I know this sounds bizzare so hear me out before you get your knickers in a knot. I wanted to add a link to the blog from the main page at www.intreipd.com.au, so I changed the name of an existing flash button and gave it an appropriate name. When I uploaded the new page and button then loaded it in my browser neither the new button or the old button appeard. I sort of expected this because I have encountered it in the past when changing flash buttons, and I have no idea why.

So I cleared my Firefox 2 cache and reloaded the page, no change. I then fired up both IE and Opera but still the new button did not appear. I went back checked everything, no spelling mistakes in the code and all the needed files were indeed on the server. Loaded the page on my laptop, still no dice. So I’m getting a little frustrated about now wondering why it was happening and whether or not users could see the button because it looked stupid with just a gap where there should be a button. I was sure it was some sort of weird caching problem so I came up with the idea of doing a clean browser install. The only other browser I had on my drive was Firefox 1.5 so I installed that and lo and behold, the button works.

So it was indeed a cache problem. I still don’t know what or why but I am finally getting to the point of this post, I like Firefox 1.5. Not because it loaded the flash button properly, that would have happened with any clean browser install. No, I like 1.5 because it is loading pages faster than 2.0, and also because there is just one close tab button, so I can just click on one spot to close multiple windows. Just a few taps of the button and all the tabs I don’t want are gone. Nice. Now that I think back to pre 2.0 days I can remember thinking this was one (of many) reasons why Firefox was better than safari which had a close button on every tab.

Now I’m sure someone will tell me about better security or better features of Firefox 2 but I’ m not too interested in that, all I want to do is load pages as quickly as possible and use it as quickly as possible and on those fronts I have to say 1.5 has 2.0 beat. You might also say that 2.0 is infact faster than 1.5 but thats not my experience. So it has me a little worried about the impending Firefox 3.0 release, I haven’t used the beta so I Just hope it lives up to the hype because despite my criticism, I do love firefox.