Firefox 1.5 – Better and Worse
Couple of weeks ago Mozilla released Firefox 1.5. I have been using it since the it was in beta and RC. Now that it is officially released let’s see what is improved and what is not from 1.0.x.
New software update mechanism: It’s about time. Finally users can update the browser with small patches instead of downloading and installing the whole browser again. The problem is it’s not that stable. When I upgrade from RC to official release things didn’t go smoothly. It would keep saying there’s no update when there’s definitely one. May be it was a problem with the server, who knows. If anything, this new update mechanism is much^1000 better and the stability problems would probably be fixed over time. To me this is the most important new feature of 1.5.
New option dialogue box: It’s redesigned, but I’m not sure if it is better than the old one. It seems that the whole point is to make it looks more like Mac OS, since Firefox is also available on OS X. It’s not worse than before so I’m pretty indifferent about it.
Fast Back/Forward: They have implemented something called “bfcache” that allows much faster rendering when going back/forward. It’s a nice feature that makes navigation feels much faster. Unfortunately the downside is this feature makes the browser consumes even more memory than it already has. Firefox has been having problems with “memory usage” for quite a while and this just makes it worse. I’m not going to say “memory leaks,” otherwise some fanboys will start yelling “You noobs don’t know what memory leaks is so stop talking like you do!” But even if someone doesn’t say “memory leaks,” it still doesn’t change the fact that the browser uses crazy amount of memory and makes the system unresponsive. The only thing you can do is restart the browser, which can be annoying when you have 5+ tabs open. (Yes I know there’s a Session Saver extension, but it has its own problems.)
Supposedly, 1.5 fixes a number of memory-related bugs included the one that caused memory not being released when closing tabs. Unfortunately I don’t see a noticeable difference when I open 10 tabs then close 9 of them. One of my pet peeves did get fixed though: it used to be that Firefox’s memory use would shoot through the roof when browsing large PNG images, such as screenshots and wallpapers at Deviant Art. I can spend about 10 mins looking at PNG screenshots and watch Firefox’s memory go from 45mb to over 100mb. It drove me crazy and I’m glad it’s fixed.
Clear privacy data option: Firefox 1.5 has a new menu item called “Clear Privacy Data” that let’s you clear your history, cache, cookies, and other things in one fell swoop. It is a pretty useful feature, especially when it lets you clear the browser cache quickly, forcing it to release some memory back to the system.
Drag and drop tab reordering: No more miniT! Before 1.5 if you want to rearrange the order of the tabs you need to install the miniT extension. Now this feature is built-in! Being able to rearrange tab orders makes life so much easier.
There are also a good number of new features for web developers, such as JavaScript 1.6, SVG, and <canvas> support. I’m not going to list them all there. There’s a nice changelog that lists all the changes.
Overall Firefox 1.5 has a number a new features that I find very useful. It is worth the upgrade from 1.0.x. But I’m disappointed with its continued problems with memory usage. I hope the developers will start paying more attention to this, because I don’t think I need 1GB of ram just to use a web browser.
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