Cutting Free

Firefox 2 was finally released to the public on the 24th of October (although apparently it was available a day early from the FTP site). I’ve been running the release candidates since RC1 and, in fact, the release version is unchanged from RC3.

Look and Feel

When you fire it up for the first time, it doesn’t seem as if much has changed. It’s only when you start using the tabbed browsing, exploring the Options/Preferences window, or updating your extensions that you’ll notice much of a difference.

• The Options/Preferences window has been redesigned and is much easier to use. More frequently used options, such as those for downloads, have been made more prominent. There has also been a spring clean, reducing the number of options per tab, and moving some to more relevant places.
• Tabbed Browsing has been made more intuitive by including some of the features from extensions in Firefox itself. The most obvious of these is that every tab now has a close button (one of my favourite changes). The tabs themselves have also been given a rather attractive silvered look.
• The Themes and Extensions windows have now been merged. This seems like a logical choice, and I find it much more intuitive. Especially so when combined with the "All-in-One Sidebar" extension (though my icon for displaying the extensions in this sidebar seems to have disappeared - don’t know if that’s just me).

Searching

Again, the intuitiveness of the search bar has been improved.

• You will get suggestions while you type, for the likes of Google and Yahoo.
• A new Manage Search Engines window allows you to remove and reorder your chosen search engines.
• It now supports OpenSearch (as championed by A9.com), and so allows you to add any search engine that supports this format.

New Features

• Anti-Phishing measures have been added to warn you about web sites trying to take your login details, or credit card information. This checks the address of the site you are visiting against a blacklist. You can choose whether this is a locally stored blacklist that is updated periodically, or a remote blacklist stored by Google. The Google list will be more up to date, but it means that they are notified about every site you visit. This is an important feature to help in combating this latest form of internet crime.
• Spell-Checking has been added, when filling in web forms. Very useful when writing blogs .
• The Quick-Find now works in text boxes. Useful when editing large amounts of text on the web, such as at Wikipedia.
• Something new, called Live Titles has been introduced. When adding a bookmark, if that page generates a microsummary, you will be given the option of adding it with a Live Title, rather than the normal page title. This is for pages that represent frequently updated information, such as the latest headlines or an on-line auction.

Annoyances

Quick-Find

There has been great debate about the new Quick-Find behaviour. With 1.5, when you started typing on a read-only page, in order to find certain text, the familiar bar would pop up at the bottom of the window and then you would jump to the first text on the page to match your query. This behaviour was amazingly useful and was something I used all the time. The problem was that the quick-find bar wouldn’t auto-hide.

Mozilla’s solution seems to have been to create an additional find bar. With 2.0, when you start typing in a page, a much simpler quick-find bar appears. There are no "Next" or "Previous" buttons, or any others for that matter. You jump to the first instance of your query as before, but then you seem to be stuck. The first few times I used this, I was very frustrated. I quickly found that if I pressed Ctrl+F the old find bar with all the old features helpfully appeared with the query from the previous bar already filled in. But why would they make you do these extra keystrokes?

Fortunately, I happened to stumble upon a forum that pointed out you can press Ctrl+G to "find next", and this is starting to become second nature. Nevertheless, it seems odd that this new behaviour is more fiddly. The new quick-find bar auto-hides, which is a welcome addition. But, really, what was wrong with just keeping the old bar and making that auto-hide? I would gladly have ticked a box in the options window, if people didn’t want that to be the default.

Toolbars

It looks as if we’re going to have to wait until FireFox 3 to get movable toolbars. This is something I’ve really wanted to see in Firefox, but they have to change the layout engine to do it. In Firefox 3, that engine will be Cairo and it looks as if will be a lot more flexible.

Conclusion

Is Firefox 2 cutting edge? It certainly seems to be out at the front. It has further developed tabbed-browsing, done a number of things to make every-day browsing easier, and started to tackle the growing threat of phishing. Internet Explorer has only just implemented tabbed-browsing with version 7. Opera seems to be Firefox’s main competitor, but it’s proprietary. Perhaps the Firefox-based Flock is a better candidate, with its integration of the social web, but in my mind its status as "Free Software" is in doubt.

The aim is to ship Firefox 3 in the first quarter of 2007. We can expect a layout engine that should be able to take advantage of hardware-acceleration, a combined bookmark/history system that uses a database back-end and adds tagging, and a host of user-requested features. I’m already chomping at the bit.

Further Reading

• MozillaLinks Firefox 2.0 Review
• Firefox on Wikipedia (After reading this page, I intend to blog soon on finding that Firefox may not be as Free as I had thought)

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