Last April, I complained about the unacceptably weak update mechanism for Firefox. In fact, just a few weeks ago I sat down at Judy’s computer and realized that she was running an old version of Firefox and hadn’t been prompted to upgrade.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this dialog box pop up a few minutes ago:
The Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 Release Notes have all the details, but suffice it to say this is a critical update that fixes several serious security issues.
Anyway, kudos to the Mozilla folks for getting this feature working right in Firefox 1.5.
Ed Bott 
Yup……worked like a charm!All extensions save one,”ARDVARK”which IS one of my favs are compatible .Oh well cant win them all.But yeah what a relief to finally be able to upgrade without uninstalling and reinstalling the whole browser.
I had exactly the same reaction here. A link in the notification dialogue to the release notes would be a nice improvement.
Now if Mozilla and the extension developers can just figure out how not to have a whack of extensions break over such a small point release. I know, in most cases it’s just a minor change necessary to allow the extension to work with an incremented core version number, but many inexperienced users will see the broken extension list and just not bother upgrading.
I’ve refused the upgrade until “later” as a couple of the broken extensions are pretty important to me, and I don’t have time to re-run them under the nightly release compatibility tool at the moment. I’ll be curious to see how Firefox handles reminding me I’m not updated yet.
(Another) Paul
I’m a huge Firefox fan, but this actually bugged me. How do I verify that this is a legitimate popup and not a form of a phishing attack? What’s to stop someone from imitating this dialog tomorrow and getting people to install a piece of code that isn’t Firefox? There needs to be some sort of verification that this is a Firefox dialog and not some random popup.
There are a number of ways that you can check,ie go to the website and verify, also http://www.download.com or www. majorgeeks.com I didn’t get the popup, I saw the update on the majorgeeks website, then verified with a look on the firefox website. Only then did I click on help to download the update. After a scan I found no gremlins. So there are ways to check Carl that don’t break the norm. J.B.
Yes I saw that yesterday and was thrilled. Then discovered that 2 of my extensions wouldn’t work. So I ended up doing the neat trick that someone mentioned over in mozilla extensions which was to essentially save the .xpi file, open it in winzip or winrar, do a view of the install.rdf file and change the part that says em: max version 1.5 to 1.5+. Save the file and winzip will ask if you want to update the zip file you say yes. Close it then do a right-click, Open with: Firefox and install the extension. It will continue to work. Just remember at some point to see if your favorite extension gets an update and update it the regular way later.
Wonder how many days it will take before this rolls out to all users? I haven’t seen a popup yet.
Ed
After the update, did ROboform still work. My Firefox autoupdated and destroyed the Roboform toolbar. Tried a few thing to get it back but they all failed. Had to reoved Firefox, and ALL traces of it from my computer before I could get Firefoix 1.5 to work again with Roboform. Major pain!
George,
Were you running 6.64 of Roboform and Mozilla Adapter 6.60? Or did you have earlier versions when you updated?
Mark
Mark,
Right now, I can’t recall. I had downloaded the latest versions when I had the problem.