Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 Arrives

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review. It is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. DesktopLinux.com has posted a list of the changes along with a few quick screen grabs. Apparently, the download can be found on Mozilla's ftp site."

Comments

One question before I try this out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can this version happily co-exist with my existing Firefox 1.5 installation without screwing everything up? I'm eager to try out FF 2.0, but not if it causes problems with the version I have installed already.

I might consider it...

[betterunixthanunix]

...but 1.5 turned me off to Mozilla. Konqueror loads a lot faster, and uses less memory.

Tabs will be broken

[anagama]

Looks like Firefox drank the coolaid and opted for the tab closing button on each tab, thus presenting a moving target for closing tabs. I hope they make single button an option a least.

Re:Tabs will be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

            1. Start Firefox.
            2. In the Address Bar type "about:config" and press Enter.
            3. Right-Click and select New->Integer.
            4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter "browser.tabs.closeButtons" (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
            5. Now you need to select the type of close button you want: 0 - display a close button on the active tab only, 1 - display close buttons on all tabs, 2 - don't display any close buttons, and 3 - display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior). After entering the value corresponding to your preference press OK again.

What the hell kind of way is that to change such a simple setting?!

Does it still hog memory?

[TheWoozle]

Anyway, Opera has most of these "new" features, and consumes fewer resources. I switched, and haven't looked back.

Re:Does it still hog memory?

[Overly Critical Guy]

That's the beauty of Opera. It already ships with the features, so you don't need to hunt down and install "extensions" or compile them yourself.

Plus, no memory leak bug or reimplemented widget controls (I have an operating system that provides those natively, thanks).

Re:Does it still hog memory?

[dcam]

Opera is rubbish. I loathe Opera.

I'm a web programmer and we run a site that supports opera 7+, IE5+, anything Gecko, Safari 1.2+. Opera is a bitch when it comes to writing javascript. Let me count the problems (BTW this is for the latest version):

1. Opera hates innnerHTML. So generating options for a select list and then setting it using innerHTML means opera doesn't work.

2. Opera doesn't like generated elements and doesn't treat them in the same way as elements that were part of the page. For example if you add a select and some options to a page using javascript, Opera will not let you set any of the options as selected.

3. Visual consistency. Opera just doesn't have it between versions.

Opera has cost me I'd guess about 10 hours sleep this week.

Re:Does it still hog memory?

[ubernostrum]

Plus, no memory leak bug or reimplemented widget controls (I have an operating system that provides those natively, thanks).

That'd be nice if not for the fact that isn't true, and very very obviously isn't true on OS X. Run through this checklist:

• Opera's dialogs and window chrome don't respect the system default font settings -- Opera uses a smaller setting that makes it feel extremely out of place.
• Opera's form controls in web pages don't respect the system default settings -- the system says "Lucida Grande" and Opera says "Arial".
• Opera doesn't actually use native form widgets (it doesn't use them on any platform, really -- Opera's built with Qt, so the quality of the interface is directly dependent on the quality of the widgets Qt provides on a given platform), and it's very easy to spot this. For example, here is a screenshot of a small area of the screen in Gmail in Safari, showing the native fonts and a few native widgets (a couple buttons, part of a text field, and a select menu). And here is a similar shot in Opera.
• Opera uses a strange and fairly ugly tab control based on older versions of the Aqua interface. Tabs are an area where it's OK to improvise -- neither Safari nor Firefox use the default tabs of OS X -- but if you're going to improvise you should do it well (compare: OS X default, Safari, Opera.
• Opera often has problems aligning text on form controls; text on buttons, for example, is often noticeably right of center, and Opera sometimes doesn't draw a button with enough height to comfortably encompass the text, resulting in buttons that look squashed and cramped.
• Opera's search box is not an OS X search box, and doesn't look or function anything like an OS X search box except for being rounded.

I could go on for quite a while here, but by now the point should be pretty clear.

Re:Does it still hog memory?

[shutdown -p now]

There's nothing wrong with innerHTML as such, and I've heard that it might in fact even end up in the standard somewhere, since all major browser vendors implement it these days (Opera does too, BTW - not sure in which version it appeared first, but Opera 9 certainly supports it). But the whole point of having standards, good or bad, is that when your software adheres to one, and other software does too, they will interoperate smoothly. Sometimes it means sacrificing speed, code size/readability etc, but especially on the Web, compatibility is a priority. Thus, as it stands, using innerHTML is no better than slapping the "works in IE only" sticker onto your website. When/if it changes, all the better.

Re:Does it still hog memory?

[ElleyKitten]

Does Opera come with the features contained in ConQuery, Flashblock, Gmail Notifier, IE Tab, Nuke Anything, Slashdotter, and Web Developer?

Yes, it does. Next.

Can you tell me how to enable these features? Because I like Opera 9, but without Flashblock, Nuke Anything, and Gmail Notifier, I just can't use it as my main browser.

More like opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading over the new features mentioned and looking over the screenshots, it looks like Firefox is starting to look like Opera. The interesting thing is that Firefox started of with the concept of having a completely minimal browser where the extensions are used to customize it to the user. However, now it just seems like their copying the concepts that a bunch of popular extensions introduced (or copied from other browsers like Opera) and incorporating them into the core because they want to either improve their performance or manage the memory leaks or whatnot that 3rd party extensions cause.

On some level, it's nice, but the one thing I prefer about extensions is that their feature/fix rate is fairly more frequent than Firefox's. It will be interesting to see where Firefox is 5 years from now.

Re:Solution.

[jfengel]

It's not a question of closing multiple tabs. It's the fact that if you want to close the current tab, you have to hunt it down visually, rather than going to the same place in the window no matter what tab you're viewing.

We're talking about a difference of perhaps a tenth of a second, but of such microscopic units of time are human-factors decisions made. Interfaces are all about developing habits, and things that make it hard to form habits interfere with smooth operation. Maybe the new interface would make different and better habits; maybe not. I didn't think so, but YMMV.

cookies

[the_wesman]

am I the only one who thinks that cookie management blows in firefox? I mean, it's certainly worse in IE, but it's far from great and I haven't seen any enhancements to it in any recent versions (though I may just be blind or crazy, though not too likely) - sometimes, you go to a site for the first time and I've got FF set to prompt on cookies, so I say "hell no I don't want a cookie" then the site says "sorry, bro, this site doesn't work without cookies" so then I have to go digging around the block/allow list for cookies to try to find the right one so I can remove it from the blocked list so I can try to get into the page. considering that most of the people that use firefox are probably nerds and probably aware of things like cookies and probably are more likely to do things about them (like selectively allowing them) it is suprising to me that cookie management is so difficult inside this application - does anyone else agree?

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Really...THESE kind of "features" are considered a major version upgrade?

I repeat...

YAWN!!!

Why can't a god damned browser do what it is supposed to? JUST FUCKING BROWSE???

Re:This is INCORRECT

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprise, surprise.

Seriously, /. editors, do we have to do this every time a Firefox release gets close? How hard is it to check Mozilla's site to see if a release is actually announced?

I keep asking ...

[Tumbleweed]

... where's the multithreaded UI?! Gah.

(Yes, 'Gah.' I went there.)

More features?

[Korin43]

Can we have less features and just bug-fixes? I mean, the reason I used Firefox in the first place was because it was tiny. Don't go making it into Netscape again..