Upgraded to Firefox 1.5 -- So Far So Good

But didn’t I just say that I was going to hold off for a bit?  That was the intention, but late last night (bad case of insomnia), Firefox started behaving very strange…namely tabs weren’t getting selected correctly (it was related to an update of this extension, read the comments), and even more strange was that attempting to pull up the extensions dialog wasn’t working (just pegged my machine at 100% and gave me a blank stare).  How are you supposed to uninstall an extension if you can’t get to the interface to…well, uninstall it?  Reinstalling Firefox also didn’t work…so I muttered a few explicatives, said a quick prayer to the Mozilla gods, and installed 1.5.

Apparently the extension devs have been on it lately; I had much fewer problems over the RC3 release.  The one huge gotcha is that if you’re using the Noia eXtreme theme, it won’t be automatically updated and you’ll lose all of your scroll bars (though you can still scroll via mouse wheel/arrows/etc), plus some other glaring artifacts in the GUI…they have an update on their site.  Manually going to my other extension’s sites also proved to be pretty fruitful, and out of my list of extensions I use, only the following don’t have updates for 1.5:

• View Formatted Source.
• Omea Connector.

That’s right…only 2, and they aren’t really that important to me.  Everything else had updates available.  I also found a much better replacement for the Focus Last Tab Selection extension that got me into this whole mess; it’s called LastTab and can be downloaded from this site…one really cool feature is that it memorizes the order in which you’ve selected tabs, when you hit ctrl-tab they come up in that order for easy switching…a fantastic little extension which has already saved me quite a few mouse/keyboard clicks.

So while I’m less than impressed with Firefox’s auto-updating feature for extensions (it missed about half of them), overall I’m very happy with the new release, and everything works as expected.  It also looks a little more polished…it’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but it just looks a little cleaner (I think they made the fonts a little smaller for starters), and feels a little snappier.  I’d say if your 1.0.7 install is good enough (and “just works”), there isn’t really a need to run out and snag the new version (I certainly had no intentions of doing that until that rogue extension update brought me down).  Sweet!