Monday, December 26, 2005

Firefox 1.5

Well Mozilla Firefox 1.5 has been out for a while and is probably worth upgrading to.

For me its always about the smoothest and easiest upgrade path and I would have to say that this is the best firefox release so far in that regard.

Of course for a vanilla install of previous versions, upgrading is no problem, but as soon as you add in third party extensions to any application there is the potential that these applications will not be supported in a new kernel.

However where previous upgrades (actually re-installing the app by running the new install exe) have simply either added a second vanilla version of the browser (pre V1.0) or replaced the current version (V 1.0x) this version works a little differently. The application is replaced completely but the existing profiles are maintained and equally importantly the extensions are retained. Now most of the extensions then need upgrading to work with the new version, but this has also benn smartened up. Where you needed to individually check extensions for upgrades, now clicking the upgrade button will check all extensions and provide the new install file for download and install if you desire.
I did have some extensions that were no longer supported. Specifically SyncMarks and Bookmarks Synchroniser but also Google PageRank Status. This is a pity as I used to synchronise my bookmarks to an xml file on my webserver and be able to access it from clients.
Good News - I found a rewrite for SyncMarks so it works again.
However I mostly use Windows Favorites now (thanks to the extension called PlainOldFavorites) and these synchronise with my SBS server (or could be backed up manually if you have just a single PC).
Firefox now installs with a single extension already installed called Talkback.

Firefox also have a nice new central page that opens on install with links to extensions, media plug-ins such as flash, shockwave and java etc.

Well done Firefox!


Posted by: Jethro | 9:05 AM |