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Firefox 2.0 To Debut Tuesday

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the two-for-tuesday dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 2.0 for Tuesday, says the Seattle PI. They give a quick recap of some of the new features, and discuss the ongoing IE vs. Fox debate." From the article: "Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7, its biggest upgrade since 2001. Analysts said IE7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Firefox's growth at Microsoft's expense. Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

22 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. innovation? by minus_273 · · Score: 5, Informative

    geez, "tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" that is beginning to sound like microsoft innovation. Long before firefox existed, I was using tabbed windows in opera. Give credit where it is due.

    --
    The war with islam is a war on the beast
    The war on terror is a war for peace
    1. Re:innovation? by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Informative

      So, to whom should the credit go to?
      "Web browsers are notable for implementing this kind of interface (called tabbed browsing). BookLink Technologies pioneered this interface design in its InternetWorks browser in 1994"
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing

    2. Re:innovation? by Sporkinum · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Opera might be better, and IE might be improved, but as long as Firefox has Adblock and the filtersetG updater, Firefox is the browser for me, my family, and anyone else that wants do do away with annoying (read all) advertising.

      --
      "He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
    3. Re:innovation? by AcidArrow · · Score: 5, Informative

      Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.

      May I ask what are those other browsers you're talking about? I am aware of 4 major browsers other than Firefox. Let's have a look at them and how they compare with firefox.

      IE7 - It finally got tabs and a search box but still has crappy html and css standards support. Actually it's a little worse than MyIE for IE6. I'll pass.
      Safari - Has a lot the basic features of a good browser and is very simple. Respects HTML and CSS standards. Has crappy PNG support (gamma correction) and for some reason scrolls slowly even on fast machines. It's a fine browser but I prefer Camino.
      Konqueror - Although I have limited experience with this one, it looks like a good browser/file manager, but I am un-aware of any features (appart from passing that ACID2 test) that make it better than Firefox.
      Opera - The only browser that is at least feature-wise better than firefox. But for some people Open Source actually matters. Though even with that into the equation, I can't really say which one is the better browser.

      So, while you can argue and I might accept that opera is better than firefox, what are the other browsers that I've been missing that are better than the "overrated" firefox? Oh, and preferably opensource.

    4. Re:innovation? by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The only thing that makes me like Firefox more than Opera is the idea of Extensions. The fact that the browser can be enhanced by the users creates a big advantage in my mind. I wouldn't want all those features built into the browser, because it would be huge and bloated, and there's a lot of extensions that without them my life would be a lot harder. The web developer extension makes my life so much easier, but i'm sure that 99% of internet users in the world would have absolutely no use for.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  2. Tuesday? by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Funny

    Tuesday? The day when security patches for IE are released?

    1. Re:Tuesday? by electrosoccertux · · Score: 5, Funny

      Firefox _is_ the security patch for IE.

    2. Re:Tuesday? by wertarbyte · · Score: 5, Funny

      Indeed. Internet Explorer is a fine browser, I use it all the time on a new windows installation - to download Firefox.

      --
      Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
  3. MDI by jonasj · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not that it matters who came first, but Mozilla did actually have tabs earlier than Opera. What you were using in Opera back then was actually MDI, not tabs.

    But of course other browsers had tabs far earlier than any of these two.

    --
    You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
  4. Hey Folks by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ...Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

    Hey Folks,

    They're both free apps under Windows! How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare? In fact, if FF were to take over it might actually benefit MS. How? IE has been their worst blackeye of the past couple of years. More problems with than than everything else. If MS could make all the bad IE press go away, don't you think that would be a positive? I realize this is like suggesting to Apple to let Dell build their hardware, but does that make it a bad idea? As long as FF adheres to Open Standards, everyone can compete with web-sites equally with it.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:Hey Folks by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare?

      If all the people use Firefox, there won't be that many IE-only applications. This means it will be a lot easier to switch to other operating systems, which usually means that people stop using Microsoft software. Microsoft's strategy is to force people to stick with their system. Why else do you think they are always making their own version of standards?

    2. Re:Hey Folks by C0vardeAn0nim0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      IE is a loss leader, just like the Xbox. they make up by selling other stuff, like devopment kits for activeX applets and other stuff.

      plus it's an anchor to hold people to their products.

      how many people you know have computers only to check e-mail and browse the web ? if all these people switch to firefox, how soon they'll realize they can use FF running in linux, freebsd, mac, etc ?

      what MS wants is joe sixpack to think that "internet == internet explorer" so they can keep shoveling windows on the unsuspecting masses

      --
      What ? Me, worry ?
  5. Re:Minimum tab size by dvice_null · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes there is. You can remove the close buttons from the tabs (make it look like it was in 1.5) and also tell the min width for the tabs:
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

  6. Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement by JavaManJim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Its Sunday after all right now, so why not pray for FireFox? This is FireFox 2.0 Beta running on my Windows XP PC.

    1. Starts without maximizing itself to the full PC screen area. Always leaves space available. In contrast SeaMonkey correctly occupies the full PC screen area when starting (but SeaMonkey makes me create a new profile except for once.). FF thinks its full screen according to its maximize/window button but is mistaken.

    2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine.
    http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

    Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

    Thanks,
    Jim Burke

    1. Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement by Threni · · Score: 5, Funny

      > Wait for Firefox 3, when the rendering system will be given a major overhaul.

      And that's just *nothing* compared with all the goodness we're putting into Firefox 4! Why do it now when you can wait a few years?

  7. Re:YAY! by aymanh · · Score: 5, Informative

    The changes are nicely summarized in this page.

    I find "Client-side session and persistent storage" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future. There are also JavaScript 1.7 which makes JavaScript more Pythonic, SVG support, and several other features.

    --
    python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
  8. Re:YAY! by From+A+Far+Away+Land · · Score: 5, Funny

    With the built in spell checker, I expect about 12% of the web's users to look smarter by at least 50% on Tuesday, with the number expected to grow as Firefox spreads.

    --
    Oh You POS
  9. Here's hoping. by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope it won't leak quite so much memory. That'd be nice.

    --
    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
  10. Re:YAY! by ilovepolymorphism · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With the new spellchecker they will also be introducing a new attribute to the input tag: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Controlling_s pell_checking_in_HTML_forms Is this a non-standard attribute? Are we going back to each browser adding stuff and hoping the other one stays relatively compatible? I'm not saying whether this is a good or a bad thing. I was just curious.

  11. Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Besides having far better CSS support than Firefox 2.0, Konqueror also uses only a fraction of the resources. Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.

    For example, when I simultaneously open about 15 of the blogs and websites I read daily, top reports Firefox 2.0 rc3 as using 149 MB of virtual memory. Konqueror, on the other hand, uses a cool 28 MB for those exact same sites. Opera uses 31 MB. So as far as I can tell, Firefox is the lame duck when it comes to effective memory usage. This is with a build right from mozilla.org, without any additional extensions installed. I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.

    A problem I have had with the Firefox 2.0 release candidates is crashes. This doesn't happen with Konqueror, or any other application I'm using, so I doubt it's faulty RAM. These crashes aren't easily reproducible, and I frankly don't have the time to bother debugging an application that I really don't use, and that crashes the few times I do try it out.

  12. Re:I'm a web developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 1.x branch of Firefox used Gecko 1.7
    Fx 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8
    Fx 2 uses Gecko 1.8.1, so a much smaller change (as in no new feature in HTML/CSS, just bug fixes I think). The new features are in SVG (textPath support), JavaScript (1.7) and Client-side session and persistent storage
    Fx 3 will be the next big jump to Gecko 1.9, with the reflow that will fix Acid 2 and incremental layout bugs, plus more CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support.

  13. Re:YAY! by bwilson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Is this a non-standard attribute?

    We wanted web pages to control the spellchecking defaults to some degree. For example, webmail applications will want to automatically turn it on for subject lines, even though it is normally off for <input> elements.

    We discussed with the WHATWG web standards group to come up with the attribute. I'm not sure about the status of this in any of their specs, as I'm not sure there was any strong consensus. That's one of the problems coming out with a new feature not currently supported in any other browser or mentioned in any standards.

    - Brett (Firefox spellcheck contributor)