Here we are at the end of 2006! I can’t believe this year is nearly over and thought wouldn’t it be neat to take a look at all the changes to Firefox over the past year? A lot has happened (more then I first realized) with a total of 11 official releases. For each release I’ll discuss the new features/fixes as well as link to security enhancements/fixes for that version. Now before we begin, I have a couple quick clarification notes:

• Releases are listed in order by which they were released (date), not by their version number. Which is why Firefox 1.5.0.8 will come after Firefox 2.0
• I have made comments (good or bad) throughout. To separate the comments from content, the comments will be in italics as to avoid confusion.

In January the holidays were over and many people were starting to upgrade to Firefox 1.5. This release was barely a month old having just been released on November 29th, 2005. Firefox 1.5 and was the first major release since Firefox was “born” in November 2004. Technically there were prior versions but they were called Firebird and Phoenix.

Firefox 1.5 included these new features:

• Automated update. Great for browser updates but extensions and themes you had to manually check or get the Update Notifier extension.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance. Cain’t say I saw a difference.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs. I love this feature.
• Improvements to popup blocking. Built-in popup blocking is a very big “selling point” for Firefox. I recall when I use to use Internet Exploiter, I had to run a third-party application to block pop-ups
  
• Clear Private Data via menu option or keyboard shortcut. One click or key stroke was a lot easier than having to click multiple buttons. Further, with the clear private data button extension you could have a toolbar button.
• Answers.com added to search engine list. I so rarely use this engine, but I guess there must have been a demand for this engine or else they bribed Mozilla.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience. I had forgotten about the redesigned options menu until I had fired up a Fx 1.0.x build a couple weeks ago. The difference was like night and day! Don’t know what the RSS discover was. Never ran the browser in “safe mode”, so don’t know what that experience was. An interesting change was going from an error pop box to an actual descriptive error page (much like Internet Exploiter has).
• Better accessibility which included DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies (screen readers). I am not sure how compliant IE6/IE7 is with this technology.
• Report a broken Web site wizard. I do sorta recall seeing that feature, but never used it. I think it was removed in later versions.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer. While I am not a Mac user being able to migrate (bring forward bookmarks/favorites and other personal info) from another browser relatively painlessly is another nice “selling point” for Firefox.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Security Fixes

Firefox 1.5.0.1 was released on February 1st. This was the first 1.5 update which added:

• Improved stability. Stability never seemed to be an issue for me until later builds.
• Improved support for Mac OS X. I have heard a lot of Mac users are using Firefox.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled. Remember, Fx has a good chunk of users outside the US & Great Britain.
• Fixes for several memory leaks. (and) created more
• Security Fixes

Firefox 1.5.0.2 was the next update and that was not released until April 13th:

• Universal Binary support for Mac OS X which provides native support for Macintosh with Intel Core processors. Firefox supports the enhancements to performance introduced by the new MacIntel chipsets.
• Improvements to product stability. Again, never really ran into stability issues.
• Security Fixes

Firefox 1.5.0.3 was a critical update came out less than a month from the release of 1.5.0.2 on May 2nd. This build fixed the denial of service vulnerability with a single bug fix: Deleted object reference when designMode=”on”. I had always wondered just how bad these Firefox caused DoS attacks really were. May be this was more of a preventive measure to keep this from getting out of hand.

Firefox 1.5.0.4, released on June 1st:

• Improvements to product stability. Still a lot more stable than Internet Exploiter every was…
• Security Fixes

Firefox 1.5.0.5 came out on July 27th and added:

Added changes for Frisian locale (fy-NL) Language spoken in the north of the Netherlands and Germany.

Security Fixes

Firefox 1.5.0.6 was quickly released on August 2nd since the previous release caused a problem playing Windows Media content and as I recall embedded Real Player content as well. Unlike MicroSquish, if Mozilla’s update creates a new problem, they will fix it right away.

Firefox 1.5.0.7, released on September 14th:

• Improvements to product stability. I think this was when I started noticing memory leak and stability issues. Though my issues were no where as bad as others who systems slowed to crawl as Firefox ate up every last KB of memory..
• Security Fixes

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