Brief Hands-On Report--Mozilla Released Firefox 1.5 Web Browser

The final version of Firefox 1.5 is now available from this Mozilla Web page. Here are the Release Notes which cover what's new in Firefox 1.5:

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
  
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
  
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
  
• Improvements to popup blocking.
  
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
  
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
  
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.
  
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
  
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
  
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
  
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

We downloaded and installed Firefox 1.5 over v1.5RC3. We browsed with the final version for several hours without encountering any problems. We like the Nautipolis theme and were pleased to find out that v1.0.28 works with the latest version of Firefox. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]