Firefox 1.5 beta 1

Mozilla Firefox is now testing it's 1.5 release. Beta 1 can be downloaded from the Firefox Nightly Builds section of their site, or you can just Click here. This version feels very much like the older versions, and if you ever downloaded the Deer Park Alpha's, you won't see much different here, but there are quite a few things under the hood to make this release more stable and easier to use.

You will definitely notice a new settings page. It's cleaned up and very well organized. In the new settings page, you will also find a much better way to use plugins in firefox, gone are the days where you have very little control over what plugin is used for what, you can now tell it what plugin to use for every file extension and change the plugin instead of just turning it off.

Another very small thing I noticed that I really like is that when you open up another browser (I use the address bar on the windows XP toolbar a lot) and you tell firefox to open a new window when external programs request it, no longer does it pop up your existing window when the new one opens. This was an annoying thing about the old firefox. For whatever reason, if you had a browser window minimized and tried to launch another browser, it would pop up that minimized one. Again, this is really small and very insignificant but I really liked it.

There is also a better update system that I have yet to use, but I've heard great things. They added a new 'update' to search for. Now it not only searches for updated extensions, themes and versions of firefox. It will look for new search engines.

The point, folks, is to download the new beta and help crush all the bugs! There ain't many, but it'll take a little time to find them all.