At last, the second beta of Firefox 2 is finally released and available for download! I saw the first beta before but it wasn't stable enough, so this time around I'm hoping to give it a try again. Below is a list of things I really like and don't like about Firefox 2.
What I like about Firefox 2
- Built-in spell-checker – not only do you have your typos highlighted as you enter your text, but you can always right-click on any text field and spell-check it again to see all the suspicious words. I've been waiting for this, and had to keep Google Toolbar for this purpose.
- Close button for each tab – again, you can't imagine how useful and effort saving this option is – you don't have to scroll to the right side of the Firefox window to close the currently open tab anymore
- JavaScript 1.7 support – I don't really plan on using the latest and greatest features, but there's definitely been some work done in JavaScript space, as one particular plug-in for WordPress which is partially written in JavaScript finally started working properly, while in previous versions of Firefox it would not properly show some of the windows
- Phishing protection – mostly I can tell a phishing site apart from the original one, but you can't be too careful these days. Apparently, this will work by having Firefox contact some online database to ensure you're not trying to connect to one of the well-known phishing sites.
- Better RSS support – not only there are Live Titles support for websites which provide microsummary, but there is also a much better general support for RSS feeds. For instance, you can change settings so that Firefox will automatically add feeds to your feeds aggregator (like Yahoo! or Google Reader)
What I don't like about Firefox 2
- Constantly moving release dates and deadlines – waiting for the Firefox 2.0 b2 beta was really painful, as the release date was pushed forward few times.
- Very little support for existing extensions.
While it really is more a task for the extensions developers to provide support for this version of Firefox, I still think some kind of Firefox version emulation (Firefox 2 pretending to be Firefox 1.5) for the sake of backwards compatibility would be a great option to have - Options dialogue window is changed again – don't you just hate it when you have to learn location of all the setting options all over again? It's okay for new functionality, but I don't like the known settings to be regrouped and moved to a different tab.
Overall, I'm very happy to see another option of the most favorite and useful browser, and I hope the final Firefox 2.0 release is to follow soon enough.
If you want to learn more, you can read more about the new features in the Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 2 Release Notes. If you simply want to download this beta of Firefox 2, please get it here.
Recent Comments