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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!
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 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.
Yes, but where will they find snakes that think in Russian?
We have not yet released Firefox 2 Beta 2. This story is incorrect.
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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).
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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
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..