Firefox 1.5 - just out of beta!
I’ve been playing with the final release of Firefox 1.5 for a few days now, and I’m really quite impressed — although it’s fair to say that most of the improvements won’t even be noticed by the average user.
Of course there are speed improvements and subtle interface tweaks, but the really important developments are Firefox’s support for emerging web standards such as CSS3, SVG and XSLT.
Now as responsible web developers we can’t just dive and start using these new features. We have to think of sneaky ways to work them into our pages without breaking functionality in IE et al. By using Firefox’s new capabilities to create functionality that makes for better design but degrades gracefully in other browsers, we show both users and browser vendors that the web can work better with a modern standards-compliant browsing tool.
With any luck, users will continue to abandon quirky, clunky old browsers, and browser vendors will get with the program.
By the way Simon Willison wrote a good summary of the new features back in September when he was looking at the 1.5 beta.
Geek note: In a cruel irony, I note that Simon’s home page currently breaks in Firefox — as it should — due to to some invalid XHTML 1.0 being served using the application/xhtml+xml mime type. Ouch! If only he was testing his pages using a strictly validating browser!
Update (10 minutes later): he just fixed it!
December 6th, 2005 at 5:50 pm
Maybe the choice may be difficult for PC users.. but for me on MAC, Firefox is definitely the best browser. IE for Mac is SO SLOW it makes no sense to use it.