I like Firefox a lot! I use only a few extensions these days, mainly web developer, bugMeNot and form spell checking called spellbound (installation of this one is a little tricky). I used to use a couple of the tab extensions. This article over at wired.com got me thinking I should try a couple more of them.

I see with the release of Firefox 1.5, the address has changed. Firefox and Thunderbird have moved from Mozilla.org to Mozilla.com. Mozilla continues to be my favorite web browser. It has only gotten better with each successive release. With the installation of Firefox version 1.5, I found that the installation/updating of extensions was really slick.

For those of you who may not have updated thier Firefox browser, version 1.07 is out. It is much easier to update Firefox these day as you can do it from options>advanced.

You will find updates for your extensions too and all install quickly with no apparent problems.

Due to some extension compatibility problems with Firefox 1.0.5 and Thunderbird 1.0.5, the Mozilla foundation have released versions 1.0.6 of both Firefox and Thunderbird. There are no new features added to the new versions, they simply rectify an API problem that affected some extensions. In other news, the next generation of Firefox will be called Firefox 1.5 and is not due now till around September.

News of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7, as well as an MSN toolbar for IE that adds tabbed browsing have not stemmed the flow of users converting to the Firefox web browser. Firefox has now been downloaded over 70 million times (71332264 at the time of writing) and according to netapplications.com Firefox is growing between .5 and 1% every month and now accounts for over 8% of the whole worldwide browser market share, far ahead of the growth of other alternative web browsers. Those figures roughly match the growth shown by Onestat and WebSideStory but is lower than what is experienced by tech related sites like ours. Although Firefox has had some security flaws found of late, it is still light years ahead of Microsoft improving your security with regards to exploits, Viruses and Spyware, both because it is not anywhere near as targeted by malicious parties as IE, but also because it doesn’t support lame technology like ActiveX, which has been the cause of many an IE exploit.

With the release of Firefox 1.0.5 and the soon to be released Firefox 1.1 the growth should continue unabated and ensure that the “Internet” isn’t synonymous with “Microsoft”.

The Mozilla foundation have released a new version of Firefox, version 1.0.5 to be exact and according to the release file, the only changes are to fix some minor security fixes and stability improvements. This release does not appear to be as critical as earlier versions, but users are encouraged to upgrade anyway. Thunderbird (Firefox’s E-mail counterpart with SPAM filtering and an RSS reader) will be getting the same updates shortly as well.

The hot news with Firefox is the Deer Park Alpha 2 release which among it’s other features is the first Firefox that you don’t have to re-install to update. It isn’t ready for prime time use yet, but neither was 0.7 Firefox and I used it for ages as my primary browser without problem. For those of you that are not sure what Deer Park is about, Firefox 1.0.5 is the latest generation of the old 1.0.x version, Deer Park will be the next generation 1.1.x version of Firefox with more features, more security and more stability.

According to a spokesperson from Google, we can soon expect an official Google toolbar for the Firefox web browser. Up until now the only official Google toolbar was for Internet Explorer. Although all of the features provided by the Google toolbar have already been replicated by various Firefox extensions, it is a sign of confidence that search engines are working to make sure their services are functional on the upstart browser. It’s said to be due out tomorrow and will run on Windows 2000/XP as well as Apple OSX 10.2 and Linux 8.0+ (Can somebody who knows what Linux 8.0+ is E-mail and let me know please?) and it has much the same feature set as the Internet Explorer version.