Firefox 1.5

The newest version of Firefox is out, version 1.5 (hooray, no more RCs!), appearently it has been optimized better for OS X. So far it seems less bulky, 1.5rc1 took way to long to load. I'm taking this as a chance to ditch Safari.

I really did like using Safari, but it had some sever limitations, such as the lack of plug-in support (meaning no Adblock, though Pithhelmet came close), and it acted dodgy when opening PDFs and other large files. Also I didn't like the fact that you could accidentally close the browser, and all tabs quite easily. Granted that the previous one is a question of user error, but it still is a "feature" that I could live without.

So far, with an hour of usage, Firefox is working as it should, clocking in at a mighty 92MB of memory with 4 tabs open, which is a little high still, but on par with Safari (which would be around 75-80MB right now). Load times seem to have improved, with 1.5 taking around 2 seconds to load on my 1.4GHz G4 (768MB of RAM), which is marginally slower than Safari still, but not enough to matter that much.

The one thing that I am going to miss though is Safari's built in RSS feedreader, Sage doesn't seem to be as user friendly, and it doesn't seem to be able to do a collective feed, meaning I have to go through one by one, nor does it seem to tell me the total unread messages in my feeds folder. If there is a work around to this I would love someone to let me know!

It does feel good coming home to Firefox though, I have been using it since the halcyon days of Phoenix 0.3. Sadly it never quite lived up to is usefulness when I switched over to the Mac side.

Here's to a happy fox-full future once again! Remember kids spread the word, perhaps someday Google and Firefox will team up, and rule the world as a happy family!

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