Firefox 1.5 Software and Technology

Tuesday, November 29 2005

Firefox 1.5 has been released, and is available for download at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. While superficially it looks like nothing has changed, there are some huge improvements hidden just below the surface.

Native, albeit incomplete, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support (finally!)
Memory-cached back/forwards
An improved extension model (already the most powerful part of Firefox)
A variety of CSS3 additions, including multi-column layouts (huge for those blogs that insist on a 10 character wide text area)
A tremendously powerful <canvas> element that allows for programmatic "drawing"

All of these are fantastic to see - Firefox really is blazing its own path now, no longer caught in the no-win situation of simply following Microsoft's lead. Of course Firefox has been better at standards conformance and nuances of CSS for some time, but that doesn't really inspire a lot of end-user adoption - it's the features that matter, and in that domain it has taken a hefty lead (including over anything I've seen with IE 7).

I've been using Opera 8 as my primary browser for several months, after a couple of years with Firefox as my mainstay. Given some of the improvements I think I'm going to switch back.

Software Development

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Reader Comments

I am in the same situation: loyal firefox user for years. Switched to Opera a couple of months ago, and now doubting whether I should switch back. There are a couple of wonderful new Firefox extensions, like del.icio.us integration.

I do like Opera for e-mail, though. What do you use for e-mail?

lena @ 11/30/2005 3:00:58 PM

Admittingly I still stick with Outlook - as far as email goes I'd say that it is adequate, so I've never really investigated alternatives. The last email client I used before Outlook...geesh that had to be Pegasus way back during the dial-up days. It was a pretty good piece of software.

Extensions are definitely the killer app for Firefox. The remarkable thing is that the current extensions are just barely touching the surface - it is remarkable how flexible and expandible the infrastructure of Firefox really is.

Dennis Forbes @ 11/30/2005 9:10:27 PM

Ah, now I understand why you need the killer machine you posted about in your energy-savings post :)

I actually also used Outlook when I used Firefox, and the major reason for switching to Opera for web and mail was that the performance became too bad with 'only' 256 MB of memory.

lena @ 12/1/2005 8:18:00 AM

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About the Author

Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.

He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.

Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.