Other Sites
"This new release brings Firefox closer to its much-anticipated 1.0 release, which will mark a milestone in the history of the Mozilla Foundation," says Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation.
A number of key improvements in this release make this the best time yet for users to reload their browser experience and migrate to Firefox. "Months of development and hundreds of open source developers contributed towards this release, working within the Mozilla Foundation's proven development model," commented Ben Goodger, Firefox' Lead Engineer.
Last week's FireFox 0.9 release candidate seemed to work fine on my Pismo PowerBook, but for some reason and was not a happy camper at all on my iBook, with extremely slow start-ups, hangs, lockups, required force-quits, in general ugly behavior untypical of this usually smoothly and slick browser. Happily, installation of FireFox 0.9 seems to have banished the gremlins, and its performance is back to what I've come to expect of FireFox.
FireFox 0.9 for OS X has a new user interface theme. I'm not crazy about the look, which is more plain-vanilla generic then the development interface was, but the larger buttons are more practical than the tiny former ones.
So far, the reluctance to display page or tab content coming out of "hide" mode seems to be fixed, as does do some erstwhile scrolling issues. I put FireFox the 0.9 through its paces last evening, and found that it performs flawlessly.
New features in Firefox 0.9 include:
• SmartUpdate: A new SmartUpdate feature notifies users of new versions of Firefox to ensure that the browser is always up to date.
• Extension/Theme Manager: New Extension and Theme Managers provide a convenient and secure way to manage and update the hundreds of add-ons that set Firefox apart from other browsers.
• New Default Theme - An updated Default Theme now presents a uniform appearance across all three platforms . Finetuning for GNOME will follow in future releases.
• Comprehensive Data Migration - Switching to Firefox has never been easier now that Firefox imports data like Favorites, History, Settings, Cookies and Passwords from Internet Explorer. Firefox can also import from Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 4.x, 6.x and 7.x and Opera. MacOS X and Linux migrators for browsers like Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror etc will arrive in future releases.
• Help - A new online help system is available
• Lots of bug fixes and improvements - Copy Image, the ability to delete individual items from Autocomplete lists, SMB/SFTP support on GNOME via gnome-vfs, better Bookmarks, Search and many other refinements fine tune the browsing experience.
• Mozilla Firefox 0.9 also includes numerous bug fixes and incremental improvements, including faster page load speed.
FireFox, along with its stablemate Mozilla. and Safari are the most comprehensively mature browsers for OS X. Of the three, FireFox would still be my choice if I were limited to one browser. It's fast, stable, has a full range of upto date features, and I very rarely encounter a Web site it can't handle.
On the downside, FireFox still doesn't support OS X Services, and page saves in text only mode are still an ugly mess. Nice as it is, there's still lots of room for improvement with FireFox.
At 8 MB and change, FireFox is a reasonable download even for dial-up users like me. Installation is a simple drag & drop, and FireFox imparts bookmarks history, settings, cookies and passwords from Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera.
Mozilla Firefox is freeware
Firefox 0.9 is available as a free download from http://www.mozilla.org . Users can also purchase a CD edition from the Mozilla project's web site.
For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Tags: OSX Odyssey ï
(0) Trackbacks ï
Bug 40873 <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40873> is where to go to vote for the page saving “bug”. How Mozilla classifies a missing feature a “bug” and then wants to vote on it defies reason, but that is what they do. Moz/Fox/Camino all suffer from the lack of this feature.
The development team seems to lack focus and direction in the establishment of objectives for the development of this and the other Mozilla.org projects.
IE, and more recently, but less efficiently, iCab are the only browsers which save web pages in a single file and preserve the URL so that you can easily go to the saved page to see if there is anything new.
Firefox does boast some *very* impressive download speeds. It is presently my “dedicated download browser” for any larger downloads.
The wonderful *volunteers* who steadfastly maintain the development of Camino will dispute this, but I believe that both Camino and Firefox suffer because of the dilution of effort between the two browsers. Still, I greatly admire and respect the Camino developers commitment to creating a browser “in their image” even when that image differs from what I believe is the better path.
On the other hand, isn’t it great to have a choice of browsers?