The beta for Firefox 1.5 came out a few days ago, and from my tests so far, it's the fastest version every, by quite a large margin. It completely blows away my 1.0 in terms of speed, and I was even using a custom Moox build. The interface pretty much "snaps" everything you do, including back and forward through history. Rendering speed is out of this world, it beats Opera right out of the box, and applying the pipelining and referer header tweaks takes things even further (although it seems to make less drastic of a difference now).

A lot of extensions aren't compatible with 1.5 yet, but installing Nightly Developer Tools first should resolve any issues. Also, you'll definitely want to start a new profile for this install.

One of the biggest advances in terms of the UI, as far as I can see, is that the native tabbed browsing features are now robust enough that extra extensions are pretty much unnecessary. Single-window mode is finally possible, plus most of the other "essential" tab features that were previously only available through extensions.

It's a great product and well worth the upgrade. I had not expected so many improvements; it's truly impressive.
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it's very fast. Definitely. Tab controls still aren't upto what I need, I pray for the day I can stop using the buggy tab browser extension, but its level of control still isn't matched.

Page loads are amazingly fast though, lightening quick.

To me, the real thing that deerpark has that is the true killer app is the binary browser updating, that's critical for mainstream users, I still have to update all my friend's firefox's manually to make sure there are no extension etec headaches, although it's a lot better than it was.

But with the binary patch installer this problem should make firefox much closer to where it needs to be with mainstream users.

I'll have to grab the developer version of firefox that allows more extensions installed, the default won't let me install all-in-one mousegestures, which I have to have.

For a beta release though, this kicks some serious butt, especially compared to IE 7's so called 'beta' version, which is not beta, it's alpha all the way.

With opera finally giving up on its stupid pricing and ads, looks like my long time dream of having real browser choice in the world is finally here, it's looking very good on that front.

Of course, I still hate Opera because of their ridiculous bugs, check out techpatterns.com main site in any Opera > 8.00 and you'll see the problem, that display works on ALL browsers, including IE 4, with small bugs, and IE 5x mac, big bugs. Works fine on Opera 8.0, 7x etc, even more or less on 6x. Not netscape 4x of course, but that's not a browser as far as I'm concerned.
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