Firefox 2.0 Overview
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most critical delivery vehicles for the Gecko product. It is intended to also eventually use XULRunner. Mozilla's goal is to continue to build the fastest, safest and most used browser product for Windows, Linux and Mac. This is what we can exopect to see from the long awaited Firefox 2.0:
- Improved user interface
- Innovations that help the user in their common browsing tasks
- Greater interaction with search
- Improvement on bookmarks and history
- Enhanced improvements to tabbed browsing
- Better RSS handling
- Easy managing of extensions
- Improved security and performance
Now that is some mighty boast and while Internet Explorer 7.0 plays catch-up with better support for CSS2, Firefox already starts thinking ahead of how it will encorporate CSS3. Will Microsoft ever catch the continously improving Mozilla Firefox. It has to be said the Tortiouse and Hare story comes to mind!
How hot is Firefox at the moment?
Mozilla Firefox was forced to push off some of its more ambitious goals for Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3.0. The list of what's new, as a result, is modest, but the changes are all welcome as far as we're concerned.
In it's latest version Firefox 2 adds built-in phishing protection. According to Mozilla documents, it warns users when they encounter suspected web forgeries. Like Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0, the Firefox antiphishing feature offers to switch the browser to a safe page (the user's home page). The phishing protection feature works by checking the currently loaded site against a list of known phishing sites that will be generated by user input and maintained by Mozilla. During Beta 1, the list of sites is limited, but Mozilla says it will grow as users contribute.
If you visit a site that Firefox 2.0 deems to be a phishing site, this warning pops up. Clicking 'Get me out of here' opens your home page which is pretty cool.
Firefox adds a built-in RSS and XML feed-viewing capability, which works like the Feedview extension available for earlier versions of Firefox and a similar feature in IE7. The new functionality lets you click on an RSS or XML link to see headlines and descriptions of the items in feeds. A 'Subscribe now' button lets you save the feed URL.
This new RSS and XML feed preview functionality creates a newspaperlike presentation of any RSS or XML feed link you click.
Even better, Firefox's simple but effective default feed dialog lets you choose which feed reader to save new feed subscriptions to. You can configure both feed-reading programs and internet-based services in Firefox 2.0's simple 'Choose a Feed Reader' dialog - a well-implemented feature.
The new 'Choose a Feed Reader' dialog lets you configure internet- or software-based feed readers. It also lets you select a default reader to which new feed subscriptions will be added.
Although it's a small feature, Firefox 2.0's new inline spell checker will be highly appreciated by bloggers, forum posters and anyone who types into web-based text fields and sometimes makes typos and spelling mistakes. The feature works almost exactly like Microsoft Word's spell checking, and you can add a list of custom spellings for proper names and terms that aren't in dictionaries.
A new feature Mozilla calls 'bookmark microsummaries' allows bookmark titles to display a bit of text that represents the current state of that specific web page. So, when you bookmark a web page that has a microsummary, you can choose to display the microsummary as the title of the bookmark. For example, a weather site might choose to display the current temperature and barometric pressure in its microsummary. Or you could write some code that would pull that information from the site. Either way, a 'microsummary generator' would need to be created for that purpose.
Tabs are Fab
Tabbed-browsing features has often been copied and now it gets even better! Firefox 2.0 has a new Undo Close Tab function. Simply right-click the tab bar, and the last tab you closed during the current session will be resurrected when you choose the 'Undo Close Tab' item from the pop-up menu. This functionality was previously available through a wide range of Firefox extensions, so formally including it in Firefox is a good move.
If you right-click the tab bar and this pop-up menu will appear. If you've closed a tab in the current browser session, you can reopen it - and the web page loaded in it - by choosing Undo Close Tab.
There's also a new Session Restore function that automatically offers to reopen all the tabs that were open in Firefox prior to some unexpected problem, such as a program or operating system crash or a power outage. Mozilla's implementation is particularly good in that when you restart Firefox after such an event, it offers the option to open the previously open tabs, or not. Many of the extensions that added this functionality for Firefox 1.x either always opened the previous tabs or required you to find a menu item somewhere to reopen them. This is the best way to handle it. When you experience a crash or power outage, Firefox can now resurrect all the tabs you had open when the problem occurred, saving you time and aggravation.
Something perhaps not as good is the addition of the 'X' Close button to every tab you open in Firefox 2.0. For power tab users, those buttons take up space, shrinking the tab labels so they're harder to read as you open more tabs. The issue is basic: how does one close a tab? Mozilla has added an about, config setting in Firefox 2.0 that gives you four options (0-3, with 1 being the default). The 0 option of this setting displays the Close button only on the active tab. That's a pretty good compromise, but when there's only one tab open, the X button doesn't appear.
Keep Scrolling
Several other additions and functional underpinnings round out Firefox 2.0. The Add-Ons Manager combines extensions and themes, and adds a Restart Firefox button to help people remember to do this for newly installed extensions and themes to take effect. A new search dialog makes it easier to change your default search engine provider, and to add additional providers. The Search box is wider, and you can move it around the tool bar area. It also offers a type-ahead drop-down list of previously searched terms.
Invisible additions include support for JavaScript 17, support for client-side session and persistent storage, updates to the extension system and a new Windows installer. Improvements to memory usage was a goal in earlier documents, but it's not clear whether Mozilla has been able to do that.
So how do we rate it? Well i think you will see Mozilla gain an even greater slice of the browser market in the next few years. It's not a dramatically improved version from 1.5. In fact some may not notice the changes on the first few looks. But the collection of small additions and improvements make it a decidedly better browser than the 1.x versions. Think of it as a return volley to Microsoft's IE7 (itself not a dramatic upgrade) and you've got the sense of Firefox 2.0. Even so, you'll likely prefer the new Mozilla browser over the old one almost immediately.
Firefox 2.0 - Discussion
Its been long awaited and this is fully discussed in our article on here. We would love to hear your thoughts on what you think of the new relase of Firefox 2.0