15 Comments on “Firefox 1.5 on Mac: Not Ready for Prime Time”

1. Hrmph. Both the Windows and Mac versions installed and ran without a hitch for me. I’d guess that the mirror that you downloaded Firefox from has an escaped operations-room mouse.

2. The empty box at the bottom of the window is likely caused by an outdated Adblock extension (at least mine was). Once updated that should go away. I’m going to guess that the other oddities could also be related to extensions, but you never know.

3. The advice to wait is probably good. I’m on Firefox 1.5 on a G3 iBook right now. I added my favorite search engines, but several of them came in as blank places in the search engine list. Haven’t noticed any other weirdness yet, but it makes me a bit nervous.

4. I downloaded 1.5 for my Dell laptop last night, and it seemed to be behaving itself. I noticed a few cosmetic changes, but nothing earth-shattering… good or bad.

   That said, I’ll probably download the Mac version now and see how it shakes out.

5. So if you have a Mac, have Firefox and planned to upgrade to 1.5, I’d suggest waiting a week or two for a code shakedown (not to mention to have the Firefox extensions catch up with the new version).

   Mozilla may be having difficulty getting many testers before a shiny new version comes out. Y’all perfectly free to let other people be the suckers trying out a new version, but, and I’m guessing here, specific bug reports would probably be taken with gratitude. The inexplicably hard to find bug system is at bugzilla.mozilla.org.

6. John, that’s really wierd. I’ve been using 1.5 for a couple of months now (release candidate 1, release candidate 2, and the current release version), and haven’t had any of those problems. Like somebody else said, it could be an incompatible extension.

   Hope the problem gets solved.

   K

7. For what it’s worth, the PC version seems to be working just fine.

8. FWIW, I’ve been running PC version of 1.5 very happily for awhile with no hitches.

   I’d also suspect one of your extensions is a problem – I had problems upgrading initially with my old extensions – what I would do is create a new profile, and install the extensions I want fresh.

9. I installed 1.5 for Windows on the blue dragon (my home desktop) last night, and had no problems with what little I used it. From one LJ post I read (and the resulting comments), it sounds like the AdBlock extension (which I don’t use) is causing a lot of people assorted problems, particularly with other plugins.

10. The only issue I’ve noticed with 1.5 on both Mac and PC is that it makes certain text input fields just ridiculously long. Perhaps that’s a Firefox issue, though, not a 1.5 issue — I’d really only started using it in earnest a few weeks ago, when I learned I could skin it to look like Safari.

11. I’ve got it on both platforms and it works fine.

    But could you talk to your dns provider/web host and point whatever.scalzi.com to this page? Or at least do a redirect? Since LJ was down I didn’t see your updates, and didn’t remember the site address, that was the first thing I tried.

12. Just as another data point here I’ve also been running the 1.5 release candidates and the final release without a single incident. Just make sure your extensions are updated.

13. People forget that a successful software install requires two things: good code and a stable environment to install it on.

    I don’t know much about the Macs, but on the Windows side, I can tell you that in addition to incompatible add-ins, you probably also have to worry about shared .dll files, incompatible registry settings, default file extension mappings, etc.

    It’s that kind of stuff that leads one person to say “The new version locks up my machine,” and another to say “You’re crazy – I tried it & everything works fine.”

14. *shrug* I’ve been using the beta and release candidates for weeks. I think the app has crashed a few times, but not since RC3.

15. I switched to FF a while back on my G5 because Safari would occassionally give me a spinner when I had a few windows open. That and I wanted the same browser on Mac as on Linux or when I deign to use Windows.

    The previous version was fine except for an occassional css wierdness relative to the same page on Safari. I was experiencing no spinners regardless of how many windows I opened. I was looking forward to 1.5 with its supposedly better Mac support.

    1.5 seemed ok, although not better as far as I saw , for the first few days. Then it went into spinning rainbows quite easily. This is now persisting even after quitting FF and restarting with even a single window open. This is a bit disconcerting. I do not like rebooting my G5 just to get some underlying wierdness to go away but it may come to that. No, I haven’t added any extensions.