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10.12.2005 - Firefox: Why You Shouldn't Upgrade Yet, And Best Extensions
<p>My colleague Scot Finnie has a surprising recommendation about Firefox 1.5: Don't.</p>
<p>Or, rather, not yet.</p>
<p>He's recommending against upgrading to the latest version of Firefox, at least temporarily.</p>
<p>That's surprising because Scot is, like me, a huge Firefox advocate. He loves it, and so do I.</p>
<p>Another reason it's surprising is because, back last month, Scot recommended the opposite.</p>
<p>So what's changed? Stability, compatibility and performance. Somewhere between the release candidate that Scot evaluated last month and the final version of 1.5 released two weeks ago, problems emerged. The new Firefox (he says) is slower and more prone to crashes than 1.0x versions. Moreover, there are more pages on the Web that are incompatible with the current version of Firefox than with 1.0x versions.</p>
<p>When I saw Scot's article, I sent him an E-mail. "I wish I'd seen your review before I upgraded last week. Thanks a lot, fella," I said.</p>
<p>But I was just giving Scot a hard time. My experience with Firefox is somewhat different from his. I'm finding 1.5 to be pretty stable. I haven't noticed any sites that are incompatible with Firefox 1.5 in the week I've been using it. As a matter of fact, there's one site I visit many times every day that never used to work with Firefox, and now does: the content-management system we use to run InformationWeek.com--although Scot says that parts of the CMS don't work with Firefox, and neither do some other applications on our company intranet that used to run just fine in Firefox.</p>
<p>As to stability: I have noticed that Firefox 1.5 crashes more often than previous versions, but it has only happened a couple of times during the week I've used it, so it's not important. Likewise, some pages seem to load slower in 1.5 than in previous versions, but not significantly more slowly.</p>
<p>So what's my recommendation on whether you should upgrade?</p>
<p>In the end, it's pretty much the same as Scot's: If you haven't upgraded to version 1.5 yet, then wait for the next minor update to do so. Version 1.51 (or whatever they decide to call it) will, hopefully, fix the problems we're seeing with 1.5.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if, like me, you have upgraded, then there's no reason to take the few minutes needed to uninstall the current version and reinstall the old one.</p>
<p><a name="jump">If I knew last week what I know this week, would I have still upgraded? Actually, yes. I like to run the latest version of software, even where there's no appreciable difference between the new version and the old one. I'm compulsive that way. Fortunately, like a neat-freak surgeon, I'm in a job that rewards that kind of compulsiveness. </p>
<p>Of course, Firefox is crippled without extensions, software add-ins that let you customize the browser's behavior. One of the most popular articles I've ever written was "My Favorite Firefox Extensions," which ran in April. After reading Scot's review yesterday, I took some time to look over the extensions landscape; read on to find out what I'm currently using and what looks intriguing.</p>
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