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.

Comments

Good so far....

[dpaluszek]

I've been using it since yesterday since Mozilla had it posted in their pub directory.
So far, so good. I was upset my Daily Dilbert and FastFirefox Extensions weren't compatible though. :( But I like the new look and feel to it, plus it uses quite less memory.

Good job Mozilla!

Re:Good so far....

[ZorinLynx]

This: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/421/

tends to fix extension incompatibility issues. Most extensions really are compatible; they just have 1.5 as the highest version supported. That extension lets you modify the maxversion with a single click in the extension manager, "fixing" the incompatibility.

Of course, YMMV, but Bookmarks Synchronizer, TinyURL creator and Flashblock (the extensions that broke for me) work fine when I "Make compatible".

-Z

Re:New tabs are great

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Will it be on autoupdate ?

[linuxci]

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.

Re:New tabs are great

[ben there...]

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.

Re:Undo close tabs?

[jonasj]

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.