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Firefox 2.0 was released by Mozilla Oct. 24th, and seems to be a marginal upgrade from its previous version, Firefox 1.5. Here, i go over some of its new features, what they do, what needs work, and more.
New Features
Like all other releases of any software, besides bug fixes, Firefox 2 has a number of new features. They enhance the browsing experience, and some of them you wonder, why weren't they in Firefox .8?
Interface
The new interface on Firefox 2 is sweet, a needed improvement over the old icons in the previous versions. The new icons are glassy, almost aqua-ish, and are easy on the eyes. Minor tweaks that may be found annoying are that the address bar and go button have been smashed together into one, and the progress indicator at the top of the screen doesn't link to the Firefox homepage anymore. Other panes, like Extensions and Themes, have been merged, into the multi featured Addons pane. The pane has 3 windows, Extensions, Themes, and then Updates. The first 2 are available at any time, and the updates pane is available whenever updates are found for themes or extensions, allowing you to select updates and download all at once. Sadly, the old downloads interface is less featured than it was in version .8, as has been since 1.0. Luckily DownThemAll, a superior download manager, works with 2.0, and even matches the interface.
Overall, the interface is nice, being able to compete with the new looks of IE7, but still with a bit of a legacy feeling to it. This will help ease users into the changes.
Tabs
The tabs have gotten a small rehaul, mostly features that were available in the extension Tab mix plus. Surface changes include a close button on the tabs, and in place of the old Firefox close button at the end of the toolbar, a dropdown allowing you to browse through opened tabs in a menu. Other features include the ability to open closed tabs from the History menu, and, if a browser crash occurs, the browser will give you the option to reload the last session. Tab mix plus gave users all of these features, and the ability to recall a previous session from a menu, something that i have yet to discover how to do.
Overall, the tabs are an improvement to users not using tab mix plus with the older versions of firefox. But for those of us who have switched over from Tm+, it seems a bit of a downgrade.
Spell checker
Finally, a spell checker as good as Newsvine's, on every website! The spell check is always on, and can be disabled via a right click. When you make a misspelling, the word gets a dotted red line. Not a wavy red line a la word, a dotted red line, a la Thunderbird. Right clicking on the word pulls up the standard contextual menu, but at the top of the menu, there are spelling suggestions. This dictionary is fairly basic though, and can't find proper spellings for a few misteaks that are only 1 letter off.
Overall, the spell checker is great, and speedy. Hopefully we will be seeing more intelligent, readable posts because of this.
Feeds
The feed handling in Firefox is much better than it was in previous versions. Instead of forcing you to use live bookmarks, clicking the big orange feed icon does one of 2 things. If there is only one feed for the site, then it takes you to a page where you can view the news posts, and select a subscribe option. If there are multiple feeds, it displays a dropdown of these feeds, and clicking the feed title goes to the view and subscribe page. Visiting the URL of a feed takes you to this page automatically. Currently, the only subscribe services i have are Live bookmarks, Thunderbird, Bloglines, Yahoo, and Google. I hope more are added.
The crappy feeds system of previous Firefoxes is gone, replaced by something as good, if not better than Safari's feed viewer. Although the feed viewer in Safari provides some things, like search, and a slider for amount of information, that Firefox does not have, the ability to send subscriptions to different services is a boon.
Overall
Overall, Firefox 2.0 is a worthwhile upgrade, bringing in features you needed. The memory leak has been fixed, and the browser loads and operates much faster, even without Extensions like Fasterfox. A few things here and there are a bit annoying, like the throbber not linking to the Mozilla homepage, and the go button being part of the address bar, but overall, it is a good upgrade.
