I mean in real world practical terms, not a changelog, what does it do better?. To installs (of 1.5, see my post in The Lounge) later and I'm back with 1.07 for a while.
- The option/settings dialog is changed.
- You can now move/re-arrange tabs.
- There is a built-in privacy cleaner that deletes that clears cookies, download history, cache, authenticated sessions, browsing history, saved passwords, etc (you can choose which).
- Improved caching of forward/back buttons for faster rendering of previous pages.
There's quite a bit of improvement, actually.
It's noticeably faster than the 1.0.x versions.
A new update system can install patches, there's no more need to do a complete re-install every time there's a minor update. Updates can even be installed automatically, if you want.
It has a built-in bookmark backup that keeps a copy of the bookmarks file from each of the past five days.
There's a new "Clear Private Data" option that can be run automatically, from a keyboard shortcut, or from the Tools menu.
The way extensions and themes are installed has been simplified. You can now make backups of the extension folder, or your entire profile, re-install them, or transfer them to another computer, and the extensions and themes will work, without the editing of the chrome.rdf file that was necessary before.
The memory leak problem has been improved.
The old "profile in use" dialogue has been changed, so it should no longer fool users into creating a new, blank profile. Now it prompts users to shut down the Firefox process that's running in the background, like it should have done to begin with.
Popup blocking is supposed to be improved, though I can't tell, I didn't get that many popups before.
I think those are the highlights, though I may have overlooked some.
<edit> Eldmannen's post appeared while I was composing mine, that explains the duplications. Drag-and-drop for tabs, that's what I forgot! Probably because I never use it. (I've been running 1.5 since beta 1).
The drag and drop tabs are actually the miniT extension implemented into Firefox.
Use Firetune on Firefox 1.5 and you'll REALLY see how much faster over 1.0.7 it is.
Fasterfox is also nice
Actually it's not. It slows things down way too much, also takes up a lot of bandwidth by "prefetching".
The biggest thing about the upgrade for me was a speed improvement. Thats pretty much it the rest of the features didnt really change anything for me.
its not a huge change, but theres no real reason not to upgrade
the one problem i had was where one of my themes wouldn't allow me to see the options window, but i just reinstalled it (the theme, not firefox) and it worked fine
Thanks for the info Tarun, I assumed that the Fasterfox problem was with my computer.
A lot of users are reporting the massive slowdown because of it.
Even I experienced it, and I find Firetune is far better.
The memory leak problems is worse for me now than it was previously.
hmm. i dont experiance anything.
also back at the topic, i read somewhere that mozilla added some stuff to firefox that reads everything on a webpage to help out blind users.