Data Circle

The popular Mozilla Firefox web browser has its first release candidate yesterday, after two earlier beta releases. I’ve been following the development right since the alpha release (although only using official release builds, I haven’t tried a CVS checkout or even a nightly build yet) and things seem to be improving all the time. The biggest bugbear for me has always been stability on OS X, because Firefox would often go into a fit when I’d been surfing for a long time and cause the whole browser to lock up every time I switched tabs or opened new ones. Thankfully this seems to have been gradually phased out over the last couple of betas, and hopefully the release candidate will finally put it to rest.

I’m also impressed that the automatic updater seems to work properly now – not only was the new version downloaded in the background without me realising (I’m sure there’s a way to switch this off though if you’d rather Firefox didn’t do that, but personally I’m quite happy to have updates downloaded whilst my connection is mostly idle) but I was also offered the option of installing the update there and then or leaving it until next time I started Firefox. This is in contrast to Apple’s Software Update, which hangs around until you tell it to restart and this can be a bit annoying if you’re in the middle of working.

The major interest in a release candidate for me though is that it usually signifies that a final release is not too far away. Betas can go on and on for several months, but last time the Mozilla team put out a release candidate for Firefox there was a final release soon after. Obviously neither they nor I can guarantee Firefox 1.5 will be marked stable and ready for general release by the end of the year, but I’m hoping that’s the way things are going.

The release notes are, as always, available online if you want a brief overview of the changes, as well as a list of bug fixes. I couldn’t find a Changelog in my brief scan of the page, but I’m sure there is one around somewhere and if you’re interested in that level of detail you probably know where it is already.