Firefox 1.5 Beta is now available. Only available in English at the moment but I imagine that will change soon.

I started digging around on the train trip home (I’ve got over an hour to kill, so why not). There’s the stated changes on the release notes, but some of the more interesting things I’ve noticed:

  • Its about 1 second faster to start up, and that’s on a Celeron 2 with 512MB compared to version 1.0.5 running on an Athlon with 1G of RAM, however 8 our of my 9 plugins don’t currently work with it, so that’s probably helping a fair bit. Linky is the only one that currently still works.
  • You can reorder tabs by dragging & dropping – nice
  • You can really notice the difference in the back & forwards buttons’ speed
  • The options screen has been re-done, screenshots were shown of this a few months ago by Ben Goodger and they seem to have stayed pretty much the same since then. For my 2 cents I think the change is for the better. Easier to use and more logically laid out.
  • Clear Private Data on the Tools menu – can be set to clear as much or as little info as you like. Very nice for those who use a shared system.
  • The Live Bookmarks link has been moved to the top, at the far right hand side of the address bar. This seems to be a better place for it, no one ever looks down the bottom right side of the browser unless they know to.

  • New page load error page, more user friendly and gives users options. Much better than the original alert box, and even better than the page that displayed after setting the about:config option. Firefox also noticed that there was no connection a whole lot faster – it didn’t wait to timeout, it just seemed to notice there was no connection to be had. I confirmed this later when I got home and re-connected to the net, and then typed in a non-existent domain, Firefox then timed out.
  • about:config page looks the same though I imagine there are new options
  • New help menu option: Report broken site to tell Mozilla about a site that Firefox breaks
  • When in sidebars and info page, any time a list item is selected there seems to be a different, heavier focus box. Not really serious, just something I noticed.
  • Checking for updates manually to the list of extensions no longer opens up a new window, it happens inline, with a description about checking for updates replacing the description of the plugin while it’s checking. Have to wait and see what happens when it finds updates automatically.
  • Along with finding updates to itself and any extensions & themes, 1.5 now also checks for updates to any search plugins (ie mycroft)
  • Updates can now be set to automatically download & install and only prompt if the update will disable any current extensions or themes. (this can even be overridden so that it will force-install any updates no matter what they’ll break. No idea why you’d want to do that though.)
  • Shows a update history, don’t think it will provide for rollbacks though. Also doesn’t show all updates to extensions, linky updated when I 1st installed, but that isn’t showing up in the history.
  • The DOM Inspector, Crash Reporter (Talkback) and broken site reporter are all listed as extensions that you can disable or uninstall easily (if they happen to annoy you that much).

All in all, I like it, nothing drastic has changed on the surface, but that’s a good thing. The plugins not working is annoying, but totally expected & understandable. Funnily enough the thing that’s annoying me the most is the fact that the tabs extension that adds the little close button to each tab doesn’t work! I’m so lazy.

Other sites on the release:

As an aside, I was using the Google Desktop Scratchpad to writeup my notes while I explored Firefox. It’s really handy for this sort of thing. Sure, I could have just used notepad, but the fact that I can drift my mouse over to the right, type a few things in then continue on as it auto-hides itself, never stealing focus or cluttering up the taskbar. Once again Google has shown that simplicity wins out.