Firefox 2.0 Beta

Firefox 2.0 is available in Beta now. Don't install this if you have extensions you need; few are ready to work with this yet. As usual, expect that there can be bugs and unfriendly behavior.

However, if you are curious about what's coming up in the next Firefox, there are some long needed improvements. No doubt the most desirable new feature is "Undo Close Tab". Each open tab now has an individual "X" to close it, which probably decreases your chances of closing something accidentally, but if you do, just right click (Mac: ctrl-click) on any other tab and choose Undo Close Tab. Should you close more than one tab in your haste (again, that was much more likely with the old single "X" interface), you'll find "Recently Closed Tabs" in your History.

Should Firefox crash, you'll be prompted to optionally reload all the tabs you had open before the crash. This feature takes some of the sting out of Firefox's buggy habit of crashing on certain sites under certain conditions.. it seems to happen to me when I've had a lot of windows open for a while and then visit some flashy site. Very annoying, but this "Restore Previous Session" will help.

This version continues to support live bookmarks for RSS enabled sites, but also adds the ability to choose your own feed reader to add the subscription to.

You can also manage your search engines now. As I never use anything but Google, I removed everything else, but you can add more if you want and shuffle around their order.

Spell-check for web forms is automatic, which might help you avoid leaving unfortunate comments at blogs. It's subtle enough (light red underline for misspelled words) that you might not even notice it; right click for suggested corrections.

Anti-phishing checking is now built in. This either checks against a static local list or can query Google. I'm not sure how good that's going to be; personally I like Netcraft's anti-phishing toolbar better, but this might improve over time.

Extensions now seem to be called "Add-ons". That's because they merged themes and extensions into one place.

I didn't observe any display glitches, and haven't been using it long enough to see if it locks up or crashes as much as the current version does (not that 1.5 is so buggy that it crashes constantly - it's just that it does happen now and then).

One thing I wish Firefox did have was a time ordered History view. Every now and then I want to revisit some page I had up earlier but can't remember the name. A time ordered list would help me find that. I also would like to see IE 7's thumbnail view - you can get that with an extension (though not yet for 2.0), but it should be built in.

I liked the new features (especially the new tab features) enough to replace 1.5 with this in spite of the loss of extensions - I'd rather suffer mildly for now but have the new tab features.

Comments /Web/firefox_2_beta.html


Thu Sep 7 17:29:21 2006: Subject:   TonyLawrence
The beta on Mac is still crashing regularly - the "Restore Session" ability makes that a little easier to take..



Sat Sep 9 14:33:37 2006: Subject:   BigDumbDinosaur
FF 2.0 beta seems to behave fairly well on Win2K, although some fonts render a bit strangely and the browser seems sluggish (this is running on an Athlon 64, so hardware performance is certainly nothing to complain about). I haven't really leaned on it too much to see what, if anything, might break. So far no crashes. One of the websites I maintain has a lot of JavaScript and it appears to work as expected. If the FF developers can tighten up the page rendering code a bit, I think they'll have a winner.



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