Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5 Beta 1. It features new update framework, better standards support (CSS2, CSS3, SVG ?), Broken site reporting tools and othe updates.

At first instance, this new version seems to be launching faster, browsing faster, scrolling smoother and taking up less memory than the previous version. But then that could be due to the fact that most of my extensions are not active (as they have not been updated for the new version). Anyways, will keep you posted if I find anything worthwile.

Also the first thing I noticed (as a web developer) is that <select> boxes now support the border as being flat. Earlier it used to show up as 3D inward no matter what you put in the CSS border tag.

Interestingly, if you view Help -> About, you will notice that the User Agent is listed as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4". Firefox 1.4 ? Isn't this Firefox 1.5. Aneways I guess, the developers were so tired that they forgot to change the User Agent string.

Download (for Windows)