Brief Hands-On Report--Unofficial G5-Optimized Firefox 1.0.2 Released

On the heals of Mozilla's release of Firefox 1.0.2, Neil Lee released an unofficial G5-optimzed version. According to the author, here are the differences from the official Firefox 1.0.2 release:

• There is a different application icon (unofficial builds like this cannot use the official Firefox icon)
  
• Includes the “pretty” form widgets by Kevin Gerich
  
• Chock full of speed and swagger - well, in theory, at least. I haven’t done any benchmarks because I’m a lazy ass.
  
• Creates world peace, enhances sexual prowess, improves overall muscle tone, and imbues user with the brilliant wit of Dorothy Parker. Or not.

It can be downloaded from his Web page.

We installed it on our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 and it works fine, with one exception, and runs faster than the official but not G5-optimized version. The exception is the import bookmarks function under the File menu but we think the issue may be due to something that is covered by an NDA and not the application. The G5 version also readily accepts our favorite Firefox theme, Nautipolis 1.0.5 by Alfred Kayser. [Bill Fox]