Oct 24
Firefox 2 is now available for download.
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December 6th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
So? I downloaded it when it first came out but a number of my fav extentions were incompatible. Seeing little new I opted to return to 1.5. Most of the enhancements they tout in 2, I already had in 1.508 (or something like that). I was disappointed, expecting a major upgrade and seeing little new. High on my wish list would be tabs that are more distinguishable. I sometimes have a bit of a problems telling which one is active.
December 7th, 2006 at 10:51 am
More on the tabs in a bit, but here’s why you should upgrade:
* Built-in Phishing protection. Sure, you may have that through some plugin or another, but those plugins probably aren’t as good as Firefox 2’s phishing protection.
* Smoother updates. Firefox will now tell you when the browser itself needs updates, or when any of your extensions have updates. It will tell you this on startup and give you the option of downloading and installing them. Because this all happens on startup, you don’t need to restart the browser as in Firefox 1.
* Built-in spellchecker. I downloaded an extension once that added this, but then got rid of it because Firefox seemed more unstable with the extension active. If you do a lot of typing in web forms (webmail, blogging, etc.) it’s very nice to have.
* Session restore. Yes, another feature that could be covered by an extension. It’s just nice to have without the risk of memory bloat, bugginess, or conflicts that come with extensions.
* Search suggestions. Start typing a word in the search box and it presents you with a selection of popular searches that match what you’ve just typed.
None of these are huge new features. It’s more spit-n-polish on an already solid product. As for your extensions… I suspect most of them are Firefox 2 enabled now. You may also want to re-examine them and purge any that aren’t really needed or useful. I’ve noticed a connection between speed/memory use and the number of extensions I load up, so I try to keep my extensions at a minimum.
As to highlighting the current tab: it’s on the wishlist for Firefox 3.0, so people are working on it. Until then, take a look at Aging Tabs.