Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Is Available for Download

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Mozilla has released the first beta of what will be known as Firefox 1.5. We installed Beta 1 without any difficulty, but when we launched it, Firefox had a problem with some extensions which were incompatible with the 1.5 Beta 1 version; in order to proceed we had to press the Cancel button. The interface looks the same and the buttons are placed in the same way as in the previous version, so if you expected some changes, you would be disappointed. We didn't encounter any compatibility issues with Firefox 1.0.6 and the new Beta 1 had no difficulty to import the bookmarks, the home page and the user's profile. The most significant changes occurred in Options menu; now, the available options are arranged horizontally, not vertically, giving it a much more organized look. Mozilla stuck to its promise and the new browser has now a better updating system, which allows the updates to be more easily applied and the tabs to be dragged&dropped, a feature a lot of users have missed. Personally, I think that one of the biggest drawbacks is that Google Toolbar is not longer compatible with the browser (this doesn't apply to Yahoo toolbar) and the update module didn't find a new version. Let's hope that Google will post as soon as possible a new version of Google Toolbar. In a nutshell, Beta 1 looks like a promising start for next version of Firefox. Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is available for download here and has been certified by Softpedia as being 100% Clean.

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READER COMMENTS:

Comment #1 by: fatmouse on 07 Sep 2005, 15:44 UTC	reply to this comment
Once again Softpedia jumps the gun with a Firefox release. Nice job.

Comment #2 by: Nanobot on 07 Sep 2005, 18:36 UTC

reply to this comment

Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is not yet out. In fact, I believe they're still waiting for one last bug to be fixed. The release date is still planned for the 8th (tomorrow).

Softpedia likely downloaded a nightly build. Every day, the current development progress of Firefox is publicly available for download. These downloads are typically unstable and full of bugs and are not meant for the typical user to download. They're current pretty stable because we're so close to the Firefox 1.5 beta 1 release, but they still shouldn't be downloaded by anyone except testers and developers.

As for the extension problem, this has been true with every major release of Firefox. Extensions work sort of like patches to a program. If the internal code of the program is changed in the next version, those patches won't work right. To ensure that users don't install incompatible extensions that might break the browser, extensions include data about compatible version ranges. Some extensions might just guess that the internal Firefox code won't change too much by 1.5 and say that they're compatible with 1.5 as well. Others, like the Google Toolbar, play it safe and only claim compatibility with versions it's been tested on. Firefox won't let you install an extension that doesn't claim to be compatible, for the user's protection.

Comment #3 by: michperu on 08 Sep 2005, 15:02 UTC	reply to this comment
MOFU still working in Firefox 1.5 Beta 1.

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