Skip to content

The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

  1. thebigreason
  2. blog
  3. Firefox 1.5 Beta Friendlier But Still For Windows

Firefox 1.5 Beta Friendlier But Still For Windows

Just downloaded the Firefox 1.5 Beta and was curious to read about what people's first thoughts were. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one awake so far, so I'm going to take it upon myself to give you my first thoughts on the Mac version.

The good with the bad:

  • The preferences have been retooled to be more Mac-like, but the implementation of the tabs in the preferences are left over from the Puma/Jaguar days.
  • Drag and drop tabs are great. They use an arrow icon to show you where you are dropping the tab. Use of animation would have been more consistent with the Mac UI, and there are still no close tab icons on each tab.
  • Safari Bookmarks import is very easy, but there is no option to replace all the default Firefox bookmarks. It merges them instead.
  • New SVG and CSS3 support added, but not the multiple background image property—one of the coolest parts of the CSS3 spec IMO.

Still beta and still an improvement, but besides the dragging and dropping of tabs, it still doesn’t hold a candle to Safari. It’s also still not Cocoa, so no spell check, dictionary, services menu, and text rendering is very short of elegant. With out these capabilities, it’s still just a Windows port.

Important Note: Installing this version will probably break any extensions you have. It broke my web developers toolbar but it did warn me that it was probably going to.