Firefox 1.5 Beta : Small Warning

[RoyGBiv]

Someone posted in the Lounge last night that Firefox 1.5 Beta is out and available for the brave.

I've been using it for a couple days now, and I can confidently report that so far, it is incredibly cool. The developers have changed the way the forward and back buttons work so that this is now incredibly fast. Many of the ways site developers have found to get around the popup blocker have been locked down. I'm also getting better page rendering times on some sites that were troublesome with the current release.

However, I'll offer a warning. Almost none of the extensions out right now have been updated to be compatible with the new version. That is to be expected, but it's a bit distracting to have been using a heavily customized version of the program and then suddenly not have all those bits and pieces I use so often. I miss my scrapbook!

Also -- and here's the real problem at the moment -- some of the themes *have* been updated and some of those will *not* work correctly now. (This of course is a problem with the theme, not FF itself, but the headache is just the same.) I updated ColorGnome for 1.5, for example, which was at the time the theme I was using. I then started FF and got a bizarre display with menus all in black ... I mean ALL black. I couldn't see what I was selecting. Also, some of the text was rendered in system default, which made it HUGE on my screen. I had to use trial and error to find the thing and un-install it before I got a normal display back.

Anyway, when the details are worked out and the extensions are updated, I think this will be a highly recommended update that will address some issues some people have with FF at present.

[charlie]

1. Is native SVG support working?

It's supposed to be in the upcoming 1.5 release. It'll be nice to finally have an open standard for vector graphics (Flashaholics, pay attention!) widely available by default.

Can't vouch for it, but some extensions that could work are disabled by a check against app.extensions.version in about:config, so setting that to 1.0 might allow you to re-customize your browser.

I've downloaded the beta and plan on installing it as soon as I can be arsed to do the prep and backups. Thanks for the report, I appreciate it!

[RoyGBiv]

2. Not sure to what lengths ...

This is the list of what's included in the update:

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5b1.html

I note the implementation of SVG events but haven't tested this.

As for extensions, currently it seems only about half a dozen common extension have been updated. I tried the app.extensions.version thing, but I experienced browser crashes immediately. I haven't taken the time to determine which extension(s) was causing this.

It's only been out a few days, so this is to be expected, but I wasn't prepared for the problem with the theme and so thought I'd mention it.

The upgrade overall appears to be excellent, however.

[charlie]

3. Shame about the themes

I'm not a theme maven, I just try to find an ultra-minimalist one, the more inobtrusive, the better. My favorite by far:

https://addons.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Miscellaneous&numpg=10&id=131

hasn't been updated since 1.0 and I had to ditch it because it made 1.0.6 crashy. I'm using a stripped-down tiny version of Orbit right now and I hope I can continue to use it -- I can't stand Qute.