Seeing the buzz in the blogosphere about the latest Firefox release, version 1.5, I naturally downloaded and installed the Web browser today.
I have used Firefox for close to two years now and was relieved to see that little had changed with regard to its look and feel. Most importantly, it still opens quickly and runs light, using few system resources.
The one frustration I had following installation was with plug-in incompatibilities. Firefox’s greatest strength, its Open Source model, is also a bit of an enemy as the plug-in architecture evolves leaving some plug-ins I loved behind for the time being.
Though I haven’t had time to investigate the new version thoroughly, Mozilla says that the new version adds support for more advanced JavaScript, CSS, and DHTML, along with accessibility improvements.
I hope they fixed the print stylesheet limitations that have been frustrating me … come on Mozilla, focus on the basics! Overall, this looks like a solid step towards a standards compliant browser. It has (mostly) been a joy to design Web sites for Firefox and it looks like it is getting better.
November 30th, 2005
