G5-optimized Firefox 1.5 released

Looking for an optimized Firefox for your PowerBook, iBook, or older PowerMac? Look no further: I have just built a G4-optimized Firefox 1.5 build.

firefoxIt’s been a long time coming, but Firefox 1.5 is finally rocking the house and making nerds salivate into their indie beards with delight.

The official changelog includes such top ten hits as:

  • Automated update to streamline product upgrades.
  • Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
  • Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
  • Improvements to popup blocking.
  • Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
  • Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
  • Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
  • Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and various assistive technologies.
  • Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
  • Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
  • New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.

And everyone’s favourite tune, “many security enhancements”. If you want to bask in some hardcore changelog goodness, check out the “comprehensive changelog” for the dirty details.

As usual, there is now a G5-optimized build for your browsing pleasure:

Download link removed - there is new a newer release available.

With this fairly major upgrade, most extensions will need to be updated. I have tweaked a bunch of the extensions I use to work with the new version, but I haven’t had time to update that post, so you might want to check out the official Mozilla update site first.

Enjoy, folks, and don’t forget to clean those indie beards before you go out in public.

Neil (feeling tired, giddy, and more than a little bit strange.)

Comments

1 | Nick said on November 29, 2005 9:50 PM
2 | YearOfTheRat said on November 30, 2005 12:10 AM

Link seems fine here...

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3 | Neil replies: (November 30, 2005 12:13 AM)

Maybe you hit it before I had completely finished uploading the file, but I just tested the link and it works fine.

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4 | Nick said on November 30, 2005 2:50 AM

Yeah, works fine now. I musta hit it early. Thanks for the file.

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5 | Chris said on November 30, 2005 10:21 AM

Unfortunately, this major Macintosh related bug is still not fixed:

[Bug 141710] Holding down mouse button forces 100% CPU
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141710

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6 | Steve-O said on November 30, 2005 11:21 AM

Forgive my ignorance, but what makes this a G5-optimized version?

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7 | danconnortown said on November 30, 2005 1:34 PM

Love it man. I've been using the RC3 firefox for a while now, and picked up your build this morning. lightning fast. thank you. It's solid.

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8 | mrGit said on November 30, 2005 5:18 PM

Any reason it's referred to as Deer Park instead of Firefox?

Just curious

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9 | devin said on November 30, 2005 11:58 PM

Why does it identify itself as Deer Park?

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10 | Neil replies: (December 1, 2005 12:13 AM)

Guys - the Firefox icon and name is reserved for official builds only to help differentiate them from 3rd party builds, like this one.

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11 | Davidegalli said on December 1, 2005 1:54 AM
12 | dunkelroot said on December 1, 2005 2:04 AM

Ein wirklich grosser Tag für die Meschheit! Eine neue Errungenschaft für das sagenumwobene OSX!

dieses hochwertige Qualitätsposting wurde Ihnen präsentiert von:

Herrn dunkelROOT

Herr dunkelROOT ist völlig frei von Tenia pedis
Herr dunkelROOT ist angehöriger der elitären Oberschicht des Landes
Herr dunkelROOT ist ein aktiver & attraktiver Nutzer des sagenumwobenen OSX
Herr dunkelROOT nutzt einen epochalen iMac G5 mit 20Zoll Bildschirm

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13 | Thomas said on December 1, 2005 12:43 PM

Any way I can get rid of the 'fancy' widgets? I tried using Firefoxy but they didn't go away. I like my sites to style the form widgets and the G5 version doesn't seem to allow that. :(

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14 | S.Robort said on December 3, 2005 5:14 AM

Hi,

I'm really happy to discover the G5-optimized version of Firefox 1.5, my favourite Webbrowser!

I've 2 questions about it:
-I've the impression that the application sometimes uses a lot of CPU capacities (more than 40% of each of my both 1,5 GHz G5-processors...), although the pages to display don't like to be complicated or long, and this state can be some minute long... Is it normal??
-How should I do if I want a french version of this G5-optimized version?

Once again thank you for your work!

S.Robort

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15 | A. Friend said on December 4, 2005 3:02 AM

Wow this version flies on my iMac 2.0 GHz. In all of the browsers I have tried, I have never seen page loads this fast. Well done and thanks!

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16 | None said on December 4, 2005 10:45 AM

Your Java implementation sucks. I'll stick with the official Firefox release, thanks.

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17 | Donald Nixon said on December 4, 2005 11:22 AM

I am having an issue with buttons displaying properly. The buttons are garble or empty. Is this common with the deer park build? Hasn't happened in the past builds. Will there be an update or released when next version appears?

Don

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18 | Neil replies: (December 4, 2005 11:29 AM)

Donald - if you're talking about the actual browser interface and not form buttons, try switching back to the default theme. Could be that your theme is corrupted or not supported.

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19 | Lawrence Tureaud said on December 4, 2005 9:19 PM

Question: Why don't you go and fuck yourself.

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20 | Florian said on December 5, 2005 3:34 AM

G5 optimized, way cool !

But what is exactly optimized ? There's no changelog for that version.

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21 | Dave said on December 15, 2005 6:15 PM

Nice and fast! But it doesn't seem to play well with Yahoo Mail. I can't get my mail page to load, or at least load viewably.

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22 | Donald Nixon said on December 15, 2005 10:40 PM

Dave,

Basically, that was what I was tring to say in my post earlier. The buttons within sbc/yahoo mail you can't even read them.

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23 | Jeremy said on December 16, 2005 8:03 PM

On my Dual G5, and on my Powerbook g4, your optimized versions create lightning fast page rendering. I am truly impressed. Though there are some bugs on a few secure webpages that I've tried to log into, I would have to say that overall this is a vastly superior browser, in comparison to standard firefox, and any other macbrowser out there, congratulations on the excellent work, I look forward to even better version in the future.

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24 | Dave said on December 17, 2005 4:10 PM

Well, since Deerpark is still in Alpha according to the mozilla website, I think that bugs like what's happening with the Yahoo mail rendering are to be expected.

Are these optimized versions of Deerpark Alpha1 or Alpha2?

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25 | Neil replies: (December 17, 2005 4:28 PM)

Yahoo mail works for me here. And Dave - this is a build of the release version of Firefox 1.5. As I mentioned earlier only officla releases from the Mozilla group can have the Firefox name and icon. Any other build, no matter if it's built from the release code (as this one is) or not can use the Firefox branding.

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26 | Calroth said on December 18, 2005 8:37 PM

Are there any benchmarks to show exactly how much faster the optimized build is, compared to the standard build?

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27 | paul irwin said on January 12, 2006 6:03 PM

is it just compiled with the 970 flags or is it actually optimized for the g5 via the guidelines on apples page? (i.e. making sure that operations that are slower on a g5 are rewritten, or running large chunks of data at once instead of smaller ops)

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28 | Jones McJones said on January 17, 2006 12:06 AM

I love the speed of loading pages, it is super quick. But is there a way to start downloads faster? Any time I click on a link to download, my computer will lock up and beachball for a good 5-7 seconds before the download begins. Other than that I loveit! Thanks

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29 | Andrew Author Profile Page said on January 22, 2006 2:03 PM

I've been having the same problem with starting downloads. Only the freezing lasts a bit longer. But you know, watching the spinning beachball of death is fun too....

Anyone found a solution?

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30 | Staggs said on January 25, 2006 4:41 PM

I have the new iMac, the one with the intel processor, will this build be quicker then the official one?

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31 | Grant said on February 2, 2006 3:28 AM

I am new to using a Mac, so bear with me. I just upgraded Firefox 1.07 to 1.5. I would like to try your optimized version for my iMac G5, but I don't want to overwrite the official 1.5 I just installed. If I install your release, will it overwrite the 1.5 I already have, or will it give me a separate version?

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32 | AlexKS said on February 2, 2006 6:12 PM

What is the difference between this version of firefox and the regular 1.5 Firefox for Mac.

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33 | Richard said on February 2, 2006 8:43 PM

Staggs this is speeded up for the PowerPC G5 processor not Intel, check this blog for upto the day news ; http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/josh/archives/2006/01/firefox_1501_will_rock_on_mac.html

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34 | Oliver said on February 15, 2006 11:01 AM

I'm not getting the images on a lot of pages since updating to 10.4.5 yesterday...

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35 | jazzman said on March 24, 2006 4:35 PM

I tried this browser on my G5 dual 2MHZ processor 2GB Ram and I see the SLIGHTEST amount of speed compared to Firefox 1.5. More importantly I have Wizz and Sage as plug ins for RSS . They work fine but Bloglines.com will NOT display my feeds (a web based RSS browser) so I uninstalled and went back to Firefox1.5 which will.

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36 | SteveNelson said on April 9, 2006 12:17 PM

The difference between 1.0 and 1.5 seems to be that Firefox stalls out on me during downloads - consistent with the other reports above. Very annoying while downloading large files with Firefox to get nothing but beachball while I wait. I've been using Safari more because of that. There's also the tendancy for Firefox to hang with beachball when I wake my computer up.

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