Firefox On The Brink Of Several Updates

Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6 has just been released by John Haller of PortableApps.com. I say Firefox Portable now because of the recent name change. Also recently released is Firefox Portable 2.0 Beta 1, for all you who love the latest test versions of the popular Firefox browser.

Portable Firefox is now Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition (aka Firefox Portable)

You can read more about the reason for the name change, and about what's new in both Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6 and 2.0 Beta 1 here.

Live/CD Support - Firefox Portable supports running from a CD or other read-only media right out of the box. You just need change one setting to do it, too. Best of all, Firefox Portable will even detect if you're running from a read-only location and offer to run locally, which is handy if you have a write-protection switch on your flash drive or memory card. Full details are in the support topic on Running from a CD.

In-Place Upgrades - Firefox Portable now supports the ability to do what we're calling an "in-place upgrade". This means that you can extract it right over an existing installation of Firefox Portable without losing any of your existing data and it'll Just Work. This will apply to future releases of Firefox Portable as you'll still need to manually update due to the directory changes.

Partial Upgrade Support Fixed - Firefox Portable now fully supports the ability to use Firefox's partial upgrades. No changes are needed. Firefox Portable will automatically let you know when an update is available and let you choose when you'd like to install it. This is important, since some flash drives can be very slow, taking several minutes to update. Just be sure you have at least 40mb free on your drive when you do an update, since Firefox's update process doesn't yet check for low disk space.

Wine Support in Linux/Debian/Unix - Firefox Portable now supports the ability to download, install and run within Wine. That means you can run it right within your *nix of choice without any changes. You can even copy things like your bookmarks and cookies back and forth to your local copy of Firefox.

Users are sure to love the new support for Wine, and the "In-Place Upgrades" and "Partial Upgrade Support (Fixed)." This will surely alleviate the tendious task of updating Firefox Portable. And adding Wine support will only help Firefox Portable grow a larger audience.

Downloads:
Firefox Portable 1.0.8
Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6
Firefox Portable 2.0 Beta 1 Preview

Enough with Firefox Portable for now. Mozilla also recently stated at their most recent status meeting that the next test release of their Firefox web browser, Firefox 2.0 Beta 1, will be released at the end of the month, sometime between August 25th - 31st.


There are currently working on 34 bug fixes, with about 91 still to go.



CyberTech has reported that the latest hourly build of Firefox 2.0, now has implemented the new Firefox 2.0 theme into the tabs as well. You can view the comparison on their post. They also have a link to a post on CyberTech about how to keep the Firefox 1.x theme in case you don't like the Firefox 2.x theme.

Another recent Mozilla status meeting stated that Firefox 1.5.0.7 is slated for an early release on September 5th.

Due to Firefox 2.0 slip, we have decided to shorten the 1.5.0.7 release cycle to get it out before we reach release time for 2.0. Current schedule and info is available at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.5.0.7:Community

(Sorry, there were a bunch of small stories, figured I'd condense them into one rather than submit many smaller stories.)