The first impressions

Sep 7, 2005 12:44 GMT  ·  By

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.