Firefox 2
July 12th, 2006
I haven’t seen it officially announced yet so I don’t want to jump the gun and say that Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 has been released but it’s appeared on the Mozilla FTP servers.
I’ve spoken before in quite a bit of depth about the new features and improvements in version 2.0. Major new features include spell checking, anti-phishing, improved feed reading and microsummaries. And there are tons of small changes which just make life so much easier.
- Yahoo! Search Blog writes a little about Firefox 2.0’s search autocomplete when used with Yahoo! What strikes me is now Yahoo’s autocomplete seems to be a lot more useful and smarter than Google’s autocomplete.
- Theres a bit of information and screenshots on the Mozilla Wiki of the new theme which is set to be introduced in Beta 2 of Firefox 2.0. I’m not a big fan of the theme refresh and it reminds me a bit of the Mozilla Suite.
Digg
StumbleUpon
See the announcement at MDC.
After reading your blog post I decided to download Firefox Beta 2 and see if it’s any better.
I tried out the spell checker first. It works out pretty nicely and spell checks as a I type. The only have two problems with it. I don’t like how the spell checker tells me words like Firefox or Mozilla are misspelled words and I don’t like having to right click in input boxes to spell check them. It should automatically spell check like it does for text areas. If that’s not possible (for whatever reason), at least an option to spell check an entire form.
[As I typed this I realized another bug. If the spell checker finds errors in your post, if you don't automatically correct them and you simply press enter and begin typing another, the words are no longer underlined. Hmm..]
Next I decided to give the feed reading a try using your blog’s feed. I really hate the feed display page. The display doesn’t even link back to posts and basically just shows a list of titles. I do like the fact that you can choose which feed reader to display. I think the system could be improved by removing the feed page and instead redirect us to our feed reader of choice.
Session restore and undoing close tabs is a nice feature and I’m glad that it was included. I tested it out by running a killall firefox-bin and then restarting. It reloading everything correctly. The new close button layout is also welcome as I am used to it from other applications such as my text editor and IM app. (gEdit and GAIM).
It is a beta though so I hope some of the issues such as spell checking is ironed out and it has some welcome additions but I still don’t know if it warrants a whole version jump.
(Also What ever happened to the Places feature?)
The new style is just too… cartoony, in my opinion.
Places was cancelled for 2.0
I think the issue you describe is an issue with the WYSIWYG/TinyMCE. I couldn’t reproduce on a normal text box. I’m not sure why this is. I’ll see if I can get my head around Bugzilla and report it.
Regarding feeds linking back to the original post, I think this is due to Firefox 2.0 not supporting Atom 1.0 correctly. It finds the title but doesn’t find the URL or post content.
Examples of RSS feeds which link back and display content:
Again, I hope the Atom support can be fixed before a release.
I’d say that it’s more deserving of a .5 version increase than 1.5 was and as Mozilla will never have a 1.10, 2.0 makes sense.
Places was removed because the Firefox team thought they couldn’t get it ready in time.