FireFox 1.5 Released
FireFox 1.5 was released yesterday. I've now upgraded and can report the the process was very smooth and I was able to find updates for most of my extentions, including all of my most used extentions. This is a major upgrade, but except for the faster performance moving between pages with the back and forward buttons (doing so now seems as fast as Opera) none of the changes seemed immediately apparent, so here's what's new in Firefox 1.5 (from the release notes):
* Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
* Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
* Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
* Improvements to popup blocking.
* Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
* Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
* Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.
* Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
* Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
* Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
* New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
* Many security enhancements.
The Frugal Webmaster strongly suggests upgrading as soon as you are able or switching to FireFox if you are still uing Internet Explorer.