I haven’t looked at other features yet like autolink (which can give you hyperlinks to search on addresses/ shipping numbers/ etc. on a page), but there are a few other good features to it.
Anyway…. seemed like a good time to talk about it.