The Mozilla Foundation has released Mozilla 1.5. I don't really have any reasons to use Mozilla anymore because of Firebird, but since Mozilla Firebird depends on the same core as Mozilla - I suppose this is good for me. I wonder if it means that Firebird and Camino will have new releases soon?
According to my performance tests, Panther is faster than Jaguar for most things Java related. Compiling whole projects with Ant is a few seconds faster. Opening IDEA is only 1-2 seconds faster. Opening Eclipse is actually slower. Booting is considerably faster - they've managed to trim off 1/3 of the boot up time.
I really like Panther so far, but I've discovered today that my 3rd party memory will have to come out and stay out. I've had 5+ black screens of death and after talking to tech support from OWC, they've confirmed there is an issue with all 3rd party RAM. They said they'd be tracking down the issue and getting me a replacement ASAP.
Things I dig the most: the Finder (more like Windows Explorer), Mail and Expose. I can't figure out what Expose's "Application windows" is for - it just seems to highlight the current app I'm in.
Things that suck? Photoshop gives errors on startup but continues to run. Ant puked at one point but seems to work fine now. A few of the haxies I've purchased aren't available yet (for Panther). XCode kinda sucks too - it forces you to use it's directory structure for projects. It looks cool, but we all know that good IDEs don't force you to do anything.
Simon mentions some treats that Panther has for developers:
I've just installed Panther and since you don't get stuff like CVS installed by default, I decided to open up the XCode CD and install the developer tools. To my surprise there are some Java tools tucked away including Ant, XDoclet, log4j and JBoss.
Here's a screenshot to prove it really does exist:
Wicked cool. It sucks that Ant is out of date (1.5.3), but that's OK since I already have it installed.
Oh yeah, and the 3rd Party RAM I have that was causing the Panther install to hang? I re-installed it and everything seems to work just fine.