I installed the new Firefox 1.5 on both my Mac and my Linux box at work last week. I have to say, I was really surprised to find that the Linux install was just a .tar.gz file with everything in a directory inside. No real instructions on how to replace your existing Firefox install, just a directory you can run the new one from wherever you put it. I ended up copying it all over into my /opt directory and changing the links to it, but it seemed very strange.
Of course, the thing is that this is basically exactly how the Mac OS X install works (though it’s just a single ‘Application’ which, despite being a directory, doesn’t look like it). This, however, it the normal Mac way of doing things, and I know that I can replace the old install by copying the new application into the Application’s folder. Somehow, this seems natural on the Mac, and very unnatural on Linux (though I suspect that a few words of instruction for the Mac install might have been a better idea).
Maybe it’s that Fedora Core 4 came with Firefox, so I never installed it from scratch myself, but I honestly have no idea how to replace that existing install. Perhaps it’s always been like this, and I can just rip out the old firefox directory and put in the new one? One way or another, it doesn’t really bother me that there is another copy of Firefox there, as long as I don’t accidentally run it some of the time. I guess in time there will be custom packages for each distribution which deal with the problem in whatever way makes the most sense.
Anyway, all in all, I’m pretty happy. It seems one bug which had just come up for me (Scroll wheel not working when focus was on an input type=text field in some cases I hadn’t properly reduced) got fixed, but there’s still no way to do a find inside a text area on the page. Overall, I must say 1.5 feels a lot faster on my Linux box (I use Safari on my Mac most of the time, so I can’t really judge there), and hasn’t caused any trouble so far.