Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Isn't Clint Eastwood a bit old to be doing this stuff?
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
For those of you that want to test this out without installing it, consider a portable version of Firefox 2 Beta 2.
http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/08/31/download-t he-portable-version-of-firefox-2-beta-2/
FireFox, 2B or not 2B.
"toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them."
FINALLY!
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
...but 1.5 turned me off to Mozilla. Konqueror loads a lot faster, and uses less memory.
Palm trees and 8
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
New Firefox 2 feature: Inline spell checking -- A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms.
But will this detect antiquated Elglish, such as when people use "ask" instead of "ax"?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
A beta was unstable and not ready for daily use? That's umpossible!
Seriously, beta 1 was unstable for me as well until I realized that it was because of a couple extensions that I had installed with the nightly tester tool that were crashing it. Since I removed those I haven't had any trouble with beta 1.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I hadn't heard that Firefox was switching to NSIS.
Was the old installer Mozilla-specific code?
Either way, the switch sounds like a good idea. The old installer had its issues, and focusing on the browser and improving an existing (and already quite reasonable) installer is a great idea.
Anyway, Opera has most of these "new" features, and consumes fewer resources. I switched, and haven't looked back.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
You must have incredible lung capacity. If I'd held my breath waiting for Internet Explorer 7 I'd have been dead for just over five years now.
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.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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.
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?
calling all destroyers
Awww yes, by-passing the version protection preventing it from doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
I have found I need far fewer extensions as FF defaults now act the way I want, so I no longer need an extension to fix the behavior.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Instead of ftp.mozilla.org, try the mirror page – currently it seems to list beta 1, but you should be able to modify the download URL to get the en-US beta 2.
One small area that has had a reasonable amount of improvement in Firefox 2 is canvas support – I've been working on a canvas-based FPS engine and get about 50% better performance in FF2 than in FF1.5, as well as lots of fixed bugs and memory leaks.
Most major changes (like the new graphics infrastructure that'll help provide hardware accelerated rendering, full-page zooming, HTML inside SVG, better printing, etc) are being left for Firefox 3, but FF2 seems like a solid improvement over the previous version.
The canvas is actually a nice example of progress on the web. After too many years with very little going on, the major modern browsers developers (Mozilla, Opera, Apple) are working in the WHATWG to add new features – it's a balance between proprietary extensions and W3C-style specifications, with browsers implementing features at the same time as the spec is being written and guiding its development. There's room for competition between browsers in terms of feature support, and we don't have to wait years for the standards to be completed first – but it's hopefully without the old problems of those features being proprietary and poorly designed. For example, Opera 9 supports much of Web Forms 2.0 and the Mozilla developers are just starting work on it too; and it's also designed to be backward-compatible, so the new forms are still usable in all browsers and can be emulated in some (e.g. IE) with JavaScript. Firefox 2 seems to be the first browser with client-side session and persistent storage, but web sites written to benefit from that feature will be able to immediately work with future versions of e.g. Opera that support it too.
With the popularity of trends like AJAX encouraging people to think about new ways to interact with users over the web, and browsers adding features to expand the possibilities open to web developers, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
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???
Been using today and it seems more responsive than Beta 1 and after a day a bit more reliable. Quick look seems to indicate that it uses less memory. Lots of add ins won't work with this and we should (hopefully) see a bunch of updates soon so that we can get our favorite add ins back!
The new tabs look nicer. I hate the "go" button and haven't figured how to turn it off, but I'm sure someone will create a theme without it.
Yes, but where will they find snakes that think in Russian?
I want to close a tab that is currently in the background. Previously I could not do this. Now I can. Seems the new feature enhances usability, no?
I suppose if you're closing lots of tabs, in exactly the order in which they currently appear, then the old functionality is more usable, since you just have to keep clicking a stationary button. But is this a common use case? I would think it's more common to want to close a single tab (foreground or background) or close all tabs. The new functionality enhances the former and doesn't change the latter.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
We have not yet released Firefox 2 Beta 2. This story is incorrect.
- Asa
Built-Phishing Protection:
WARNING:
The man you are about to converse with is not really a high ranking General in the Nigerian army, he does not really have a rich uncle who died tragically in a plane crash in Siberia, and he absolutely DOES NOT have $53.4 million dollars to smuggle out of Nigeria for his uncle's poor orphaned children. You will not get 30%. Trust us.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE?
+----+ +--------+
| OK | | CANCEL |
+----+ +--------+
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Actually, you have always been able to close a background tab; just do a middle click with your scroll wheel on the tab.
liqbase
Am I the only person who thinks this is a stupid and counter-productive idea? When was the last time you (the population of
I like the idea of having more tabs than window space, but fer cryin' out loud, two scroll buttons are not the way to handle it. How about multiple rows of tabs? Or right click + drag to scroll back and forth? Or a drop down menu of tabs?
I thought we all agreed that Flash applications that break scrolling are a Bad Thing (tm).
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Have they done anything to fix performance on linux builds?
It's sad watching FF on a dual boot system run significantly slower under linux than under window on the same machine. Especially when other linux applications fly.
And it's not even just DNS lookups. Simply switching tabs can take up to a second (?!) under linux whereas under windows it's 0.2 seconds (the perceived direct interaction threshold for most people).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've been using Firefox 2.0 daily builds and Thunderbird 2.0 alpha along side the stable versions for quite some time using PortableApps.com. They are an entirely self-contained directory separate from your regular install.You can even run PortableFirefox from a CD so make sure to turn on the disk cache, otherwise performance is slow.
Firefox's auto incremental updates work great, plus it remembers your tabs so after the restart I'm right where I left off. I'm enjoying the built-in spell check--right now in fact. Firefox's reopen recently closed tabs feature on the renamed History menu is a life saver. I just accidentally closed this tab after checking that my links worked and Firefox brought it back complete will all form information. Google Suggest in the search box rocks.
The RSS feed summary page is cool and has support for Simple List Extensions. Check out a sample here: Jeff Bezos's Wish List. The ability to subscribe using your chosen feed reader is nice.
The tab bar is interesting. It changed to a grey gradient from a lighter, whiter washed out look a few builds ago. The grey doesn't match well with the Windows XP light tan gradient toolbars and the overflow arrow on the side of the tab bar are too faint to be noticeable. The list all tabs drop down on the right side is great though. I guess Mozilla has reached their goal of making the active tab better distinguished.
Generally, it seems to me that memory usage is lower than 1.5, even with 4 windows with 10+ tabs each. :-)
I'm lovin' it!
Host localhost (127.0.0.1) appears to be up
... where's the multithreaded UI?! Gah.
(Yes, 'Gah.' I went there.)
The spec states:
which sounds like what you want. Unfortunately Mozilla hasn't implemented that behaviour, which is a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3025 66) that ought to be fixed. (I guess you could get the right behaviour by creating the canvas element in script and adding it to the DOM, but that would be kind of nasty.)
The spec also says that authors should provide alternate content that "conveys essentially the same function or purpose as the bitmap canvas" and also "should not use the canvas element in a document when a more suitable element is available. For example, it is inappropriate to use a canvas element to render a page heading". I can't think how else they'd encourage the use of alternate content, but it'd be interesting to see any ideas of how to help overcome the laziness of authors. Chrome-spoofing (assuming you mean making canvas content that looks like part of the web browser) is usually no different to the issues caused by normal images, except that the drawWindow method (a Mozilla extension (not added through the proper extension mechanism, which isn't terribly polite of them – Opera has done it more properly)) would let scripts read the pixels from e.g. form buttons and work out what theme you're using – so that's currently limited to being run by JS code in extensions and it can't be used by web content, to avoid the security issues.
And SVG does seem a generally better way of doing vector graphics than canvas+JS; but it's worse at dynamic bitmap graphics, which is why both exist :-)
Warning: Rant coming on.
And if you want to feel incoherent rage, type "Alt-F(file-menu),C(close tab)" for a year and then go to Wikipedia and try to close the page. Oops. You can't, because some dumb fuck decided it should mean "Find" in wikipedia.
Whatever pigfucker decided that a fucking web page should be able to override an application's ability to use a key such as Alt-F should be gutted like a fish and have his entrails wrapped around a pickle fork and shoved down his throat.
And when he gets to my website, he will, because my CSS thinks that "F" stands for "fishyfork".
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..