Firefox 1.5 Coming on Nov. 29

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Firefox 1.5 Coming on Nov. 29
 
Posted by Erik Larkin
Thursday, November 17, 2005, 05:04 PM (PST)


Give or take a few days, according to the Mozilla folks who were just here. If you can't wait until then, release candidate 3 is out today. I don't see a download link for it just yet on <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.getfirefox.com">www.getfirefox.com</a><!-- w -->, but if you've got RC2 installed you can click Help -> Check for Updates and install it, or wait for the pop-up.

That automatic updating is probably the most significant change in the new version. There are also new accessibility options, and you can clear all your private data - cache, history, passwords, etc. - with one option under Tools.

But really, you probably won't notice that many differences between 1.0 and 1.5. Most of the changes are back-end, to make it faster and render better, Mozilla says. Version 2, due out in mid-2006 will have more user-interface type changes, they say.

We'll have a story in our January issue that looks at the new Firefox, IE, and Opera versions.

Here's a little bonus: one of the guys from Mozilla had what he said was a Google SMS extension that let you select some text, then click a little phone icon in the upper-right and send that text as an SMS message to somebody's phone. Sounds like it might not be out just yet, but it looked like a fun browser gadget, so keep an eye out for it.

Edit (thanks specialk):

The Firefox extension is called "Google Send To Phone."

It can be downloaded here: http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/

-specialk