Firefox 0.9

The ever-shrinking browser Mozilla Firefox has now reached version 0.9. It's smaller and perkier than ever before. Here's a list showing how the size of the Windows version has been reduced (size shown is smaller of exe or zip):

• 8.3MB: phoenix 0.1


• 7.4MB: phoenix 0.2


• 7.0MB: phoenix 0.3


• 7.1MB: phoenix 0.4


• 6.1MB: phoenix 0.5


• 6.7MB: firebird 0.6


• 6.0MB: firebird 0.7


• 6.2MB: firefox 0.8


• 4.7MB: firefox 0.9

Lots of major changes were introduced between 0.8 and 0.9 so that the run up to version 1.0 would be used for fine-tuning. As such, it seems a tad buggier than previous versions. The most irritating one for me is that it doesn't set itself as the default browser properly, leading to problems such as two Firefox windows opening at once, or Internet Explorer loading, or just errors on clicking hyperlinks in other programs. The Bugzilla entries related to this are: 246674, 246078 and 246164. There are also some Mozillazine forums threads, such as this one.

Finally, if your favourite Firefox extensions have not been updated to work in v0.9 then you may want to keep v0.8 installed too. I have done that for the sake of card games.