Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
If you haven’t been following my updates on it so far, you’ve almost certainly heard of Firefox by now anyway. That won’t deter me from my usual milestone upgrade-o-push, though.
Though the new Firefox 1.0 Preview Release isn’t as packed with landmark new features as previous editions, the focus has largely been on fixing bugs and improving stability, along with minor enhancements for improved convenience. The bookmarks manager now has a folder pane on the left, for instance, and bookmark icons are much less prone to disappear over time. The default theme which drew much criticism on the initial release of Firefox 0.9 is greatly improved. In addition, there are a number of enhancements designed to prevent spoofing of browser windows and secure sites: the location bar is now highlighted and shows a lock icon on secure sites, and the status bar security area shows the host name to ensure you’re in the right place. By default, the status bar can no longer be hidden in popup windows.
One of the more interesting new features is the addition of Live Bookmarks, which allow you to keep track of news sites, blogs etc. which provide a syndication service. Look for the RSS icon on the right of the status bar to see where this is available. I may even work on hooking up CoN news or recent posts at some point, since there’s basic functionality for it built into the board. Also look out for the new find toolbar, which replaces the familiar old find dialog, searches while you type and includes the ability to highlight your search term in the document.
The popup blocker has been improved, and now allows user-requested popups to open during page load, as well as being better at blocking unrequested popups (though it doesn’t seem to work properly with the popular TBE extension, which probably needs updating). A Windows XP SP2-style information bar now appears when popups or extension installations are blocked, or when plugins are needed to display a page. While these are good for new users, I personally found the popup notification bar to be irritating; thankfully, it can be disabled very easily.
I know I say it every time there’s a new Firefox release, but this really is the best one yet, and a great excuse to try an alternative browser if you’ve never stepped away from Internet Explorer — the browser being able to update itself for future milestone releases is certainly a very promising feature in terms of ease of use.
If Firefox isn’t for you, you might consider trying Opera or the old Mozilla "1.x" Suite before heading back to Internet Explorer. If you’re determined to stick with IE or one of its variants, it’s a very good idea to make sure you have Windows XP Service Pack 2 installed, which provides security enhancements and, at last, popup blocking. It’s important to note, though, that there’s no way to obtain this IE update on anything other than Windows XP. There is also no improvement to Web standards support either, which is our main platform for bullying you all into changing browser, including the now pretty basic functionality of displaying PNG images correctly; it’s understood that this probably won’t even be improved in the next major release of Internet Explorer, which has been comfirmed only to be in production for the next version of Windows, codename “Longhorn”. In other words: don’t expect anything new from IE for a long time, if ever, and only if you’re prepared to shell out for a new OS. It’s also unlikely that future optional CoN styles will be available for Internet Explorer, if you care about that sort of thing.
If you want a Mozilla e-mail client to go with your Firefox browser, the excellent Thunderbird 0.8 was released at the same time as Firefox 1.0PR, now featuring the ability to import Outlook and Outlook Express messages, as well as store messages from POP3 accounts in a single inbox.
- Firefox Product Page
- Firefox 1.0PR Downloads
- BitTorrent tracker for Firefox releases
- The Burning Edge: Bigger Picture (notable changes in Firefox 1.0PR)
- Firefox Extensions
- Firefox Themes
- Warning: old extensions and themes from Firefox 0.9.x may not be compatible with 1.0PR.
- Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8
- Opera Software
- Mozilla Suite
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Tiddles |
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| Member Since: 2001-01-01 | |
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Comments
| Zephir | Comment 1: 2004-09-14 09:51 |
| Awesome. =D I'm digging my new theme and the Adblock extension I'm itching to use.  | |
| Endless Knight | Comment 2: 2004-09-14 12:20 |
I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firebird and it gets better with every update. Tabbed browsing is the way to be and it's always great when you don't support Microsoft and help the "little" guy.  Thanks for the update Tiddles! | |
| Tiddles | Comment 3: 2004-09-14 12:32 |
For any Windows users who need to install the Java plugin, my instructions from the previous thread might help:
In the Firefox 0.9 topic, Dark Paladin rightly commented that the scroll position when using the back button usually returned to the top of the page rather than your previous position. This doesn't seem to have been as much of a problem for me in recent builds, so give it a go and let me know if it's improved any for you. He also commented that it would be useful to be able to drag bookmarks, and I agreed that this feature was missing. However, it now appears to be there, at least in the bookmarks menu and toolbar... even in my old copy of Phoenix 0.5! I'm pretty sure the reason I thought you couldn't do this was because I only tried dragging folders around, which doesn't work. It's quite possible to drag bookmarks up and down the menu and into and out of different subfolders, though, and to drag links and the URL bar text into the menu to create a bookmark. I hope that's useful for anyone who hadn't noticed the feature. | |
| SECProto | Comment 4: 2004-09-18 03:18 |
| I've been using firefox since it was version 0.5 or 0.6, and loved it. The best part was tabbed browsing, until i discovered adblock, which became my new favourite part. I'm personally going to wait until 1.0 final before installing it, so that i won't have to update as much. Just a bit of lazyness I suppose. | |
| Tiddles | Comment 5: 2004-09-18 10:10 |
| 1.0PR contains some important security fixes, so it's an extremely good idea to upgrade any previous versions. Treat it like another milestone build, which is what it is. It's only called 1.0PR because, well, where do you go after 0.9? Internally, 0.10, but people who expect version numbers to be real decimals confuse that with 0.1, which it certainly isn't. 1.0 final won't be out until mid-late October at the very earliest, and given that 1.0PR was scheduled for August, it's a fair bet that it'll slip. | |
| Electricbassguy | Comment 6: 2004-10-20 06:14 |
| Firefox is vastly superior to IE. IE is full of spyware. Firefox has tabbed browsers. That alone makes it the best in my book. | |
| Alfredo | Comment 7: 2004-10-20 16:44 |
| I like firefox. Tabbed browsers is new and interesting and I love it. | |
| Elessar | Comment 8: 2004-10-28 14:47 |
| FF RC1 is just released, mostly bugfixes though. It looks more internal than a true RC, since PR was 'feature complete' already. | |
| Tiddles | Comment 9: 2004-10-28 15:08 |
| There's quite a lot of decent improvement in 1.0RC1, notably true single window mode, but it's only intended for users who particularly want to help test it. That's because the real Firefox 1.0 is just weeks away, and if you upgrade to a release candidate build, you won't be automatically notified by Firefox when the real 1.0 is available, since the internal version number is the same. If anyone does want to give it a go, though, it's mostly very stable. | |
| Elessar | Comment 10: 2004-10-28 15:35 |
| I think they also added some features to tabbed browsing, taken from yet another extension (just like single window). http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/ I highly suggest that site, as it has builds that have been optimized for PC architecture.  | |
| Silverlance | Comment 11: 2004-10-28 22:54 |
Quote (Electricbassguy @ 20th October 2004 01:14) Firefox is vastly superior to IE. IE is full of spyware. Someone clearly knows very little about how to use their browser. Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Disable all activeX stuff. OMG MAGIC PROTEKSHUN FROM SPYWARZ!  Now. Show me how to get FireFox to render XSLT transformations client-side and we'll call it even. ;P | |
| Rangers51 | Comment 12: 2004-10-29 01:16 |
Quote (Silverlance @ 28th October 2004 18:54) Quote (Electricbassguy @ 20th October 2004 01:14) Firefox is vastly superior to IE. IE is full of spyware. Someone clearly knows very little about how to use their browser. Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Disable all activeX stuff. OMG MAGIC PROTEKSHUN FROM SPYWARZ! Now. Show me how to get FireFox to render XSLT transformations client-side and we'll call it even. ;P What exactly are you trying to do? We just finished a site at my office for a huge company, rendered in XML with XSLTs, and it works just fine in Firefox. But I'll grant that I'm hardly an XML expert, so maybe you know what's up on your particular instance moreso than I. | |
| Elessar | Comment 13: 2004-10-29 02:04 |
Quote (Silverlance @ 28th October 2004 18:54) Quote (Electricbassguy @ 20th October 2004 01:14) Firefox is vastly superior to IE. IE is full of spyware. Someone clearly knows very little about how to use their browser. Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level -> Disable all activeX stuff. OMG MAGIC PROTEKSHUN FROM SPYWARZ! Now. Show me how to get FireFox to render XSLT transformations client-side and we'll call it even. ;P http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/faq.html That should answer whatever angst you have over the gecko engine. | |
| Tiddles | Comment 14: 2004-10-29 09:42 |
| Indeed, I did most of my testing for my old XSLT coursework at Uni using Firefox. It did seem to be more tempremental about including XSLT stylesheets than IE for my housemate, but I never had any problems. It does basically work. The security issue is getting overplayed these days, but the fact remains that it's much easier for a user who doesn't know how to configure IE securely and avoid spyware themselves to be infected via IE than Firefox, if only through relative obscurity. (IE6 SP2 isn't really much worse than Firefox in this case anyway.) I've always tried to be clear that the platform CoN recommends Firefox on is Web standards. It gets unbelievably tiring to produce a nice skin design that works great in Opera and Mozilla, and mostly in Konqueror and Safari, and then having to introduce a battery of hacks to make IE's hugely outdated CSS support produce anything close to the effect you were after. CoN3 is the worst offender; the pseudo-frameset effect can't be reproduced at all in IE. | |
| Elessar | Comment 15: 2004-10-29 12:36 |
Quote (Tiddles @ 29th October 2004 05:42) Indeed, I did most of my testing for my old XSLT coursework at Uni using Firefox. It did seem to be more tempremental about including XSLT stylesheets than IE for my housemate, but I never had any problems. It does basically work. The security issue is getting overplayed these days, but the fact remains that it's much easier for a user who doesn't know how to configure IE securely and avoid spyware themselves to be infected via IE than Firefox, if only through relative obscurity. (IE6 SP2 isn't really much worse than Firefox in this case anyway.) I've always tried to be clear that the platform CoN recommends Firefox on is Web standards. It gets unbelievably tiring to produce a nice skin design that works great in Opera and Mozilla, and mostly in Konqueror and Safari, and then having to introduce a battery of hacks to make IE's hugely outdated CSS support produce anything close to the effect you were after. CoN3 is the worst offender; the pseudo-frameset effect can't be reproduced at all in IE. Not to mention the only reason why most people use IE is in order to use ActiveX web-apps. Disabling it is gutting the only feature MS has over Mozilla. > Web design Nothing like spending 5 hours working on a great design, and then another 20 hours put in just so IE works along side of the other four (Opera, Gecko, Konqueror, Safari)? It's unbelievable how IE still hasn't fully implemented 4-year old standards like CSS2 or PNG support. PNG support alone irritates me to no end, as an alpha layer makes skinning sites far easier. | |
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