Firefox 1.5.0.1 came out today, and it was the first version to ever really handle the "update" feature well. With past versions, having Firefox realize there was a new version was a chancy deal. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it would 5 weeks after the update was released.
With 1.5, the made it so that an "update" is truly that. Older versions smilpy downloaded a full copy of the new version. 1.5 is supposed to only download a small batch of changes.
Today I read that 1.5.0.1 is out, went to Help -> Check for updates, and it found it and downloaded it properly. It then checked for new versions of all my extensions and themes, found some, and updated those too. Very nice.
Which brings me to my next point, the ColorZilla extension. I’ve known about it for a while, but all previous versions said the coolest part didn’t work in Linux. Now it does. 🙂
It puts an eyedropper in your status bar, and you can click on a part of your browser window and it will tell you the color codes for that part. Very nice. And another big perk is that it can zoom on the page. Not just make the fonts bigger, but truly zoom the page like Opera does, so you can more easily grab that little pixel you want.
For a web developer, a VERY welcome tool.
I’m using Firefox 1.5 and it informed me that it needed updating while I was reading this post. It was quick and efficient. More efficient than it used to be at any rate. It even updated the obsolete extensions (one of which was Colorzilla) without too much bother.
I put Austrumi Linux, (a 50mb Slackware based live cd with a hd install, runs in cache) on my computer. It has FF 1.5, but wont install extensions or updates.
What about MeasureIt and WebDeveloper?
I have webdev, and it has a measuring tool built in. Is MeasureIt cooler?