Firefox 1.5 has been released, and is available for download at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. While superficially it looks like nothing has changed, there are some huge improvements hidden just below the surface.

• Native, albeit incomplete, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support (finally!)
• Memory-cached back/forwards
• An improved extension model (already the most powerful part of Firefox)
• A variety of CSS3 additions, including multi-column layouts (huge for those blogs that insist on a 10 character wide text area)
• A tremendously powerful <canvas> element that allows for programmatic "drawing"

All of these are fantastic to see - Firefox really is blazing its own path now, no longer caught in the no-win situation of simply following Microsoft's lead. Of course Firefox has been better at standards conformance and nuances of CSS for some time, but that doesn't really inspire a lot of end-user adoption - it's the features that matter, and in that domain it has taken a hefty lead (including over anything I've seen with IE 7).

I've been using Opera 8 as my primary browser for several months, after a couple of years with Firefox as my mainstay. Given some of the improvements I think I'm going to switch back.

In two prior entries (on October 6th, and also on October 2nd) I commented on EXIF and GPS, and how the inclusion of the latter will dramatically improve the value and utility of the former. A reader left a note about a site covering this sort of issue - http://geo.novelviews.com/. Thus far it appears to have a limited amount of information (though it did point me to a couple of GPS-integrated or -enabled cameras that I didn't know existed), however the importance of that technology pushes me to give it some link goodness.