I'm sorry, but update.mozilla.org needs to be faster for me to expect to put firefox 1.0 on my parents computer and feel good about them being able to take care of things themeselves. Right now I'm waiting ~5 minutes with no user interaction when I install Themes/Extensions. *I* know what's going on, but that's a little much for them. Plus, if they become impatient, they can crash fx. I hope the update service gets ironed out.

loving everything except the default theme (dont like the one of mac os either :/). but i know that it'll look better in the next release.

something about 0.9 on Mac OS X has me looking to Safari! It's weird. It just feels slower and less polished. Although, there are still plenty of features in Fx that I have come to count on that Safari lacks. URL keywords, type ahead find to name a couple. If there was a solid theme that gave the pinstripe/safari look and a little boost in speed there would be no doubt

Only one of my extensions works with update.mozilla.org.

That said, I'm pretty happy with 0.9. I don't mind the default theme, but I'm sticking with Charamel. (Thanks for the heads-up btw, easily my favorite theme.)

I read the release notes today about 2 weeks ago and thought it was a nothing update (read, bug fixes, few features) and since firefox never crashes I didn't much care. Downloaded it today, wow it's awesome. The theme manager and externsion manager is great, installing is easier than ever. The automatic update concept is great (and humerously unneeded) and the quick download is just stunning. It's just plain excelent.

I'm using it on all my computers and forcing it on everyone I can.
There are some great improvements since 0.8 - I especially love the "Add A Keyword Search For..." option in the context menu of all search forms. I'd like to see it extended into an automatic generator of search plugins in the future; that would be awesome.
I used scads of nightlies before 0.9 and of course had extension problems, but all the one's I've taken from u.m.o in the final release have worked without a hitch. The themes seem a little flaky still, but I'm fine with Winstripe.
Looking forward to 1.0.

My main problem is the default theme. Seeing as how most themes don't draw the scrollbar on FF for Mac, we are pretty much forced to use the default theme. I just don't understand what happened. We had a great mac-like theme that was beautiful, but now we get this multicolored, flat, clashes-with-everything, unmaclike atrocity for nothing more than having a continuous identity. None of the supported operating systems are similar in appearance, so why try and force a theme that doesn't really look good on any? It's a shame. While its not necessarily enough to make me switch, I'm hoping the theme gets better ... a lot better. Maybe a graphite version would help, but right now I'm very disappointed in the direction.

If it was my first ever Firefox, so I didn't have any upgrade/migration troubles, and I didn't know about any extensions other than u.m.o, I'd probably love it. As it is, having lived in Firefox since Phoenix 0.2, I'm saying exactly what my mother taught me to say in a situation like this: nothing at all.

First, the new default theme for the Windows version is ugly as sin, and makes Firefox look like shit. The old theme I thought was pretty slick looking. It's a small issue, and I know that it doesn't make the browser any less usable, but for christ's sake, appearances count!

Second, the install is too flaky for a live release. On one of my machines it installed perfectly, brought across my existing profile and everything was cool. On the other, blank profile and I had to figure out how to copy it all over. Both machines are practically identical, both have been running Firefox since 0.6 (I think). This is a big disincentive to upgrade - and it would appear that I'm not alone.

Other stuff, I haven't noticed it any faster (or slower), or any dramatic improvements. That said, with the two negative things I noticed, that made me feel like it was a step back, not forward.

firefox 0.9 is the best release ever. Seriously.

I agree with vfwlkr--best release ever. Room for improvement? Surely. Every once and a while a bug will pop up, something won't work as expected...but it is definitely useable for day to day use. Excellent work on the new theme (how long was it from the time the theme was checked in until the release? A week? Two?) I can't wait for the bug fixes and the tweaking that will really make 1.0 a fantastic browser. I've read all the "Mozilla devs are arrogant and don't listen to the people". Well, if thats true, then please, be arrogant! Excellent work, and I'm _sure_ 1.0 will be great.

Just for the record, my upgrades here on Linux (and on WinXP) have been flawless. No problems at all, 0.9 runs great.

Not a big fan - see my post here http://theoriginaldexta.blogspot.com

well, I dunno. I am a militant supporter of Mozilla suete. I will use that untill support for it stops.

My friends have had mixed reviews of Firefox. With the diffrent skin they seem less hesitant to jump on the bandwagon.

No new issues with them that have not been addressed... problems with old profiles and extnesions not working with the new manager.

The browser itself seems to more responsive, faster etc. So no real complains :D

After using Firefox for more than half a year, it's only because of this release and the theme/extension managers that I started installing those... Already, I have lots of extensions I can't imagine missing! 0.9 also makes me more confident about installing firefox on other peoples computers. Excellent browser!

On the whole I think it is an improvement on the allready great v0.8 but...

I agree with many others about the theme - the buttons are a bit square and boring to be "fancy buttons" but are to detailed to be "ultra simplistic icons"
I also think there is far too much blank space in the toolbars, but thanks to a few userChrome.css hacks I can sort that (which is great, each to his own, etc)

I think the new download manager, themes window, and extensions window are a step in the wrong direction. One of the big advantages of fx is the tabs - a reduction in windows - so why cant these be in the one dialogue?
The "download manger tweak" extension at least lets you set the downloads back in a sidebar where they should be.
The options pannel now has 2 blank spaces at the bottom where themes and extensions should go (are they not options anymore??)

I am planning to work on a mockup of what I think the options/themes/extension pannel should look like soon (when i have time)

for me firefox seemed somewhat less stable. couldn't install Qute theme first. then it crashed and would keep on crashing on startup. i had to delete the profile. now everything seems to be ok :)

Just a few complaints:
- Download manager won't close sometimes (Bug 246165)
- History loss sometimes (Bug 247576)
- Layout problem of horizontal rule, from Mozilla 1.7 (Bug 246179)

=P

I think Firefox 0.9 is an excellent release, and I appreciate all of Ben's efforts to solve the upgrade issues (remember 0.8) for good. With some finetuning for 1.0 beta it's gonna rock.

I haven't downloaded 0.9 yet, I'm waiting for the localized German version, as I'm doing for the new Thunderbird.

I have not installed V.0.9 (I am on V.0.8) , but read very carefully the forums' entries.
My opinion is that there is a major communication problem with this release: on one hand Dev slaps O.9 moniker on a specific nightly in order to declare it "feature complete", and from now on starts minimizing bugs until 1.0 is out, and on the other hand users see it as a milestone release with all implied robustness.
This difference could be handled very effectivly by putting a big sign on the download page saying that "this release is for testing only - for daily browsing please use 0.8 until V.1.0 is out. Please note that your existing extensions will probably not work".

That way, dev will get the testing support from the fans, and "normal" and new users will know what to expect.

The release is great, considering that 0.9 is supposed to be 'feature complete' and the bugs ironed out later on. However I personally feel that update.mozilla.org could be designed in a more professional manner. The font size is too big, and the graphics are rough. IMHO it should follow the design of mozilla.org or perhaps the new Mozilla store. Or even the Firefox help site. That said, it is still a great community effort and I hope to see it improve before Firefox hits 1.0.

Thank you for Firefox!

.9 is working very well for all the feature smash that went into it... 1.0 is gonna rock when all the extensions and update.moz.org work as expected.

I like it, but it doesn't seem as stable as 0.8.

I'm sorry, but i can't pur off all the profile migration problems, even in a very small community of mozilla users (Israel..), there are a lot of users that has faces with them :-/ It doesn't help our image...

Putting this off, the release is great, especially the extension manager (together with update.mozilla.org), which is much moe useful and intuitive than the extensions pref pane in 0.8 release.

Still, the mac version looks and bahaves very weird in some places such as the Preferences window and the CustomizeToolbar window, realy waiting for 1.0mac.

Been using since Phoenix 0.5 so i've become accustomed to qute. having installed 0.9 i was pretty unimpressed by the theme.

that's not my gripe, i understand it will be refined.

my problem was that i had never installed a theme before, never really cared to, and i had no idea how to install it. theme manager took me to the update site to get the theme, it downloaded it for me and then did nothing. there's no install button (that i could find). i had to go to texturizer and use the install page there. surely an install theme button would be handy in the theme manager. if there is one, maybe it needs to be put where the blind, like me, can see it.

I'm happy about the Mozilla Foundation works, but I would like the mozilla core developers pay more attention to xul and extensions developer. There are a lot of issue that are really annoying when developing remote xul application with Firefox 0.9.
http://xulplanet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=702
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=88603

I have allready given my review,
http://lynggaard.blog-city.com/read/655237.htm

Good release, but serious issues that needs to be dealt with before 1.0

If you put aside the profile problems, the extension manager problems (which aren't only legacy issues - installing multiple 0.9 extensions can also cause problems, removing extensions can too; and localisation is completely broken), and the selection of new crashers, then it's not bad. If you don't put all the problems aside, then you're looking at a bunch of problems...

The mad dash in itself was impressive, but I think madly dashing was a silly thing to do. It's meant a bunch of people spending a lot of time either getting annoyed with things not working, or getting annoyed supporting users for whom things aren't working.

Why have tens of thousands of people testing a pre-beta release (although I see Firefox has moved out of the technology preview category...) when you can find 95% of the issues with a few hundred people testing it? It just means more effort doing the support and the QA co-ordination, for little return. Now we have a couple of months of firefighting bugzilla reports from 0.9, which distracts from doing more useful things...

Anyway... that's done now. Just need to get down to fixing the 150 bugs blocking 1.0, and triaging the hundreds of new reports...

Personally *I* like 0.9, and for *me* it's the greatest release ever (as were 0.8, 0.7). Despite the odd toolbar buttons spacing of the new theme, despite the EM/TM/DM being very slow due to transparency problems etc.

But, 0.9 release has several bugs (most extension-related) that will keep me from recommending it to my friends. Because I don't want to hear: Ew, it sucks, I'll never try it again. I sincerely hope that 1.0 will be much better, and not only for me.

(I agree with Kob's post above and this post - http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=599396 - entirely)

The new release is pretty good. I love it that it has yet again become smaller and faster while having more features. That's so refreshing. It's approaching the size of opera, but with the feature support of the full mozilla engine. Tres cool.

I also really like the new extension/themeing support. It's very smooth, and very professional.

What I don't like is the new theme. For me it should be a 1.0 blocker. I really don't like it. I have all the respect for the theme builders, but they seem to have tried to make a mac theme work on windows, which is essentially impossible (I have yet to see a single instance where it looks good). I don't see why there should be a coordinated look between mac and windows anyway. No other app pulls that trick off successfully, so why should firefox?

It's true that I can just install qute, and I did, but I shouldn't have to do that to make my browser look acceptable.

I like it. I had some compatibility problems with Chatzilla at first (I'm on my third profile now) but now it works just fine. The faveicons aren't consistently there; they go on and off, and the new UI is uninspiring to say the least, but functionally it kicks butt. I understand the licensing problems with Qute, but I really hope we can come up with something more attractive for 1.0.

I agree with many of the above comments. It makes sense that this is (for some) the greatest release of them all, since its feature complete. The update.mozilla.org site is a welcome addition, as is the theme and extension UIs. I recognize the complaints of users due to the bugs and the unfinished default theme. But the point of the 0.9 release is to begin bug triage. By having so many bugs reported and worked on over the entire summer, we'll end up with an incredibly stable 1.0 release, the type that can be easily recommended to family and friends.

Feels a little faster than 0.8, but not as stable. I won't get into the theme issue. I think I should wait and see what the final version is like first. From what I read in the Mozillazine forum, there are lots of bugs remain when 0.9 was released. I would've prefer waiting most of these bugs to be fixed before making it a 0.9 release.

Finally, I think it eats up more resources more quickly compared to 0.8. Please, please look at the memory footprint/leak/etc issues before 1.0 is released. It's getting more and more difficult to make it run comfortably on a 128mb ram computer. It's particularly awful in Linux with the combination of Gnome/KDE. In Windows it's more tolerable. IMO it's more important to make it takes less system resources to run than making the download size smaller.

Firefox 0.9 is really the best linux browser! I love the new GTK+ enhancements, it really blends in with my theme now.
Looking forward to more Gnome integration, maybe the GTK+ 2.4 Open/Save dialog?
More meaningful ftp/sftp/smb "page" with more filemanager feeling?
Is there like a Gnome integration metabug in bugzilla?

It's a little faster browsing, but seems slower on menus, startup, etc.

New theme is better.

Still annoying problem of legal popups blocked when page is loading.

Download Manager still sucks. Pausing works fast, but resuming takes ~20 seconds or something.

Why does it close when it's done? What's the point of the Open link if Downloads is closed before I can open it?
Help really sucks. Mimicing each system's native help thing is probably more helpful than this proprietary ugly mess you have.

Update.mozilla.org seems to have potential but fails. I don't see the point of a rating system for something that's free. It's like Rolling Stones reviewing songs. And the comments only invite each theme's fanboys, "OMG!!! QUTE ROCKS!!! DiE WiNSTRiPE!!!"

It's quite amazing that users are left with such a bad experience that you can see for yourself in the Firefox Support Forums. To this day, Firefox can't install over a previous installation. I think Ben Goodger should've made this 0.9 release 0.9 quality, but he chose to release Firefox on time, which is funny since other releases were delayed for months.

I hate to be a griper, but I've got gripes. Profile migration was flaky. I think the new theme has promise, but in its current form it's ugly or at least deeply unpolished. I haven't personally hit any other new bugs but I'm willing to trust other commenters that they exist. I agree with the sentiment that the feature rush was impressive but pointless.

I enthusiastically recommended Firefox to my friends when 0.8 was the latest release. I don't anymore, because as someone said I don't want to hear "ew it sucks" and have them never try it again. I hope to resume my amateur evangelizing with 1.0, which I'm sure will iron out most of the kinks. But is there a good reason I should be waiting?

Release 0.9
I have been using firefox and it's predecessors for some time and am more than happy with the overall performance and stability.
Whilst in principal the progress is good the timing of the release is I feel rather poor.
The underlying browser is fine but in reality the enhancement provided by the extensions are what makes Firefox truly great.
As with all releases there are many extensions which will not work on the new version and this effectively limits it's functionality.
On a personal note I have reverted to release 0.8 for use on a day to day basis and will keep an eye on the progress being made with the current release.
I am grateful to the team for all their work and can only imagine the pressures they were under to achieve the release.
Keep up the good work

Firefox 0.9 seems to me to be much, much better, but much less polished and shiny. I've had some /very/ odd things going on when I try to change themes (only one of which I've figured out how to reproduce consistently, which is that the first tab won't close after you change themes) and I've found at least one new crash (open and close the browser over and over and eventually it'll crash, which is annoying when you're testing out your brand new Firesomething extension).

All in all, though, it seems much better, and like much progress was made, and a Firefox 0.9 with no bugs (aka 1.0?) will be much better than a Firefox 0.8 with no bugs.

For me 0.9 had quite a few irritating problems, but being someone that's a bit of a Mozilla zealot i was able to work round them and live with it.

What i found very difficult was that as of 0.8 i had started recommending Firefox over the suite because to people who were not technologically savy. People that had never used anything but IE. I was encouraged even more to do so by the adds campaign launched with 0.8.

It seemed the epitome of a stable product despite not being past 1.0.

99% of the people i got to try stuck with Firefox and appreciated that it had been shown to them.

Then comes along 0.9 a more buggy release, with more than you mentuioned for some people Asa and it became very difficult to say in honesty to people that they would have no issues or troubles.

Troubles on the whole i could help them with but they don't want to go through all that.

I think rushing 0.9 was a bad idea when Firefox had allready been pushed as an option for the masses.

That being said, it does have a lot of nice feature improvements and (importantly for conversion of users) it does seem faster and is a smaller download.

It's certainly not all bad but i think disregarding the bugs, shouldn't have been an option.

Of course maybe there wasn't enough feedback over bugs, i wouldn't know.

In short though i love many aspects of 0.9 i'm not half as impressed as i was at 0.8's release.

I'm sure though, since 1.o will add no new features and be all about bug squashing i'll be happy then :)

1. Localisation:
It seems to me that Fx relly lacks of support for this. Until now it "only" was that it was difficult (and not officially supported) to install a lang-pack.
With 0.9 AFAIK many, if not all l10n makers got really annoyed. Cause it got even worse.
If we want to compete, we need good l10n support (ideally we would release fx 1.0 in several languages simultaneously)
Instead of learning lessons from Suites history of l10n it seems this time it gets much worse. This shouldn`t be.

2. So it`s true that winstripe is default theme on mac os X,too? I thought the plan was to have pinstripe for the mach, winstripe for the MS OSes and Gnomestripe for linux (it might do well on the BSDs or any other *nix ru nning the Gnome Desktop.
There is no market for a browser the uses Wincolors in it default theme on the mac.

3. It`s a big mistake to put this realese on the top of the frontpage with no technical-preview strings attched. With 0.8 this might maybe been okay. Not with this release. I think there allready has been a far to big hype for the pre-1.0 releases by now (cause people who better shouldn`t use by now alreaday do), and this doesn`t help it either.

3.And i second that closing Download manager when the dl is done is annoying. What`s the logic behind this?

4. I hope the theme gets better (talking about win this time). I understand you had to do this change. (By the way it seems Qute is still not under compatible license, so thres no wy in using it, if Arvid waits longer the chances will only decline, cause the more work that m.o has to put into winstripe the more they`ll insist on using it, of course)

5. Beside this and maybe some small issues i missed (most of them maybe already mentioned above) this is a very good piece of work. i really like it (Okay it`s been like this since mozilla Suite 0.9, but that`s another story)

I personally had no real problems with the upgrade to 0.9, but then I also use nightlys on a regular basis so I was prepared for most of the problems. A lot of my friends had issues with extensions & themes installing and getting said themes & extensions from update.moz.

I tend to keep local copies of all my regularly used extensions & themes so I can just wipe the old build and drop in a nightly zip and go. I guess I'm in the minority, as almost everyone I talk to uses the installer. I've used the installer once or twice but it just wasn't my thing. I like to unzip and go.

I hope that update.moz is due for a site renovation too, to make it more appealing visually. It's kind of an eyesore.

That's my 1.5 cents.

I file a bug #247174, which I think is a serious problem, yes, its not relevant to the product's function, but who want the interface gets nasty? seems you guy just dont want to look at it. So, what can I say?

I couldn't migrate my profile automatically from 0.8 to 0.9 - I got a XUL error when I finished the install and start Firefox right away. I had to move those files by hand.

Regarding the theme, IMHO the *stripe on Lin/Win still has a long way ahead. So you guys had made great icons for Firefox and Thunderbird(esp Thunderbird), I'm expecting improvements on the *stripe themes too, just keep it up.

My comment? Well, a bit boring... :)
And before I turned back to Qute I did used Smoke, from http://mozthemes.tk/, which I think it's quite good.

And the last, I miss the Live HTTP headers extension which is not yet available to 0.9 :\

Wow! Firefox 0.8 was a good release and now Firefox 0.9 sets the quality bar ages back. It has it's highlights like Winstripe, Footprint, Copy Image, but nothing revolutionary. The bugs are really annoying. By the way, is there a bug for "Downloads shouldn't close by default after Downloads are done"?

I've started working part-time at a local ISP and computer repair place during the summer, and we roll out our service disc with Firefox on it. I generally get positive comments about Firefox when I ask customers. By the way, I'd like to customize our firefox builds a bit and maybe change the default icon setup (add the history, bookmarks, download, and new tab buttons) and add some vital bookmarks. Do you guys have any documentation on how to go about that process...I figure I'll have to compile my own build w/ installer. Anyway, when Fx gets to 1.0 we are probably going to politely demand that all new customers use Firefox because the virus, trojan, adware, and spyware is getting to be insane.

Just Love It!!

Themes and extensions managers are superb.

Winstripe isn't at all bad, the fact that this is most people favorite gripe just goes to show how full and complete the browser must be. It looks better than IE so no probs there and anyone that doesn't like it is given a simple means to choose from many others.

Whilst in general this release doesn't seem to quite have the solid finish of 0.8 it is a crucial and superb step on the way to 1.0.

Well done Ben and all!

I've unfortunately run into a lot of bugs with 0.9. It feels far less stable than 0.8, and I'm scared to recommend it to people, for fear of them having issues and never trying it out again. Myself and two of my friends both had lockups with importing. I ran into an early issue where themes wouldn't install. The EM/DM/TM are all really slow, and use 30% or more CPU usage just by moving the mouse over them; I fail to understand why we have to use fancy transparent overlays on those managers when it causes such extreme slowdowns; even scrolling is extremely slow on a P4. The extension manager is the worst of these, and has a few usability issues that I really hope get addressed before 1.0 lands (for example, there is no visual indication that an extension has options or not! How was this ever considered acceptable?)

I agree with other people that the 0.8 theme on Mac was better than the 0.9 theme in many ways. At least the home icon is close to Apple's home icon on Mac though. On Windows, it's very out of place. Also, the new tab icon is just hideous, I'm sorry to say; it lacks the kind of polish that the icons brought over from the 0.8 Mac theme (like printer, downloads, bookmarks, etc) have. I'm sure this will be corrected for 1.0 though, or at least, I hope so. The theme in general just needs work, as everyone has pointed out already.

I'll be writing a full review on all of the issues I ran into with this release. Frankly, I'm a bit disappointed, and I'd like to see a 0.9.1 bug fix release between now and 1.0. I think this release was pushed out of the door too early, and some more Unit/UAT testing would have helped immensely. It seems like many of these issues are widespread, and they should have been caught & fixed prior to release. I hope 1.0 is a lot more stable.

Also, I hate to nitpick design, but update.mozilla.org is, in my honest opinion, ugly as could be. Plus, in Firefox 0.9 under Linux, nothing lines up properly, and the icons overlap the descriptions for the extensions. Not good at all.

Also, the Web Search menu item under Tools is extremely flawed, as it does absolutely nothing if you don't have the Search box displayed anywhere. The menu item should be grayed out if it isn't displayed. Also, if the search box is set to "Find in this page", the phrase "Web Search" is a total misnomer.

I never use the search box, so now I have this enabled menu item that does nothing except eat my mouse click.

Finally downloaded the latest Aviary build today (there have been too many regressions over the last month, and I didn't want to mess with them). My thoughts...

Theme: unpolished, but not awful (and having seen some truly awful themes, I can't really sympathize with the most vocal gripers). Can live with it for now. I'm more irritated by the continued screwing up of favicons in the bookmarks.

Extensions: only 3 out of about 10 that I tried (and these were all pulled off of update.mozilla.org) worked when installed. The rest either cause the browser to hang on startup, or just sit in the extension manager saying "this extension will be installed on next startup" regardless of how many times the browser is started. Especially irritating as I haven't figured out how to install FlashBlock manually. At least I figured out how to manually cleanup after the attempt so that I don't have to reinstall the entire browser and/or profile again. It appears that most are legacy extensions. Bad form to have them listed as compatable with 0.9 if they really aren't.

Oh, and yeah, update.mozilla.org could use some good design touches, but I'll put that in the same category as the theme: unpolished, but good enough that I imagine it will be brought up to par by 1.0.

Firefox 0.9 didnt crash at all, but I'm having occasional freezes, much more frequent than 0.8

0.9 is a frequent crasher for me, especially when I put it under load (e.g. ~20 tabs loading at the same time, which I do quite frequently). Also, 0.9 corrupted my prefs.js, so I had to delete it in order to get it to run again (it would crash on startup as soon as the browser window appeared).

0.8 was rock solid. I may go back.

Love it. I only have two minor complaints.

When the download complete window pops up at the bottom right, it seems like you should be able to click on it and show either the downloads window or the location where the file was downloaded to.

The other minor complaint has to do with setting up multiple home pages. I've currently got /. and gmail as my two home pages. When you hit the home button it opens up new tabs for those pages, even though currently opened tabs are already there. If you've currently got one of the tabs up, it only duplicates the tab behind it. I would think that it should just reload the pages if you're already at the addresses.

With the IE view extension for those rare sites that don't work with firefox, I will rarely ever go back to IE.