Except, no British version yet. Pfah. Where are those translators when you need them?
Anyway, Firefox 1.5 (note the move to the .com for the main Firefox page from the old .org) is, er, OK. Certainly from an end-user point of view it doesn’t justify skipping out Firefox 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. It may well now use Cairo for rendering, have native SVG, support the canvas
tag, have E4X support, and re-orderable tabs (I think that’s all the main features – did I miss anything?), but to be honest, new users aren’t going to care about any of that, all they’ll know is that the UI has got worse.
The toolbar menus now have a load of extra white-space for no apparent reason, which makes them look completely awkward, and like they were put together by a first-time UI developer. The much-vaunted new options window is a joke. Really. In fact, I can’t understand why it was changed. OK, that’s a lie, I do understand why it was changed. What I don’t understand is why it was changed to something less usable and harder to interpret than before. If ever Firefox wanted to look non-native, this was the way to do it. I can’t think of anything I’ve ever used on Windows that looks like this. Along with the bizarrely-padded menus, there is now no way you could mistake Firefox for a native Windows app.
I’ve been using Firefox 1.5 for a couple of months now, and whilst I’ve seen it get more and more stable, I’ve still got almost all of my extensions disabled because I got bored with it crashing ten times a day.
If I could recommend 1.0.7 to people without it telling them to upgrade to 1.5, I probably would.