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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
IE7 and FF2, I have to say its really no contest. Despite just plain hating how much vertical real estate the new tab toolbar takes up, performance with IE 7 is just horrible. Even a light page like the Google home page take about about half second longer to render on my Core 2 Duo machine. Let's not forget only really giving lip service to CSS standards, there is still going to be a ton of web pages that need hacks or workarounds for IE CSS issues. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/ for the latest hoops you need to jump through for IE. In no means is Firefox perfect in its CSS support but at least they respond to incompatibilities in a reasonable time frame.
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.