Secure Your Portable Files
Spying on Satellites
Successful Picosatellite Launch
Robot Weblogs
You Know You Want Your Own Picosatellite
Critical Communications Infrastructure
We Think Differently
Wiretap Access to VoIP Lines
The Tiered Internet
more...
Firefox 1.5 is out. Firefox, if you haven’t had it stealthily or overtly installed by a SlaveDog near you, is a web browser which improves, dramatically, on Internet Explorer. In a year of being released, it has taken about 10 percent of the market, which isn’t bad considering the competition is pre-installed on just about every computer out there.
While not free of bugs, or invulnerable to hackers, it sure beats the surfing hazard that is IE.
It’s still a bit of a memory hog, though.
We downloaded RC3 (which is the final version) and have been playing with it for a little bit, now.
The first thing we noticed is that it caches renders. For the less-technical out there (anyone who gets their technical info from us, in other words), that means when you hit the “back” button, you don’t have to wait for the whole page to be redrawn – it just snaps into place.
If you’ve been using Firefox, then you’ll probably be happy to know that you can reorder the tabs. Not high on our list of priorities, but it is nice.
Something that we are excited about is the new update mechanism. It used to be that if a bug was found then you had to go download the whole damn thing again. Not any more. Now they’ll be downloaded in the background, as nice itty-bitty files. Welcome to 2004, guys!
One thing that hasn’t changed is that it seems to leak memory. It grabs up big chunks of RAM, and doesn’t let it go. In and of itself this isn’t a problem; we’ve got lots of RAM. However, it eventually leads to a crash, which is something we don’t like at all, nosirreebob.
Beyond being a lot smarter about rendering pages, there haven’t been any noticible improvments in CSS2 compliance. Mebbe 2.0 will fix that.
In short, if you’ve been putting off installing Firefox (for whatever reason), now’s the time to get it. It’s faster, it’s safer, and just all-around better than that crap that came with your PC.