I’ve been running Firefox 1.5 all day on my iMac G5 and the update hasn’t disappointed me at all.
Here are a few of the new things I’ve noticed, good and bad.
- Fancy installer (dmg) on the Mac.
- Start up is slow the first time, but that’s because it’s upgrading everything. Be patient and let it do it’s thing.
- It saw all my old extensions and themes and updated what it could. Remember, if an extension or theme doesn’t work with FF 1.5 it’s the developers fault, not Firefox’s fault. The developers have had more then enough time to get their extensions and themes ready.
- New preferences layout. Much nicer.
- Drag and drop tabs, NICE!
- The RSS indicator button has moved up to the URL bar. Easier to see I guess. Just like Safari.
- ‘Copy Image’ is now an option when you right click on an image. I was waiting for this.
- ‘Set as Desktop Background’ is now an option on the Mac when right clicking on an image. Not sure where the image goes though.
- ‘Read Email’ and ‘New Message’ are now options on the Mac. Works with Mail.app and Thunderbird just fine.
- It now downloads updates to the browser and extensions in the background. Not sure how I feel about this as I’m no longer in control of when it checks for updates. Not sure how it does this either. If it updates an extension that I’m using, will that cause a conflict? Humm
- Super fast back and forward buttons. Mmm, the need for speed!
So far, I’m very happy with Firefox 1.5. Sure, not a lot of ground breaking features, but still a great upgrade.
I read an article on how if you highlight some text or click and drag for some reason it uses 100% of your cpu. I did try this out and found it do in fact use up 100% of my cpu but I don’t see that to be a big issue, never had a problem highlighting, copying or anything like that…
I found the 1.5 upgrade to be much faster and reliable on my 1.42 mini
I read over at tuaw.com that the processor issue “… is a carbon thing, not a firefox thing. Try the same thing with Photoshop, AppleWorks, or any other big carbon app. Same result. My guess is carbon is allocating resources the way OS9 used to.”
If that is the case then it hasn’t really been an issue for me in the past, unless I’ve always been robbing myself of CPU performance and I just don’t know what it’s like to have the better half lol. Interesting how if this is a Carbon issue why Apple has not yet done anything to change this, wonder how this is going to effect the newer intel machines.
Christopher, it happens in Appleworks too. It's not Firefox specific. 🙂
The click and drag and also highlighting text in Opera 8.51, Safari, and Camino does not exhibit this behavoir like we see in Firefox. Therefore it is our understanding that this is soley related to forefox itself. We call this “feature” a software bug. We used G5 Dual 2.5s for the testing of this issue.