Just installed Firefox 1.5, released a couple of days ago.

I've been looking forward to this release ever since Kevin, who's been using the betas for a while, showed me a feature that'll make my life a little better.

In Firefox 1.0, if I'm in the middle of reading a web page and an email arrives, I would go to Thunderbird to read my email. If that new email happens to contain a link and I click on it, the link would be displayed in Firefox, replacing the page I was reading. If I was reading a plain old web page (POWP), I would go "Oops, didn't mean to do that," and click on the "Back" button. Trouble arises, however, if I was in some sort of a Weird Web Page (WWP, aka Web Application), click on the "Back" button would engender a dialog box that warns me about how the previous page contains POST data and would I like to repost the data to the website, etc., etc. Being the cautious person that I am, I would be too chicken to repost the data back! And guess what, I would be stuck. Even worse is if I have done any data entry since the last post, I would lose work. I have lost a couple of blog entries that way. (Oh, those were my best blog entries that the world would never see.)

Firefox 1.5 fixes this problem. When I click a link in Thunderbird, the link will be displayed in a new tab, preserving whatever it is that I was browsing.

Some other observations:

• It did not try to hijack my home pages as Firefox 1.0 did.
• The installation process checked all my installed extensions for compatibility. Everything except two are compatible, one is SlashFix, the other is JavaScript Debugger. The former is no longer necessary, the later will be missed.
• Some of the AJAX stuff seems to be broken.

Responses[4]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on December 1, 2005 8:43:25 PM CST #