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Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard
ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.
I've been using it since yesterday since Mozilla had it posted in their pub directory. :( But I like the new look and feel to it, plus it uses quite less memory.
So far, so good. I was upset my Daily Dilbert and FastFirefox Extensions weren't compatible though.
Good job Mozilla!
to get rid of the close buttons on every tab and make it like 1.5 goto about:config and set
browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3
and to hide the Go button set
browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true
From the review of FF2: Tab Tweaks.
I've also found that this extension works fine with FF2: Tab Minus.
Small,and does the job perfectly. This was my single-biggest hassle with FF2. I do not understand how quasi-randomly moving the location of an item I use ALL the time is supposed to make things more efficient. Especially when you've opened up a bunch of images or documents in separate tabs and want to quickly scan through them looking for someting. Your eyes have to bounce around the screen, finding the stupid close button.
The old mechanism seemed to work better for that: put your mouse on the close button, and now you can focus on the *data*, not finding the button over and over... With the extension, you don't have to choose: they're both avaiable. Works for me.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
Honestly, I've been using Firefox 2.0 since RC1, and I don't find anything really compelling about it over Firefox 1.5. I mean...I use FF about 80% of the time at home, and use it almost exclusively at work, but there just wasn't anything that made me go "wow" about it.
Also, it seems to me that Firefox has developed a rather hefty memory / CPU footprint, and its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux. (Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience).
Anyways, it's a solid release, and still my primary browser....good for the Firefox team...but I can't help but think it would have served FF better to release something more compelling in their 2.0 release.
Yes, autoupdate will allow you to update to 2.0. You have the option to refuse the update. If you refuse the update then the update will still offer you point releases of the 1.5.x series while it continues to be supported.
Alternatively, setting it to 0 will put a close button only on the current tab, if you prefer.
Personally, I like the default, though.
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You don't need any extension for that, since very early it has been possible in Mozilla and Firefox to close the tabs just by middle clicking on them.
Unless you mean middle clickin in the content of the tab, but that would remove the ability to show the autoscroll thingie that appears.
Just to add to that:
browser.tabs.closeButtons 0 = close button on active tab
browser.tabs.closeButtons 1 = default, close button on all tabs
browser.tabs.closeButtons 2 = no close buttons
browser.tabs.closeButtons 3 = Fx 1.x style, one close button on right
It updates instantly so you can try them all out and find the one you like. I like 2 because I use an extra mouse button to close tabs instead of the close buttons.
CTRL+Shift+T.
You can also right click the task bar and say Undo Close Tab.
And the History menu contains a submenu called Recently Closed Tabs.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
I'm running Firefox 2 with Google Sync 1.2.20060911.3 just fine.
If you're doin' the Gnome/Linux thang*, open up the GConf editor and drill down through / -> desktop -> gnome -> interface. Change the key 'gtk_key_theme' to 'Emacs'. When you're focused on a textbox or the location bar, you get C-w, along with a bunch of other nifty stuff. My biggest complaint is that C-k deletes to the end of the line, but doesn't copy it into the clipboard.
More information.
* Dawg.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Just get it now, without overwhelming specific mirrors:m l?product=firefox-2.0&os=win&lang=en-US/a
;)
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.ht
I don't see this as a bad thing, as your still getting it the way they want (using the official link that selects a mirror for you) I'm just not waiting for them to post the link, so I wrote it myself
Every time I look at the new features, this still feels like a Point Release to me. I would only justify it as going up a whole version if substantial underlying code was changed which, of course, is not visible to the user.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Slate is owned by Washington Post and MSNBC'es "MS" comes from Microsoft. They do every kind of possible compatibility tricks disallowing other systems rather than their Win32/IE combination too.
Slate was always kind of "independent", we must admit it. I have seen/read many anti BillG/Windows stuff there.
Firefox 2 is a major update to a browser which is used on millions of machines and started to be choice of companies. I don't favour it on OS X (feels like Windows) but it is the truth.
See where Firefox 2 release is buried on their "Technology News", you will figure it is owned by Microsoft in its full extent.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032118/
Just months ago, those fascist were suggesting to update their IE to Mac OS X using people while there is no such thing exists anymore. Just to "punish" us for not using their OS. Not to forget MS Media Player 7 was causing major problems on OS X Tiger (10.4,latest) too.