Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

I am a pretty avid Firefox user. I have even made it the default browser on my Powerbook over Apple’s Safari browser. I have followed the development of the browser pretty close, using it in one way or another since it was Firebird (version 0.4 I think).

The release of Firefox 1.5 is a great step in the right direction, finally bringing some great features into the fold that were once only possible with extensions. One of those is the draggable tabs, allowing you to rearrange your tabs just by clicking and dragging them.

With 1.5, automatic updating has also been introduced. In addition to checking for updates, you can also install the update without having to completely re-install the browser, making it easy for non-technical users to keep their browser up-to-date easily.

One of the other new featuers (or fixes, depending on how you look at it) is the focus given to form buttons when tabbing through the page. It used to infuriate me when using my Powerbook that the tab would just skip over form buttons. Now it focuses on the butttons when it encounters them and I can actually just click “Enter” to execute that button. A big thanks to whoever rolled that in.

Along with the final released of 1.5, the Mozilla Foundation also officially launched the website of the Mozilla Corporation at www.mozilla.com. This is the side of the Foundation charged with overseeing the development and distribution of Mozilla products, especially Firefox and Thunderbird.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at November 30,2005 @ 10:42 pm and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.