New Firefox 1.5 beta is available

TechBlog blogged Beta 2 of Firefox 1.5 is now available.

Slashdot indicates the auto-update feature in the earlier beta of Firefox 1.5 will be triggered in a few days, allowing you to grab just a 700K download, rather than reinstalling the browser from scratch.

Firefox 1.5 beta is now available

TechBlog blogged For the feel-like-living-dangerously set, the beta version of Firefox 1.5 is now out.

I installed it, and 1 hour later, when it was about to begin reloading the RSS Feeds (Live Bookmarks) Firefox crashed. I started to go back to 1.0.6, but decided to leave it overnight. It stayed up overnight, but several things were not working, like being able to right click on properties and change a link, so I had to reboot. It will take a little more experimenting, but it appears the 5 minute lockup I had when the RSS Feeds were refreshed, seem to have dropped off to about 1 minute, but there are other strange things happening, so I am not sure.

Firefox 1.5

TechBlog reported BetaNews brings word that Firefox 1.5 beta will be released on Sept. 8.

The official announcement from the Mozilla Foundation is here.

Exactly what new features will be included is not yet clear, though BetaNews notes what's been in the alpha versions:

Alpha builds of the browser, code-named "Deer Park," have shown some of the features that may make it into the final version. Although, Mozilla has made no official announcement of the new features that are expected to be included in Firefox 1.5.

Some of the current enhancements include a better software update system to serve browser upgrades, the ability to reorder tabs through drag and drop functionality, and improved pop-up blocking.

Early alpha versions have also shown the 'SnapBack' technology that allows for faster navigation through Web pages. Also, better support has been announced for Mac OS X.

The list of fixed bugs is here, and it is being updated daily, but as of September 3, bug 295758 was not on the list

Firefox: Worse than Opera

Hennessy’s View blogged Anyone who has anything nice to say about Mozilla’s Firefox browser has such because of emotional bigotry, not objective analysis.

Respectfully I disagree. The 5 minute lockup every hour really ticks me off, but otherwise I am very happy with Firefox. I really like the Live Bookmarks (RSS Feeds) and Tabs have resulted in me saving a significant amount of system resources when I have a lot of windows open.

I have been running Firefox on both Linux (SuSE’s latest) and Windows (XP Pro SP2) since beta days. With each release and each patch, I expect the uncountable list of problems to abate. Instead, the list grows only longer. On Windows, Firefox has plenty of plug-ins, though not enough. It freezes constantly. It is unable to interprest RSS or RSS2 from most sites where other browsers, including the crappy Opera, have no trouble.

If you are talking about freezing once an hour, while it refreshes the RSS feeds, I agree. That is what I am talking about. Otherwise I have not seen any freezing.

On Linux, Firefox is even worse. It is hideously slow and has very few plug-ins. Those it does support—RealPlayer, for example—do not work as expected.

I can't comment on Linux, because I dont run Linux.

By comparison, the generic Mozilla browser is wonderful. All of its plug-ins work flawlessly without hours of administrative tweaking. It is fast, clean, and handles javascript errors better than any browser I have tested.

For usability, though, IE is still champion. (In case you’re wondering, until I can afford dual P4 3.0 ghz processors, I will not install Netscape, perhaps the worst commercially produced software ever written.) IE is fast, it has intelligent and configurable caching, and allows developers to do the things users demand. Its security problems are exclusively the result of its popularity.

It security problems are the reasons I dont use it unless I have to, and I think one reason for its security problems is its support for Active X

Firefox 1.0 had numerous, serious security holes. I can only assume that the rest of the application is so awful as to prevent its popularity from making it a target for hackers. Unless a 2.0 version comes that actually works, Firefox’s developers need not worry about that scenario.

Firefox Movie

The Clint Eastwood movie Firefox, where he is a retired military pilot recalled to steal a Soviet Aircraft, was on last night. He had to control the plane by thinking in Russian. The plane worked better than Mozilla's Firefox browser; at least it did not lock up for five minutes every hour.

An even more interesting fact is that the same day the Firefox movie came on, my volunteers and I were completing the last of over 200 refurbished computers that will be sent to Belarus, Russia, with a Cyrilic version of Windows. Click here for more information.

Now does anyone have a clue how to light a fire under the Firefox programmers to fix this bug?

Lockup Every Hour

I love FireFox, and particularly its LiveBookmark support of RSS feeds, and only slightly less its Tabbed Browsing. I even wrote several articles on it, including this and this.

But there is one thing about Firefox which really makes me mad. Every hour my computer locks up for about 5 minutes, with almost 100% CPU utilization, interleaved with short periods when the CPU utilization seems to drop off, but I still cant use my machine, because the Hard Drive is being accesses solidly. All of this is caused by Firefox updating my RSS feeds. I do have a large number of Live Bookmarks (RSS Feeds), but then that is the reason I use Firefox in the first place.

I certainly have reported the problem, but what else is there I can do? I finally decided to create this blog, in the hopes that others having the same problem could post their problems here as well, and maybe we can persuade someone to tackle these problems.

In my case, it would seem to me very reasonable if rather than just bitspinning while it is updating the RSS feeds, I wish the Firefox programmers would create a separate task to do the job, and give it a very low priority. It might not update as fast, but it could do its updates without disturbing what I am doing.

If for some reason they can't do that, then could they not make the one hour refresh a configurable time. If I could set the refresh to only happen every four hours, I could go eat lunch, or something like that, whenever they felt they needed to do an update. But not every 60 minutes, please.