Firefox 1.5 is the New Standard

Firefox 1.5 came out yesterday, and although I tried a beta some time ago and was impressed with the speed increase, I’ve held out upgrading for day-to-day use until the final release. This isn’t even so much because for the sake of a final release but also so the extensions I want would become available.

So, since I hear it might be some time before we see Firefox 1.5 backported to Ubuntu Breezy (let alone 64-bit packages!), I decided to just build it myself from source. Well, I had a tiny gotcha that I was able to solve, but now I’m lovin’ the Firefox!

It’s really cool:

It’s 20-30% faster than the old 1.0.x versions in most cases making it rival even Opera’s speed.
It caches pages so that when you go back/forward, the new page loads instantaneously. This is especially pleasing when I can use my mouse’s side thumby buttons to zip around in my history!
You can drag/drop tabs around to reorder them—even between windows!
It has lots of really nice extensions
There are friendlier error messages.
UI enhancements, particularly in the preferences.
Loads of other stuff.

Firefox has been a really great browser for quite some time now. Version 1.5 seems to be very well refined product that is fast, easy to use, and very flexible.