December 10, 2005

Firefox 1.5 Review

December 10, 2005, 12:12 PM | 2 Comments

Firefox 1.5 has been out for about 2 weeks now, and after using it since it came out, I thought I’d post my thoughts on Mozilla’s latest offering.

The newest release of Firefox offers several enhancements and upgrades to existing features, some of which are really nice and negate the need to use a few popular extensions. As far as new features and major upgrades, anyone hoping for those will probably have to wait for Firefox 2.0.

The Good

Speed 

My favourite new upgrade is the speed in which Firefox loads pages. I instantly noticed a decrease in page load time after switching to 1.5. The nice thing is that this upgrade is noticeable on both Windows and OSX.

Drag + Drop Tabs

Tabbed browsing is great. I simply cannot go back to the days of IE and multiple open windows because it’s just become habit now. Every time I use an un-tabbed browser, I always find myself middle-clicking in dismay.

One of the things that I always wanted for tabbed browsing was the ability to re-order my open tabs by dragging them and dropping them in place. I used to use an extension called ‘Mini-T’ for this that would allow me to do just that. Well, Firefox has included this feature by default now, negating my need for any extensions. It’s a fairly basic feature, but extremely useful once you have it.

Bookmark All Tabs

I’ve never actually used this feature (except to test it out), but I can see how it would be extremely useful for research purposes. Let’s say you were researching a certain subject, and you did your Google search. If you’re like me, you’d open each relevant result in a new tab and browse through all of the results, closing the tabs that aren’t particularly useful. Firefox gives you the ability to then instantly bookmark all open tabs, and prompts you to enter a name for a folder to hold all the new bookmarks.

Ignore target=”_blank”

Sometimes I’d forget to middle click a link to open it in a new tab, and of course, it would be a link with a ‘target=”_blank”’ statement that would open it in a new window and annoy me. Firefox 1.5 now gives you the option to control how those links behave.

Under the Tabbed Browsing options, there is a new option “Force links that open in new windows to open in:” which gives you the choice to either open it in a new tab, or in the current tab.

Server Not Found

Firefox 1.5 has changed the way in handles itself when you type in a bad URL. Previous versions of Firefox would just pop up a message box to tell you that the server couldn’t be found. This was slightly annoying if you were trying to load the page in a background tab.

The message box has been removed, and Firefox now presents you with an aesthetically pleasing error message:

Miscellaneous

Some of the more trivial changes that I noticed were: better cookie handling, the DOM inspector seems to work a little better now, there is a short cut called ‘Clear Private Data’ that will clear all history, cache, cookies, etc. I think this idea was borrowed from Opera.

Another miniscule feature that I noticed was that when I double click to open a new tab, the focus of the cursor is automatically set to the browser’s address bar. It’s a nice little improvement. You used to have to double click to open a new tab, and then click to type in the address bar.

The Not-So-Good

Honestly, there really isn’t much about Firefox 1.5 to be disappointed about, but there were a couple of things that I noticed that didn’t exactly make me clap my hands in appreciation.

The first is the preferences window on Windows machines. It’s been modified a bit to look more like the OSX version of the preferences window, but I find that it is little bit tab heavy. This is generally true of a lot of Windows applications though. I just felt like the older version was a little better. The OSX version of Firefox’s preference window hasn’t changed at all.

Secondly, when I first installed Firefox 1.5, I noticed that it took significantly longer to load the browser on an initial start up, sometimes more than 15 seconds. This was a little annoying for me, considering the fact that I have a pretty fast laptop with 1.25 GB of RAM. Once the browser had started though, the speed was lightning fast when loading websites, so I looked at it as a bit of a trade-off.

After using Firefox for a couple of weeks though, it doesn’t take nearly as long to start the program anymore. The last time I paid attention I think it took about 4 seconds, which is pretty good.

Conclusions

I’ve been a Firefox user for a while now, since the 0.8 days, and I’ve always liked it. The newest version to the Firefox family is no exception. As I said before, Firefox 1.5 hasn’t added any big new features to the browser, but if you’ve never tried Firefox before and are still hanging on to IE, it’s worth a look to try it out.

If you’re a current Firefox user who hasn’t had a chance to upgrade yet, go for it! You will not be disappointed. The only caution I would mention is that if you use a lot of extensions, some of them will not be compatible with Firefox 1.5, but that’s the responsibility of each extension author, not Mozilla. I don’t personally use any extensions at this point, so it hasn’t affected me.

All things considered, this is a great browser.

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Posted in: Technology