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July 12, 2006

Firefox 2.0 beta - the highlights

Marshall Kirkpatrick

20 comments »

A first Beta version of Firefox 2.0, called Bon Echo, is now available. (download for Mac or PC) The 2.0 Alpha had been available since March. Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. Will 2.0 be a world-changer? There are some nice new features and if the memory and stability issues have been improved at all then there will be parties in the streets.

Recent numbers indicate that Firefox has attained 16% market share among web browsers. It’s secure, extensible and open source. It’s also been unstable and an obnoxious memory leak. Have these problems been solved in 2.0? I’ve seen little discussion on this, but this beta feels better so far than the 1.5 I have been using.

Highlights include:

  • The ability to re-open tabs you’ve closed and tab recovery when the browser crashes - that’s one way to deal with instability!
  • Automatic spell checking - very nice! Humorously, it doesn’t recognize its own name by default. “Firefox” gets underlined in red and suggested spellings are “Fire box” or “Fire fox.”
  • Google Suggest and a similar auto-complete type function from Yahoo! are available in the search bar.
  • My favorite: Clicking the orange RSS icon in the browser bar can now subscribe you to that page’s feed in Bloglines, MyYahoo or the Google readers. Or you can select a desktop app like NetNewsWire. That’s fantastic; quick subscription from inside FF to NNW.

I haven’t seen a lot of problems yet, but I’m not a big Firefox extension user. Many extensions that worked with previous versions are not working with 2.0. General consensus is that the Firefox Nightly Tester Tools is the easiest solution.

So far 2.0 looks solid. I think it’s a keeper.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Firefox 2.0ベータ版－ハイライト

    July 12th, 2006 at 5:51 pm

  2. Blog Yellek » Blog Archive » Firefox 2.0 Beta is Out

    July 12th, 2006 at 6:10 pm

  3. Linux Toy

    July 12th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

Comments

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  1. Gary King

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:23 pm

    Is 2.0 good enough for you to stick with it or are you going back to 1.5 for regular use?

    Also, the RSS feature you like is an extension for FF already that I always use :)

    Feed Your Reader: http://projects.koziarski.net/fyr/

  2. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:27 pm

    Gary, 2.0 does look good enough to use regularly.

  3. nortypig

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:34 pm

    This may be useful - how to enable all extensions in firefox 2.0

    http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/.....irefox-20/

    I haven’t tried it yet myself but it was Dugg this week if I recall.

  4. LuxEurope

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:56 pm

    Nice but too lazy to upgrade not worth it

  5. Ryan

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:18 pm

    Firefox 2.0 doesn’t look like it has very many innovative features to me. I know it’s been said before, but it looks like it has just copied many of the Opera’s features. I know it’s kind of pessimistic and whiny, but when one browser steals another features and tries to paint them as brand new, I get really angry.

    For instance, the session restore feature has been in Opera since version 7, which was released 3 years ago. Also, the re-open a closed tab has existed since version 8, released last year. Both features seem pretty normal, and that every browser should have them, but I can’t stand to see so many people think that Firefox came up with them both (at least that’s the way it seems).

    Sorry for the rant, but I wish more people would see how much Opera has changed the browsers that are coming out today.

  6. Bharath Kumar

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:27 pm

    Memory leak is the only issue with firefox for me. Hope they fix it in this version.

  7. Ian

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

    Ryan, sounds like you should not be posting on a FF news article. But i do understand. PS never heard of Opera,

    On that note i wish that the FF Dev. team could have put more “NEW” features in to this Distro. but hey it is just a Web Browser so what more can we ask fo u know.

  8. adrenaline

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    Might have to try it out, I hope that the startup of it is faster as that’s one thing that I’ve noticed compared to using IE7 & IE6 compared to FF 1.5.

  9. Ryan

    July 12th, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    @ Ian,

    Yeah, that’s true. :D Just had so much inside that I had to get it out. (Being a fanboy can sometimes be annoying. :p)

  10. Alan Wilensky

    July 12th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

    I’ll tell ya Mike, I was the least likely to use Flock Beta - I hate beta apps - especially central anchors like web browsers - I did’nt want to mess wit it.

    However, I find Flock to be as solid as as Firefox 1.5, and has an almost ideal set of features. It seems from reading your foregoing that it is even ahead of FF 2.0.

    The only area that Flock seems to get wrong is the completely messed up handling of of the delicious account in its favorites management.

  11. Thiam Teck

    July 12th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    Actually there were already some plugins for Firefox 1.5 that provide the re-open tabs features.

  12. Aaron Suggs

    July 12th, 2006 at 6:57 pm

    “My favorite: Clicking the orange RSS icon in the browser bar can now subscribe you to that page’s feed in Bloglines, MyYahoo or the Google readers. Or you can select a desktop app like NetNewsWire.”

    I use the LiveLines extension to do just that in Firefox 1.5.

  13. Rob

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:12 pm

    I’d almost say flock is going to be better than firefox soon.. I mean i’d definitely use flock over firefox 2.0 any day. I guess flock builds off firefox but so it would take advantage of 2.0?

  14. Will

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:27 pm

    Marshall, you should really change your link on the Firefox image from http://www.firefox.com, to the correct address: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

  15. Steve Macdonald

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:33 pm

    There is very little to get excited about in Firefox 2.0. Both FF 2.0 and IE7 still fail the Acid 2.0 test miserably. Opera passes with flying colors, as do Konqueror and Safari.

    Opera is a better browser than FF or IE in most ways. It is far faster than FF and uses less memory than either of them. Opera really deserves the success that FF has seen, but it only became free recently so they never got the traction they needed early on.

  16. Kyle Eslick

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:35 pm

    Thanks for the great write up. I’m really excited for 2.0 to be released, mostly for the security improvements.

    I think this was mentioned above, but will you be going back to 1.5 or is it very useable in the current Beta 3?

  17. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    Will, good call. lol

    Kyle, I’ll keep using this one for now. So far it looks much more stable than 1.5

    Opera fans: I agree, Opera is way cool - see my recent review of Opera 9.0 at http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....bittorent/

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