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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox 1.5 RC2 Available 297

ltwally writes "Although not posted on the Mozilla website yet, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is out. You can grab it here. As of right now, it is available for Linux (i686), Mac OS X and Windows. Happy updating!"
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Firefox 1.5 RC2 Available

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  • by puppetman ( 131489 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:16PM (#14002427) Homepage
    It will automagically do the update (after asking you first). Mine did about 3 hours ago.

    My Help->About still says plain old 1.5, however.
  • Only en-US so far... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iworm ( 132527 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:21PM (#14002499)
    The update, at the time of posting, is only available for en-US builds so far. Now I know that that's all that matters, but if you're running RC1 non-en-US then the update might be a little time away yet.

    Perchance that's why it's not been publicised yet, and further perchance that's what the poster or editors might have noticed? Sorry, dreaming there for a moment...
  • by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:23PM (#14002516)

    ltwally writes "Although not posted on the Mozilla website yet, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is out. You can grab it here.

    What exactly is wrong with waiting for the official announcement? Posting the link - and inciting a /.ing - seems like a rude gesture toward an organization techies generally profess to love. Did it occur to anyone that maybe the mozilla folks didn't feel ready to announce the release?? If they did, don't you think the announcement would have been added to their site? (Despite the summary, it appears that 1.5 RC2 was actually there yesterday (09 Nov).)

  • by xikzantric ( 929298 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:23PM (#14002525)
    It seems like most of the advances that Firefox made vs. IE have now been neutralized (popup blocking, tabbed browsing, etc.). What new ideas/innovations are the Firefox team making these days to stand out in the browser wars?
    • by zulux ( 112259 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:31PM (#14002616) Homepage Journal
      It seems like most of the advances that Firefox made vs. IE have now been neutralized [snip] What new ideas/innovations are the Firefox team making these days to stand out in the browser wars?

      Security.

      Internet Explorer still is an ActiveX exploit away from wiping you files.
    • by sedyn ( 880034 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:32PM (#14002628)
      Despite all those features, as long as technical people can recommend firefox as a means to prevent spy/ad-ware to non-technical people it'll continue to spread.

      Innovation is great, but adding features for the sake of adding features is what caused a lot of trouble for IE in the first place.
    • Is there really a browser war, or is this the megalomaniac in we geeks that says any open source project just has to kill, crush and conquer? Isn't this what makes Microsoft evil?

      I use Firefox. I use it because it's the best, not because I have some desire to up a statistic that really doesn't tell anyone anything anyway or help the FOSS movement's world domination push. Can't we just say Firefox was first to market with some pretty damn innovative features and leave it at that?

      To be honest, I'd rather Fire
    • It can be uninstalled very easily. Try doing that with IE.
    • by Ythan ( 525808 ) <ythan&taconic,net> on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:49PM (#14002784) Homepage
      I think extension support is the single most significant feature of Firefox. Sure you can add functionality [imageshack.us] to IE but it's not as easy as packaging up some Javascript. This extensibility lets Firefox support new and unimagined features without adding bloat. It wouldn't surprise me if IE moves in this direction eventually just to stay competitive.
    • And they are even working on an amazing copy of the Web Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and some sort of GreaseMonkey userscript tool.

      Well the best reason is of course to look cool and impress your family at birthday parties. A good second is MS-bashing, always fun.

      For me, I love Firefox because
      - I can start typing in a page and FIND things
      - I can easily write userscripts for Greasemonkey to improve websites. For example on a forum I can keep my personal blacklist, reorder the page,
    • XForms and SVG!
    • What new ideas/innovations are the Firefox team making these days to stand out in the browser wars
      Not a whole lot. They're just making a fast, slim, and secure browser. On the other hand, most of the innovation and neat stuff is happening because of extension authors.
    • by digidave ( 259925 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @07:46PM (#14003296)
      What are they doing? With 1.5...

      1. Improved the rendering engine (through Gecko)
      2. Better tab behaviour (drag and drop placement, better default behaviour)
      3. New faster updates that don't require a reinstall
      4. SVG support

      And more, but I can't remember every big change from the changelog at the moment. Don't forget that this is a minor release, not a major release. It's mostly refining and improving features from 1.0. You can expect bigger changes in 2.0. With any luck, 2.0 will be out in time to greet IE 7.
    • From the release notes:

      "New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6".

      Isn't enough?
    • Are you on crack? Just check out these babies and then come back and talk to me about innovation:

      Bork Bork Bork [mozilla.org]

      Eggon [mozilla.org]

      Firesomething [mozilla.org]

      It's not just about tabs and security you know. Firefox extends and enhances my productivity and gives me extra functionality, functionality that makes my co-workers all go "Ooooohhhhhh...that's so coool! Show me how to do that"
      In an increasingly technologically savvy and cynical workforce (our admin is incompetent and an asshole) I'm re-introducing a sense of wonderme

    • " It seems like most of the advances that Firefox made vs. IE have now been neutralized "

      Most? Most? I think not. After three years of complete stagnation IE has come within 50 or 60% of the features of firefox I rely on daily. These come immediately into mind.

      Find as you type, mouse gestures, flashblock, adblock, live bookmarks, nuke anything (great for printing!), web developer, foxylicious, and of course bork bork bork!.

      Whenever I am forced to use IE I feel like somebody tied my hands behind my back.
  • by Critical_ ( 25211 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:25PM (#14002549) Homepage
    If you're running RC1 already, the posted links have .MAR files available to perform an update without redownloading the entire binary. Windows users should be careful because .MAR is associated with Microsoft Access in Office 2003 (maybe earlier versions but this is all I checked with). Anyway, info on how to update with .MAR files is here:

    Manually Installing a MAR File [mozilla.org]

    ----
    Car pictures gallery [ranaventures.com]
  • Changelog (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anti-Trend ( 857000 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:29PM (#14002598) Homepage Journal
    I went to hunt down the changelog, and since I had to compile a list of changes from a few sources I will go ahead and reproduce the whole thing here:

    * Fixed: 314241 - "Report broken web site" toolbar button is broken when using "small icons".

    * Fixed: 313490 - Enable IDN for .org.

    * Fixed: 313894 - Reporter chrome is registered twice.

    * Fixed: 313360 - Profile locking doesn't work if the profile is located on a FAT partition.

    * Fixed: 314754 - "Extension compatibility updates" check never completes.

    * Fixed: 314684 - Endless update loop from firefox 1.5 beta2 to 1.5 rc1 if 1.0.x was ever installed

    * Fixed: 312777 - Negative margins cause floated elements to be placed to the right of incorrect earlier boxes (since March 2005).

    * Fixed: 312363 - document.write into iframe results in broken-lock icon

    * WFM: 314484 - Firefox 1.5 RC1 topcrash [@ 0xffffff4d] [@ js_GC]

    * Fixed: 309044 - Flashplayer 8 "Bad NPObject as private data!"

    * Fixed: 314258 - ExtensionItemUpdater:checkForDone: Failure in listener's onAddonUpdateEnded.

    * Fixed: 315017 - [Linux] Undetermined progressmeter doesn't work.

    * Fixed: A few potential security holes.

    * Fixed: 313414 - Add a way to do "sandboxed" http connections that don't modify the cookie list.

    * Fixed: 314465 - Implement a non-copyingCompareUTF8toUTF16.

    * Fixed: 263042 - Ship both autocomplete impls with the new-toolkit

    * Fixed: 264308 - Implement DOM Level 3 UserData API.

    * Fixed: 314218 - New version of JEP (0.9.5+a), please land on trunk and branch.

    * Fixed: 147670 - Wrong (last or empty) tooltip text displayed for dropdown list menu items.

    * Fixed: 226094 - Support JavaScript Core for WinXP AMD64.

    * Fixed: 314549 - Various bugs involving containers not actually fixed for subframes.

    * Fixed: 312036 - History.dat contains entries deleted from the "date and site" view.

    * Fixed: Several fixes for specific DHTML performance tests.

    * Fixed: 312804 - No longer shows loading-image.gif when loading images

    * Fixed: 309706 - Stack overflow crash [@ jpinscp.dll + 0xaa87] (since Sept 22).

    • * Fixed: 313490 - Enable IDN for .org.

      I hope they don't mean by default, or if they do I hope that it retains my settings for blocking IDN! IDN for a native English speaker has basically zero benifit and can only lead to many problems like phishing sites that use UNICODE character replacements for legit sites.
    • Re:Changelog (Score:5, Informative)

      by jesser ( 77961 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @10:24PM (#14004340) Homepage Journal
      If you're going to copy information from The Burning Edge [squarefree.com] without attribution, at least get it right. You included several bugs that were only fixed on the trunk.
  • by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:30PM (#14002601)
    Now I can embed SVG images into my pages. Exported from OpenOffice Draw, of course. "This site best viewed with a modern browser. Get Firefox 1.5 now, you Neanderthal!"
  • by Maxmin ( 921568 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @06:45PM (#14002755)
    Under Windows XP, Firefox has become my browser of unchoice, because it's clipboard functionality is totally borked. I posted to bugzilla, and saw that about a million other people have too.
    • What clipboard bug? Most of the clipboard bugs I know of occur only when running Firefox under XFree86 (i.e. on Linux).
      • Well the most notable clipboard bug under Linux is when in KDE you accidentely middle click. The problem with just removing this though is it's sometimes damned useful to middle click (for example when trying to go to an unlinked URL you can just double click to highlight and middle click to go to that URL), it's just annoying when you do it accidentely. They should have an option to disable middle click if you'd like.
    • Apparently you're not alone since this got moderated up. I haven't run into any clipboard bug - can you provide a URI or a description of the problem?
    • by DarkEdgeX ( 212110 ) on Friday November 11, 2005 @01:13AM (#14005213) Journal
      Yeah, this happens to me as well. I usually do Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy from the address bar to an open chat window in another application, and sometimes it will, for seemingly no reason, not work. Sometimes I'll even try Ctrl+X (cut), and sure enough, when I do this the text disappears from the address bar (indicating it recognized the cut operation), but it still won't paste! Just to verify it's not the chat app but Firefox, I open Notepad and still can't paste.

      Oddly, if I beat the unholy shit out of Ctrl+C it will, sometimes, eventually work. Sometimes.
  • Adblock Extension (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have been unable to get the Adblock Extension working under any of the 1.5 version releases till now. Any ideas??
  • The most noticeable difference I am seeing in this release is load times on my Powerbook. RC1 was hovering around 8-10 second initial load time and RC2 is now 1-2 seconds.

    This was my one gripe with Firefox on OSX, and it now seems to have been fixed, and too my untrained eye it even seems to be quicker all-round over Safari.
  • If you're running Windows x64, there aren't any native RC2 binaries available yet. However, you can check out this site for Deer Park Alpha 2 (latest) binaries and information on how to build your own Windows 64-bit Firefox-ness from source.

    http://www.mozilla-x86-64.com/ [mozilla-x86-64.com]

    (Or, of course, you can just use the 32-bit version, but that's no fun.)
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10, 2005 @07:12PM (#14003004)

    The Firefox 1.5rc2 release is nearly ready to be announced. When it is, we'll update our website to point you to the installer files with links that use our load balancer. A note: going to our FTP site directly will hammer all mirrors evenly which is bad for those smaller mirrors that aren't as bandwidth-laden as our bigger mirrors.

    If you can't wait for your Firefox 1.5rc2 fix, though, feel free to download Firefox 1.5b2 or 1.5rc1 [mozilla.org] and then use software update (Help -> Check for Updates...) to grab the 1.5rc2 update. The updates for both to 1.5rc2 are less than a meg!

    Chase, the build/release guy at Mozilla

  • Great! Links to a new software release, without a single word as to bug fixes, new features or potential problems. In other words, we have the software, but we don't have any information with which to make a sensible decision to install it — or not. Talk about compulsive upgrading.
  • by Tezkah ( 771144 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @08:31PM (#14003692)
    ... and it just now gets posted on Slashdot?

    Why all the fuss about Release Candidate #2... with some minor bug fixes, when Opera released a technical preview of their next generation browser, Opera 9.0/Merlin [opera.com]?

    Sometimes I wonder if Mozilla has been putting some of their advertising dollars at work here...
  • by CritterNYC ( 190163 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @09:43PM (#14004108) Homepage
    Portable Firefox has been updated to the 1.5 RC2 release. For the unfamiliar, Portable Firefox allows you to carry your whole web browser along with all your bookmarks and extensions with you on a USB thumbdrive, iPod, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it right into any Windows computer and use it just like you would on your own. It is a repackaged version of Firefox designed with portability in mind, so it has all the same great features, but there's nothing to install.

    Portable Firefox 1.5 RC2 [johnhaller.com]

    And if you're a fan of the portable apps, Portable Gaim 1.5 Beta [johnhaller.com] was released to day, as was Portable Apps Suite [johnhaller.com], a preconfigured suite of portable applications including Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, NVU, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, FileZilla and Gaim.
  • Download Resuming (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThePeices ( 635180 ) on Thursday November 10, 2005 @10:37PM (#14004402)
    One feature id really like to see firefox support is download resuming. Adding Getright-like features to the download manager would be a great feature. There isnt even an extention available to do this....

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