No, not my internet connection again... but something nearly as good. I finally got around to installing Firefox 1.5 - with some trepidation, as I'm very much used to having all of my extensions break whenever I upgrade to a major new Firefox version.

I shouldn't have worried. After clicking through the complication-free installation, I was presented with a list of extensions and themes that weren't compatible with the new version. Darn. Okay, there's a check-for-updated-versions button there. A click and a few seconds later, and all my extensions had been smoothly upgraded, preserving all of my preferences. There was a bit of trouble with my Opera theme, because it isn't registered with Mozilla Update for whatever reason, but a quick Google soon fixed that.

All in all, it was probably the smoothest Firefox upgrade I've ever had, despite it being such a big one. Kudos to the Firefox team for finally getting it right!

And speaking of Opera, Firefox now feels much more whizzy; nearly as fast as the aforementioned browser, which is saying something! I spent a minute cackling like a maniac as I mouse-gestured back and forward across one particularly slow-loading webpage, with no noticeable rendering delay. Awesome.

So those of you who are still using Firefox 1.0.x, upgrade now. It works. =)



While I'm on the subject of Firefox... I've been having a lot of trouble with Flash recently. Despite having installed the Flash player, Flash movies that were embedded in a webpage simply refused to show up. It turns out that the Adblock extension's "Obj-Tabs" option conflicts with the new Flash player; so I turned it off and they ran fine. Yay. So if you're having the same problem and you use Adblock, just go Tools->Adblock->Preferences->Adblock Options->Obj-Tabs. Nice easy fix, for once!