In case you don’t follow browser developments, FireFox 1.5 is out. I didn’t do the betas and was waiting for my FireFox 1.0 to tell me to upgrade. I read so many good things about it and then had an hour or so to kill, so I installed it on my Windows machine at work. It was faster, and I liked the fact that I could drag tabs around. I also liked the fact that when a site wanted to open another window, FireFox opened it in another tab. The same goes for links I click in applications. I was so impressed that I installed it on my Linux machine at home. (“emerge mozilla-firefox-bin”, for those interested).

And, wow, was I blown away.

My home box is quite old and a lot of apps drag on it. But FireFox 1.5 runs at least 3x faster then FireFox 1.0 did. Startup times, browsing times, everything. I’m not quite sure why — the release notes don’t have any performance bugs fixed for Linux.

This is impressive work.