Firefox 1.5 Released

The Mozilla foundation has just posted Firefox 1.5 final to their FTP Servers. (In the release folders this time around ;))

Firefox 1.5 is a major milestone release by the Mozilla Foundation. It represents not only a viable alternative to the way we surf the web, but the continued growth and success of the open-source software community. It's estimated that 10% of the world's internet-enabled computers run Firefox, with some countries in Europe (Germany, Slovenia and Finland) claiming numbers three times that amount. Love it or hate it, Firefox has truly sparked an internet revolution with its foundations rooted in the spirit of community.

Here's just a few of many things you can expect to see in Firefox 1.5:

• Support for SVG, Canvas, CSS3 Columns, Javascript 1.6

• Revised options window including a new "Clear Private Data" option

• Binary patching with an enhanced automatic update system, eliminating the need to reinstall Firefox for an update or subsequent release

• Significant decrease in page rendering time

• Instant "Back/Foward" browser cache along with tab "Drag and Drop" functionality

• Hundreds of program/stability related bugfixes

View: Firefox 1.5 Release Notes | MozillaZine | Firefox Wikipedia Entry | "MozWiki" Site

View: Mozilla Developer Blogs (Asa Doltzer) | Ben Goodger

View: Neowin Forum DiscussionWhats changed?

The immediately noticeable changes are that we are running Invision Power Board 2.1.3 and the v3.9 design has been revamped, codenamed Swift the new design removes a lot of the nested tables present in the 2001 v3.0 design here at Neowin.net.

Most of the changes are in the code, but we also made huge improvements to the layout and underlying css.

The server layout has changed too. We now use 1 dedicated server for MySQL data and 2 for Apache, the 4th does DNS, web and pop email.

Marcel (Redmak) has also coded a new news script backend and the design was updated there aswell, making the page lighter and more responsive overall.

The neowin 5 theme is not completed yet, due to the fact that staff have day jobs and the recent thanksgiving holiday halted development there temporarily, its next on the list. The most important thing is to have a working situation we can move to and I'm confident the updates will be sufficient while we finish up the new design on the new servers.