The latest Firefox release came out sometime early this morning. I installed it at my house and had only 1 minor problem. When I first double clicked the executable it just kinda waited at the very first screen for a while, it eventually allowed me to click the “next” button, but I was just a little worrisome initially.
I installed it at work as well and it had no such problem.
Download Firefox 1.0 Preview Release here.
I’ve noticed a few pretty neat inprovements:
- Integrated RSS reader, look in the bottom right of the screen for a red “RSS”
- It seems to be able to check for new mail, too. Perhaps this is because I have Thunderbird open; perhaps because it has the same profile? I’m not really sure the cause. I noticed “Read mail (0 new)…” under my Tools menu. I don’t think I’ll use that option very much, but it still seemed neat.
- I’m not exactly sure if this is an improvemnt or not, but I’ll list it nonetheless. The upgrade process was very easy and quite intuitive. I’ve always done new installs in new directories, so perhaps that’s why it’s always been easy and painless for me, who knows. The point is, it asked me if I wanted to include bookmarks from other browser installations I had, which, if memory serves me, was one of the complaints about previous versions. It also checked my installed extensions and told me which ones wouldn’t work with the new version and then asked if I’d like to check for new versions of said extensions. The only hiccup with this is that my Web Developer Extension, which it said was not compatible, actually was, so who knows. Find out for yourself.
I’ll list other observations of note as they come along.
Two more things that I noticed, adjustments to “Find” and encrypted pages.
Encrypted pages now have the address bar background color set to yellow. This effect is just another way of telling people that the page they’re on is encrypted, the only other way was that little yellow lock in the bottom right corner. Simple but effective.
The other is Find. Press Ctrl+F and find pop’s up in the bottom of the screen. Not as a pop-up though, but more as a small menu bar on the bottom. It’s non-intrusive nature is what I like about it, that and the ability to highlight with a simple button. This highlighting feature is also persistant across multiple websites assuming you have it on.
Those two are the only notable things so far other than what I already listed.
Oh, I forgot to mention my thoughts on the RSS features. It initially seemed useful, however it doesn’t seem to change the bookmark itself in any way once you’ve read the post. Something as simple as changing the background color, color, font, font weight, or icon would suffice.
Someone look into that.
Damn, I keep finding stuff. 🙂
With regard to that apparent Thunderbird interaction thing, I now noticed that underneath the “Read Mail (1 new)…” option there is a “New Message…” option. The only caveat, it doesn’t work, whoops.
If Thunderbird is closed and I click the “Read Mail,” then it opens Thunderbird for me. Just an FYI.
Another added feature that I noticed is that in the secondary search bar, defaulted previously with Google search, now has more default engines: Amazon, Dictionary, eBay, Google, and Yahoo. That’s helpful.
Now another complaint; I used the dictionary feature of Firefox before every now and again, it was great. All I had to to do was type “dict” in the address bar and wammo, it took me to dictionary.com and performed my search. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the secondary search engine that would work for dictionary.com, but that was a few too many extra clicks.
Well now it doesn’t work, shit. It now takes me directly to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” search for whatever you type in the address bar that is not formatted as a URL. Damn it, someone make it work like it did, I liked that feature.
Go now.