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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox 1.5 Final Now Available 646

Posted by Zonk from the frabjous-day dept.
yootje writes "Firefox 1.5 is out, you can download it right here: Linux; Mac; Windows. You can find more info about it in the release notes. Highlights are: Automated update, drag and drop reordering for browser tabs, improvements to popup blocking, better accessibility and better support for Mac OS X. Don't forget to make full use of the mirrors." It's semi-official.
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Firefox 1.5 Final Now Available More

Firefox 1.5 Final Now Available

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  • I have been running RC3 for quite a while, very nice indeed

  • Where are the RPMs? (Score:4, Informative)

    by podz ( 887481 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:41PM (#14141573)
    You would think that they could build packages for at least the most popular linux package management systems. Wonder how long til this shows up on the DAG repository...

    • Re:Where are the RPMs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:55PM (#14141763)
      That's not Mozilla's job at all. Their job is to produce the best web browser, it's up to all the distribution maintainers to provide packages for thier flavors.

      Mozilla already invests a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money in maintaining a three-platform build farm http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=F irefox [mozilla.org]. Do you really want them spending their time trying to figuring out the nuances of the top five distributions as well?

    • Re:Where are the RPMs? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) *
      IIRC the rationale is that (a) there are many different RPM-based distributions with different requirements and (b) many of those distributions include Firefox anyway, so releasing an RPM for current versions of Fedora or SuSE is just a duplication of effort.

      I've got first-hand experience with (a) building RPMs for the Dillo web browser [dillo.org], and let me tell you, it's a pain to keep a zillion different distros and/or mach roots and/or UML virtual machines so that you can build packages with the right set of libr

  • P2P downloads: (Score:5, Informative)

    by J0nne ( 924579 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:43PM (#14141594)
    For the people using Windows:
    Gnutella, G2 and ed2k go here [freebase.be].
    torrent can be found here [thepiratebay.org].

    • Re:P2P downloads: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:58PM (#14141800) Journal
      No way I will download something from those Sweden pirates sites!
      OMG! you will be visited by the MPAA soon! =oP

      Anyway, just for the sake of completness, I was just looking at the "Roadmap" for Firefox 2.0,3.0. [mozilla.org]
      It seems that the once "sleek, fast and stand alone browser" will continue to be bloated and bloated with features.

      Why, o why dont the just freeze the 1.5 release and try to fix EVERY bug in the bugzilla database!

      For example, I have installed the 1.5 version, and still the Find function does not work as expected on multiple frames (Java Api Documentation). There has been a bug filed on bugzilla for quite some time now (one year IIRC).

      • Re:P2P downloads: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:24PM (#14142089)
        I realize that every individual has their own set of priorities and concerns with their browser, but that's exactly what's great about extensions. Put the necessary stuff in and leave the optional stuff optional. Keep the footprint small and avoid both bloat and insecurity in the process.

        I don't see a lot of things in the 3.0 roadmap that are questionable. Do you? They are things that will improve browsing in general and would be of most use to the most people with the least negative impact. This isn't like cramming ForecastFox into every installation by default or anything.

        In fact, I don't think you've read through the entire list because in most cases, they are simply improving current functionalities and interfaces. The footprint is already there. The functions and features largely already exist. Improving on them is a GOOD THING because you're squeezing more return out of the existing investment.

        The aim is for "Less than a 5.0 MB download on Windows".
        The current Win32 download is 4.98MB

        After all these modifications and improvements, where is this bloat you speak of? 4.98MB to 5.0MB is an increase of about 4/10ths of one percent.

        • Re:P2P downloads: (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @09:00PM (#14143609) Homepage
          "I realize that every individual has their own set of priorities and concerns with their browser, but that's exactly what's great about extensions. Put the necessary stuff in and leave the optional stuff optional. Keep the footprint small and avoid both bloat and insecurity in the process."

          This is exactly it. If I can be forgiven for using a cliche, "extensions are the new tabs". They're as much of a killer app as tabs were, IMO.

          Not only do extensions make it possible to keep the base install simple and add features only a fraction of people want (eg mouse gestures, sessions) on an as-needed basis, they allow lawsuitbait features (eg BugMeNot integration) and features too narrow in scope to make it into an official release (eg enhancements for specific websites like Fark).

          Naturally, some want a browser that works the way they want out of the box, and perhaps Firefox can't do that for everyone. I have no problem with that. I don't even have a problem with people using IE. What I like is that there's a powerful choice that works well for me, and the fact that IE's market share isn't high enough to let websites start requiring it again (it still happens but it was much more common a few years ago).

          Also... now that the Mac version doesn't suck I can ditch Safari. It still has a slightly smaller memory footprint, but it's not significantly faster anymore and there are themes that help Firefox look native. With Firefox's feature lead, it's worth a small memory hit even on my older iBook, and with the ruthless efficiency of the AdBlock and Fliterset.G Updater extensions I even end up saving memory.

  • Welcome to Officialality Firefox 1.5! (Score:3, Funny)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:43PM (#14141604) Homepage Journal
    "Firefox 1.5 is out, you can download it right here."

    A fitting tribute would be to slashdot the mozilla site into obscurity for at least the first 24 hours. I'm sure Microsoft will try even if the general public doesn't manage to do it ;-) Everyone knows the most popular stuff on the Internet can't be seen in a speed faster than dialup in the outback of Saskatchewan, due to the heavy demand. Spybot's update servers are a good indicator of this effect.
    • Just donwloaded it from the ftp-site at blazing speed and this is now written using 1.5. I think they've anticipated the /.-effect... :-)

  • The feature that Mozilla is still missing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daVinci1980 ( 73174 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:43PM (#14141606) Homepage
    Or maybe I just haven't figured out how to get it to work properly (please correct me if I'm wrong).

    When I click "Automatically do this for files of this type", stop showing me the prompt box for what to do with this file everytime the file comes up!

    This happens a lot, especially with Torrent files. I tell firefox to launch Azureus whenever it sees a torrent. I tell it to always do this automatically for me. What does it do? It prompts me for every godamn torrent file as to whether is should save it or launch it into Azureus.

    I torrent a lot of stuff, so this is really, really annoying.

  • Oooh! Features! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adolfojp ( 730818 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:44PM (#14141609)
    Drag and drop reordering of tabs? Like Opera version a "couple of them ago"? :-P

    Apart from the troll. Props to the firefox team. Keep up the good work!

    Adolfo

    • Re:Oooh! Features! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Iriel ( 810009 )
      Fair enough, but at least it's built-in instead of having to download the extension.

      I'm more psyched about the auto-patching. Hopefully, this will keep some parties quiet about their perceived lack of FF security.

  • Woohoo! (Score:2, Funny)

    by atomicthumbs ( 824207 )
    Now I can finally use that cool black theme! And tabbed browsing! Without seriously sacrificing computer stability!

  • Couldn't wait for the official releas? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by carlmenezes ( 204187 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:45PM (#14141624) Homepage
    Yeah, the download is available. But it hasn't been officially released yet. Come on people! Let's make the launch a nice event by downloading it then! I wanted to post the exact same thing but didn't because after so much hard work on the part of the Firefox Team, I don't mind waiting a few hours to make their release a huge success. And no, I'm not going to download it until it's officially announced. That's my little way of helping to recognize the official launch.
    • It's become a geeky tradition to celebrate the release of a blockbuster movie, or software by downloading advance copies from the web. Strangely this time, a P2P program isn't required to get this advance content, although it is still an option once a torrent is set up.
  • Until i see it on the official Firefox Website http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ [mozilla.org] I ain't downloadin' squat.

  • Using it now.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by bhsx ( 458600 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:49PM (#14141680)
    It seems very nice so far. I'd been using RC3 for a few days now. All extensions carried over for me, although I had to reset my Tabbed Browser Preferences.
    One of the nicest new features is the "Unable to Load" page that comes up instead of the alert that interupted your browsing, even while in another tab, on the older versions.
    Some of the rumorous new tab features haven't made it in so far, which is a shame. They're supposed to make tabs work more like Opera: Close tab returns to previous tab, and close box on each tab, as well as cleaning up the text in tabs. Oh well, overall very nice though.
    • All extensions carried over for me, although I had to reset my Tabbed Browser Preferences.

      Looking at my extensions folder:

      • Switchproxy Tool: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • Save Image in Folder: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • View Formatted Source: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • MapIt!: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • Download Statusbar: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • Bookmarks Synchronizer: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
      • Redirect Remover:

    • Re:Using it now.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by milimetric ( 840694 )
      "Close tab returns to previous tab"

      aaaaaaah!!
      I hate that about opera. Good god, I really hope there's going to be something in there that allows you to turn that off. Btw, does anyone know how to turn that off in Opera? It's just so much nicer for browsing... you know, lots of pictures.

  • Pretty sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hao Wu ( 652581 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:50PM (#14141694) Homepage
    Still doesn't pass the Acid 2 Test [webstandards.org].

    Does anyone know why Safari passes, but no other browsers? (Perhaps the Acid just love Apple?)

  • Heavy Stress on Gentoo Boxes (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:50PM (#14141695)
    WHAT?!!? My Gentoo box is already busy compiling KDE 3.5! Now you're telling me to start compiling Firefox 1.5 too!? My CPU's so busy it be cryin'.

  • I guess we need posts like these...... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 8127972 ( 73495 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:50PM (#14141697)
    .....To kill the time between Google posts.
  • Do you remember the 3D FPS game demo [slashdot.org] using the canvas tag found in FireFox 1.5, I think this is a sign of things to come, and offers a good alternative to XAML support in IE7.

  • 1.5 RC3 and Final are the same (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:57PM (#14141787)
    If you already have Firefox 1.5 RC3 installed, don't bother with this. It's the exact same file, the md5 sums are even the same:

    d0cbbd5d8c47fe36ee8f26fb1255838c - Firefox Setup 1.5.exe
    d0cbbd5d8c47fe36ee8f26fb1255838c - Firefox Setup 1.5rc3.exe

    • Re:1.5 RC3 and Final are the same (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MTO_B. ( 814477 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @07:24PM (#14143062) Homepage
      That's because "Release Candidates" are just that: Release Candidates.

      RC3 was a candidate to be the Final 1.5 version, not a beta.
      Changes are expected within beta versions, but not within Release Candidates.

      RC3 convinced... it was fine, no bugs needed to be fixed for it... so it was confirmed from a candidate to the actual final product.

  • Drag and drop reordering bug (Score:5, Interesting)

    by njchick ( 611256 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @04:59PM (#14141801) Journal
    The downside of "drag and drop reordering" is that accidental dragging of the current tab to the current page causes 100% CPU utilization for several seconds, the page is reloaded and the form entries are lost without a warning. Observed with Firefox 1.5 RC1 and RC2 on Linux.

    • Re:Drag and drop reordering bug (Score:4, Informative)

      by kbrosnan ( 880121 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:09PM (#14141925) Homepage
      That would be Certain UI operations (opening dialogs, drag and drop) cause refresh, prolonged hang (CPU at 100%) bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305970. It is only fixed on trunk builds which I strongly discourage people from using as the code is still pre alpha.

      Wait for your distro to have a binary to download or build from source and apply the patch.

  • Halleujah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by queenb**ch ( 446380 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:01PM (#14141838) Homepage Journal
    The first prophet was called Netscape and he was mighty, leading the people serenely through the internet. But the people forsook the prophet and the prophet turned to evil ways. In time, the first prophet was corrupted by evil in the form of the giant ISP known as Baal or AOL.

    The second prophet was a false prophet called Internet Explorer, which hid its true nature from the people until it was nearly too late since it was sent out by the great deceiver, Microsoft. The great deceiver tried to limit their access to the internet and to turn them aside from anything that the deceiver did not make money off of.

    The people groaned and labored to feed the great deceiver, but alas, nothing could fill his belly. The great deciever blessed the heresey of having the browser integrated into the operating system. Loudly did the people cry unto the computer gods for a new prophet to lead them, but the gods were angry since the had given the people Linux. The people ignored Linux and chose to follow the great deceiver.

    Finally, the computer gods softened their hearts and heard the cries of the people and sent a third prophet. The people are fortunate that they have not been abandoned for straying from the path of Linux. Mighty indeed is the penguin. A new prophet has been sent to lead us out of the valley of the shadow of ActiveX.

    Halleujah!

    The heavens opened, the angels sang, and Firefox descended into our midst to releive us from the woe that is Internet Explorer.

    2 cents,

    Queen B

  • Wither AMD64 Version? (Score:3, Informative)

    by tjstork ( 137384 ) <todd@bandrowsky.gmail@com> on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:03PM (#14141861) Homepage Journal
    Come on guys, give us 64 bits! Do we dare risk a build from source?

  • where to get Firefox (Score:4, Informative)

    by mykmelez ( 6506 ) <myk@NOSPAm.melez.com> on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:03PM (#14141863) Homepage
    Please do *NOT* download it from ftp.mozilla.org. Please instead use our redirector, which has a lot more bandwidth:

    Windows: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5&o s=win&lang=en-US [mozilla.org]
    Mac OS X: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5&o s=osx&lang=en-US [mozilla.org]
    Linux: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.5&o s=linux&lang=en-US [mozilla.org]

    Or, if you need a different language, get it from releases.mozilla.org, which doesn't have as much bandwidth as the redirector but still has *much* more than ftp.mozilla.org:

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefo x/releases/1.5/ [mozilla.org]

  • No it's not! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DrIdiot ( 816113 )
    Um... guys...

    MozillaZine Forums [mozillazine.org]
    Big red letters, you can't miss it: Firefox1.5 is not yet out

  • new problems introduced (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:05PM (#14141880)
    Highlights are: Automated update, drag and drop reordering for browser tabs, improvements to popup blocking, better accessibility and better support for Mac OS X

    Dark alley corners are:

    • Nightmarish cookie management. You can now search (which is nice), but you can't select more than one cookie at a time (the usual key modifiers do nothing). Hitting delete does nothing. I filed a bug about the selection thing and the answer was "oh well, next release, not going to make it for 1.5" Said bug was filed almost a month ago.
    • Select text in the URL-bar on the Macintosh. Hit the left arrow key, which should put you at the start of the block of text. But doen't- unlike the behavior in the text entry boxes on a webpage. WTF?
    • Every. Single. Time. You. Download. Something. You. Get. Asked. What. To. Do. Even. If. You. Checked. Do. This. Every. Time. ARRGGGGGGGG. Why can't it remember these preferences!?
    • Keyboard shortcuts randomly stop working. Command-W being the most obvious, as you go to close a tab or window...and nooooothing happens.
    • Plugin "security" is completely non-sensical. If I'm visiting a website of a plugin author, you're forced to navigate to the prefs panel and then go back and click the link again. Instead of blocking the installation of anything, why doesn't this do what IE does with DirectX controls and such, ie say "hey, this page WANTS to do this, SHOULD I let it?", with an option of "Yes please"? Instead we get "I blocked this. Just thought you'd like to know. Go here if you want to enable it." Especially since it encourages two very insecure things: a)permitting the entire hostname access b)permanently (since few users are likely to go BACK and DELETE the entry)

    That's all that I can think of right off the top of my head- but the cookie and URL bar problems are driving me nuts.

    • Odd, is this just the Mac version? Because the windows version doesn't have any of these problems.

    • Regarding plugin security:s do The idea is that you do not want to let sites trick people into pushing yes. There have been several demonstrated attacks which do this: Having a game which requires quickly and repeatedly clicking a spot on the page, and then popping up the dialogue right underneath it is one. While this can be prevented by disabling the "yes" button for a small amount of time (as Firefox does with these dialogues anyway) I think they thought: "better safe than sorry."

    • Re:new problems introduced (Score:4, Interesting)

      by vitaflo ( 20507 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:40PM (#14142248) Homepage
      That's all that I can think of right off the top of my head

      - The Reload button randomly disappearing on occasion.

      - When I switch from one app to FF by clicking on the FF window, if I click into a text area (like the one I'm typing in now) the text area does not have focus. This pains me to no end because if I copy something from another window and then click on the FF window, I have to basically click the textarea twice in order to copy the contents into it. Bah.

      Yeah, they have a ways to go with the OS X support.

  • RC3 and final are the same exact thing (Score:5, Informative)

    by mykmelez ( 6506 ) <myk@NOSPAm.melez.com> on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:08PM (#14141910) Homepage
    Note that Firefox 1.5 RC3 is the exact same as Firefox 1.5 down to every last bit. So if you already have RC3, you already have the final release. You don't need to download it again.

    Why? Well, because RC3 was the last release candidate, and having the last release candidate be exactly the same as the final release is the best way to ensure that all the testing the release candidate gets definitely applies to the final. Otherwise we would have run the risk of any change, no matter how minor, introducing a problem that we didn't foresee.

    So they're the same. Right down to the user agent string, the version number, etc. Do an md5sum on both files, and you'll get the same values. You get my drift.

  • Hah. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 )
    It's semi-official.

    And now that it has been Slashdotted, it's fully-official.

  • Many extensions don't work (Score:3, Informative)

    by wk633 ( 442820 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @05:54PM (#14142388)
    Meaning you may well want to hold off until there is an official release, or until extension writers get a chance to catch up.

  • Is the Memory Leak fixed yet? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by noc007 ( 633443 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @07:20PM (#14143038)
    Have they fixed the memory leak yet? This is the biggest thing that's turned me off to FireFox. I reboot my computer about once every two months and in that time FireFox stays open. After a while I noticed FireFox is not properly releasing the memory it uses. 400MB of RAM was used above normal and FireFox was only claiming 120MB of it; closing down FireFox released all 400MBs of RAM. This is a normal thing and IMHO is not acceptible. FireFox's FAQ lists some 3rd party utility that keeps track of windows and tabs and restores them when the program is started up again. Another forum member suggested reducing the allowable cache size; this hasn't worked either.

    I was hoping this bug that's been around for a long time would have been resolved earlier on. I don't have a lot of motivation to try out this new version to see if it's been resolved.

  • First impressions: what's new in 1.5? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @07:40PM (#14143167)
    - An uglier, less-functional prefrences screen which hides more options at a time
    - New, non-standard "flat" look for the menus (presumably trying to emulate MS-office in windows XP)
    - Extension interface broken once again, so no 1.5 support for some extensions
    - new "Hey look, we're pretending to be IE!"-style error pages (less-intrusive than error popups, I'm mixed on this one.)
    - Some of the more-important functions of tabbrowser extensions seem to be included, but I'm not going to bother to disable tbe to find out if it's "good enough"
    - http://www.yzzerdd.com/ [yzzerdd.com], http://www.snopes.com/ [snopes.com] no longer seem to succeed at opening popups (Yes I'm against ad blocking, No I'm not against blocking browser-hijacking.)
    - Still seems to have whatever bug makes it sometimes simply "stop responding to all links", but now seems to recover from it after a long delay, rather than requiring browser restart.
    - No obvious improvements to the bookmarks panel
    - The incredibly stupid favorite-icon bug is still there. I dont know what idiocy causes this, but it certainly /looks/ a lot like something being left uninitialized or simply an offbyone error. Seriously, what is wrong that you havent fixed this by now?

    So, verdict for the moment: Less fun to look at, more good.

  • Deer Park? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ozbird ( 127571 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @12:37AM (#14144706)
    After spending money advertising Firefox to gain brand recognition, why does the Firefox 1.5 final version still have "Deer Park" labelling all over it? Giving the development version a code name is fine, but users should not have visibility of this.

    As an analogy, imagine demonstrating Linux to your CIO and the first thing he sees is "Now booting Zonked Quokka"...

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