Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7

| Tags: tool, web, browser

Last week saw two highly anticipated releases - well at least highly anticipated by Mozilla geeks.

Firefox 0.9 was the first of the two releases. This release was long overdue. It was postponed several times due to heavy bugs (One of those bugs caused the Firefox installer to delete system files on computers running with Windows XP). But now all the severe bugs are fixed and Firefox is again in a usable state.

One of the big new features is the new handling of extensions. Extensions can now be uninstalled and there is an update feature that checks for new releases of the installed extensions. There is also a new default theme with new icons. Well, it’s usable but every time I see it I say to myself that I have to finish that Squareness-Theme for Firefox - well, eventually I will do it. Damn, a day consists only of 24 hours, of which I have to sleep at least 7 hours to be able to go to work the next morning.

The release of Thunderbird 0.7 was quite surprising. First it was “No, we won’t release it yet. There’ll be another release candidate” and then out of nowhere - a day after the release of Firefox 0.9 - there was Thunderbird 0.7. First I thought it was a mistake, that someone posted the release candidate and just got the descriptions wrong. But no, it was the real and final 0.7.

The biggest feature for me is the addition of the GUI for the management of multiple personalities per account. I had to edit the preferences file with a text editor to add personalities before, but now it’s very comfortable and not as error-prone as before.

I think I’m somehow a version number fetishist. Somehow it makes me happy to install new versions of the applications I like the most and to see that they still - maybe even better than before - work. And Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 work flawlessly up to now.

Ah well, Firefox 1.0b is planned to be released in July. So it won’t be long before I can install a new version. Life is beautiful :)