Mozilla have released Firefox 1.5 RC1 for interested parties to download. According to their roadmap, the stable version will be released within this year.

I would love to try this RC out. I didn’t, however, because I did not know which extensions that I have installed would be broken.

The release candidate is supposed to help extension developers to make their extensions "in sync." Unfortunately, some of them are developed by amateur programmers and, for whatever reason, they no longer give support nor update to their extensions. These extensions can be quite useful and some users simply can’t live without them. For example, the Tong Wen Tang （同文堂）extension is very handy to me as well as a lot of Chinese users, but the author has stopped updating it since Firefox 0.9. Luckily a little hack can make it compatible with Firefox 1.0+. But how about 1.5?

Extension is the second most important reason why I switched to Firefox (security is no. 1). Ironically, they are so useful that I might decide not to update my Firefox if I can’t keep using them in the new version! I believe that other people, especially those who have installed a lot of extensions, may share the same feeling.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2005 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Web Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, bookmark the Permalink in your Browser, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.