Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Firefox 1.0
So, I'd been waiting to update most of my machines until the official 1.0 release. I had 0.7 on my machine at work and 0.8 at home. Yesterday morning I happened to browse to Mozillazine and wondering why it was so slow, I soon saw that 1.0 was out! This was fairly early in the morning and soon everything just halted as things got slashdotted (I'm sure Mozilla.org itself was long since down). In order to get the release, I ended up using the google cache of the mirrors page to find an ftp which had the release and torrents. I decided to go with torrents to help save someone's server and that worked great. It seemed like I wasn't doing any uploading, though, so I looked with TorrentSpy and saw 900 seenders and 50 downloaders. Talk about a nice ratio. :)
Anyway, I have to say I'm liking 1.0 a lot. It seems more stable and a bit more responsive than some of the previous versions and I'm ok with the default theme though gray is a bit blah... One nice thing is that secure page actually really stand out, with both the gold locks and gold url bar. I was pleasantly surprised by the new "search on this page" type bar which appears right above the status bar and scrolls down the to first instance as you type. You can even have it highlight all instances on the page at once.
Relating to blogging, it has a feature where most pages with RSS automatically show an icon in the corner letting you easily bookmark the feed. Then when you look in the bookmarks, it shows up as a folder with entry titles as items inside it. I think that's a bit too much on the basic side for me, but still pretty cool for those that want to get their feet wet with feeds.
I have to say that a definite lowlight to me is the fact that it still has no icon under windows in terms of the upperleft corner of the window and when minimized to the taskbar. Not a huge deal in terms of functionality, but it is one of the few things left that makes it seem a bit unprofessional. Why whould an app this big be showing a generic windows icon instead of its own logo? The other obvious lowlight is a lot of the extensions not working with the new version yet.
But overall I have to say that I'm really happy with it. It is such a world away from those early Mozilla versions ages ago and even the earlier incarnations of Firefox itself. Good going guys... it is looking pretty solid.
Edit: Aparantly the icon thing was just a Win98 issue. Thanks everyone who helped clear this up.. :)
Anyway, I have to say I'm liking 1.0 a lot. It seems more stable and a bit more responsive than some of the previous versions and I'm ok with the default theme though gray is a bit blah... One nice thing is that secure page actually really stand out, with both the gold locks and gold url bar. I was pleasantly surprised by the new "search on this page" type bar which appears right above the status bar and scrolls down the to first instance as you type. You can even have it highlight all instances on the page at once.
Relating to blogging, it has a feature where most pages with RSS automatically show an icon in the corner letting you easily bookmark the feed. Then when you look in the bookmarks, it shows up as a folder with entry titles as items inside it. I think that's a bit too much on the basic side for me, but still pretty cool for those that want to get their feet wet with feeds.
I have to say that a definite lowlight to me is the fact that it still has no icon under windows in terms of the upperleft corner of the window and when minimized to the taskbar. Not a huge deal in terms of functionality, but it is one of the few things left that makes it seem a bit unprofessional. Why whould an app this big be showing a generic windows icon instead of its own logo? The other obvious lowlight is a lot of the extensions not working with the new version yet.
But overall I have to say that I'm really happy with it. It is such a world away from those early Mozilla versions ages ago and even the earlier incarnations of Firefox itself. Good going guys... it is looking pretty solid.
Edit: Aparantly the icon thing was just a Win98 issue. Thanks everyone who helped clear this up.. :)
