Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 Arrives 351
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review. It is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. DesktopLinux.com has posted a list of the changes along with a few quick screen grabs. Apparently, the download can be found on Mozilla's ftp site."
One question before I try this out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
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I realise the app exists in its own place, but the profile is more important.
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Funny)
*sorry*
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm going to jump out on a limb here and say that you are quite mistaken. You will need to update several extensions... thats always how FF updates go. Are you annoyed that Adblock has not released an updated version for an unreleased product??
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Sure, if you make sure you use a new profile and never run Firefox 2.0 beta2 using your old profile.
If you don't understand what I just said, then stick with "no." Portable versions of Firefox 2.0beta2 may coexist as long as they don't use the standard profile directory. Unless you're absolutely sure that your existing profile won't be touched, it's best to assume not to.
In any case, if you're going to try out Firefox 2.0beta2, you should definitely make a backup of your profile.
Re: Question Answered (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using Firefox 2.0 daily builds [portableapps.com] and Thunderbird 2.0 alpha [portableapps.com] along side the stable versions for quite some time using PortableApps.com [portableapps.com]. They are an entirely self-contained directory separate from your regular install.You can even run PortableFirefox from a CD so make sure to turn on the disk cache, otherwise performance is slow.
Firefox's auto incremental updates work great, plus it remembers your tabs so after the restart I'm right where I left off. I'm enjoying the built-in spell check--right now i
Firefox 2? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Firefox 2? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:SoaF (Score:5, Funny)
Portable version (Score:5, Informative)
Portable version also available (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox Shakespear (Score:5, Funny)
This alone makes it worth it (Score:5, Funny)
FINALLY!
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This is a mistake usability wise. The previous system of having a close button on the far right of the tab row was much easier to use as it does not move as tabs are added and removed. I wish these people would read some books on usability!
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I want to close a tab that is currently in the background. Previously I could not do this. Now I can. Seems the new feature enhances usability, no?
I suppose if you're closing lots of tabs, in exactly the order in which they currently appear, then the old functionality is more usable, since you just have to keep clicking a stationary button. But is this a common use case? I would think it's more common to want to close a single tab (foreground or background) or close all tabs. The new functionality enhance
Re:Even better... (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe he's a Mac user, and still hasn't found the second button...
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Regards,
Ross
Rant: Access keys and Wikipedia. (Score:3, Funny)
Warning: Rant coming on.
And if you want to feel incoherent rage, type "Alt-F(file-menu),C(close tab)" for a year and then go to Wikipedia and try to close the page. Oops. You can't, because some dumb fuck decided it sho
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Theory is great, but experimental evidence (if gathered properly) trumps it every time. In this case, they did a usability study [mozillazine.org] and found that many people were better able to deal with the close button on the tab.
Personally, I find it annoying, and prefer the old behavior. But it's also surprisingly easy to get used to after you use it for a while.
I might consider it... (Score:2, Insightful)
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For people without the hard drive space to dual boot, is Konqueror or any other KHTML based web browser ported to Microsoft Windows yet? The latest news on kde-cygwin [sourceforge.net] is 10 months old.
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Yes, Swift [getswift.org] ("a web browser for Windows based on the Apple WebKit rendering engine") would fit that bill, although from what I've heard, Webkit has diverged quite a bit from KHTML. (Also: very alpha!)
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Dual boot? Why would you install Windows to run Konqueror?
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Tabs will be broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tabs will be broken (Score:5, Informative)
Some people were frustrated that Mozilla added a close button to every tab which resulted in an extension that removed those close buttons. Well, you no longer need to get an extension to remove those pesky X's, in fact there are multiple options that you can do now: display a close button on the active tab only, display close buttons on all tabs, don't display any close buttons, and display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior). Here is how you can customize the placement:
1. Start Firefox.
2. In the Address Bar type "about:config" and press Enter.
3. Right-Click and select New->Integer.
4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter "browser.tabs.closeButtons" (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
5. Now you need to select the type of close button you want: 0 - display a close button on the active tab only, 1 - display close buttons on all tabs, 2 - don't display any close buttons, and 3 - display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior). After entering the value corresponding to your preference press OK again.
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Re:Tabs will be broken (Score:5, Informative)
It took a bit of adjustment, but middleclicking a link to open it in a new tab is really easy; in the case of slashdot I just load the comments I want to read, or the article while I browse on until I decide to go more in depth or reply without losing where you were.
When finished, I just middle-click the tab. It dramatically speeds up the browsing experience if you're used to using your mouse alot. (once I'm actually with both hands on my keyboard I tend to switch to keyboard shortcuts. But it's tedious to get to the right links using TAB)
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That's what ' and / are for.
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which leaves your other hand free I guess...
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And now that I think of it I'll try to find a way to disable that red cross on the right you like so much
Laptop, you insensitive clod (Score:2)
Buy me a laptop computer whose built-in pointing device includes a middle button and I'll consider it.
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Re:Tabs will be broken (Score:4, Informative)
(and moreso should be too words)
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Re:Solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking about a difference of perhaps a tenth of a second, but of such microscopic units of time are human-factors decisions made. Interfaces are all about developing habits, and things that make it hard to form habits interfere with smooth operation. Maybe the new interface would make different and better habits; maybe not. I didn't think so, but YMMV.
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Until you get to few enough tabs that the width of each tab starts expanding, and the close button moves out from under your cursor... leaving you again with a moving target.
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that you couldn't close a tab that wasn't at the front, that's what.
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So the only benefit of this feature is that I get to lose a third of my screen width for tab names when I have 7 or 8 tabs open (i.e. all the time).
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Because that means you can only quickly close the tab that's currently open?
Personally, I'm happy with the tab-clicking extension that allows me to double-click a tab to close it. Though I have a sneaky suspicion that this may be at least one of the extensions contributing to massive memory usage. Not sure how, but it's a feeling I get.
greetings from the year 3000 (Score:5, Funny)
But will this detect antiquated Elglish, such as when people use "ask" instead of "ax"?
Re:greetings from the year 3000 (Score:4, Funny)
I guess if I were using Firefox 2 I'd be all set.
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Sure, but you'll need to have the Tengwar fonts installed in order to read it.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said "Elvish." My mistake.
NSIS (Score:4, Interesting)
Was the old installer Mozilla-specific code?
Either way, the switch sounds like a good idea. The old installer had its issues, and focusing on the browser and improving an existing (and already quite reasonable) installer is a great idea.
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Not much loss on Mac, since the Mac version doesn't use an installer. It's just a disk image that you open and drag the app to the Applications folder. (This is pretty standard on Mac. Install is frequently just drag-n-drop.)
This may affect Linux, at least people who download and install it instead of using their distro-provided version. You used to have the option to choose between an installer or
Does it still hog memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The standard line.
Wake me when Opera has extension support and I can compile it myself.
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Lack of extensions is no big deal to me (except for Flashblock!). Anyway, if I need the utility of some extension, I can still open Firefox. Last time I checked I could still use both at the same time.
Oh, and lack of source code doesn't bother me in the least; I'm too busy working on my own projects (which make me money) to bother fixing the bugs in other people's code.
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Plus, no memory leak bug or reimplemented widget controls (I have an operating system that provides those natively, thanks).
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That'd be nice if not for the fact that isn't true, and very very obviously isn't true on OS X. Run through this checklist:
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I'm a web programmer and we run a site that supports opera 7+, IE5+, anything Gecko, Safari 1.2+. Opera is a bitch when it comes to writing javascript. Let me count the problems (BTW this is for the latest version):
1. Opera hates innnerHTML. So generating options for a select list and then setting it using innerHTML means opera doesn't work.
2. Opera doesn't like generated elements and doesn't treat them in the same way as elements that were part of the page. For example if y
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Most of the time it's people who are bitches when it comes to writing JavaScript. There are now even some websites that take use of Gecko's internal XBL methods that are wrongfully exposed to regular web pages (Gmail's chat comes to mind, with its explicitOriginalTarget property).
Do you know that the innerHTML property is Microso
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2. I just wrote a quick test generating a select with options and selecting an option with javascript and it works fine for me (innerhtml and dom methods both worked). Maybe I am misunderstanding what specifically you are having problems with?
3. What does t
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You should hate innerHTML too. It's not part of any W3C standard, and anything it does can be done just as well with DOM (which is a standard).
Simply put, if you use proprietary extensions to DOM, don't be surprised that they are not supported in every browser. Code to the standard, and sleep well. ;)
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More like opera? (Score:3, Insightful)
On some level, it's nice, but the one thing I prefer about extensions is that their feature/fix rate is fairly more frequent than Firefox's. It will be interesting to see where Firefox is 5 years from now.
Hmmm... lets see (Score:2, Funny)
Great functionality. Can't live without it!
Wow, pure innovation. I've never seen anything like that
Hello!! MSN user here!
Pure genius. How did they invented that?
Dot'n need thtat! Ohh.. and everything for the gr
cookies (Score:2, Insightful)
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Whenever I start a new FF profile CookieSafe is one of the first extensions I install next to NoScript and Adblock Plus.
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Basically, I tell it to accept all cookies, but only for this browser session. I then create a list of exceptions for sites that I want to be able to keep cookies until their normal expiration date.
That way any site that requires cookies will work, and the moment I close Firefox, I'm back to only the cookies on sites I'm willing to trust.
Opera has a similar feature, which will delete any new cookies on exit, but it's a little
One of the improvements (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of ftp.mozilla.org, try the mirror page [mozilla.org] – currently it seems to list beta 1, but you should be able to modify the download URL to get the en-US beta 2 [mozilla.com].
One small area that has had a reasonable amount of improvement in Firefox 2 is canvas [whatwg.org] support – I've been working on a canvas-based FPS engine [lazyilluminati.com] and get about 50% better performance in FF2 than in FF1.5, as well as lots of fixed bugs and memory leaks.
Most major changes (like the new graphics infrastructure that'll help provide hardware accelerated rendering, full-page zooming, HTML inside SVG [mozillazine.org], better printing, etc) are being left for Firefox 3, but FF2 seems like a solid improvement over the previous version.
The canvas is actually a nice example of progress on the web. After too many years with very little going on, the major modern browsers developers (Mozilla, Opera, Apple) are working in the WHATWG [whatwg.org] to add new features – it's a balance between proprietary extensions and W3C-style specifications, with browsers implementing features at the same time as the spec is being written and guiding its development. There's room for competition between browsers in terms of feature support, and we don't have to wait years for the standards to be completed first – but it's hopefully without the old problems of those features being proprietary and poorly designed. For example, Opera 9 supports much of Web Forms 2.0 [whatwg.org] and the Mozilla developers are just starting work on it too; and it's also designed to be backward-compatible, so the new forms are still usable in all browsers and can be emulated in some (e.g. IE) with JavaScript. Firefox 2 seems to be the first browser with client-side session and persistent storage [whatwg.org], but web sites written to benefit from that feature will be able to immediately work with future versions of e.g. Opera that support it too.
With the popularity of trends like AJAX encouraging people to think about new ways to interact with users over the web, and browsers adding features to expand the possibilities open to web developers, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
Yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
I repeat...
YAWN!!!
Why can't a god damned browser do what it is supposed to? JUST FUCKING BROWSE???
More noticable tabs (Score:2)
Please use the mirrors, not the FTP site! (Score:2)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.
as soon as they are officially relased (which should be in a few minutes!)
Seems a bit more responsive (Score:3, Interesting)
The new tabs look nicer. I hate the "go" button and haven't figured how to turn it off, but I'm sure someone will create a theme without it.
This is INCORRECT (Score:5, Informative)
- Asa
Jumping the gun (Score:2)
Re:This is INCORRECT (Score:5, Funny)
Phishing Protection (Score:4, Funny)
WARNING:
The man you are about to converse with is not really a high ranking General in the Nigerian army, he does not really have a rich uncle who died tragically in a plane crash in Siberia, and he absolutely DOES NOT have $53.4 million dollars to smuggle out of Nigeria for his uncle's poor orphaned children. You will not get 30%. Trust us.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE?
+----+ +--------+
| OK | | CANCEL |
+----+ +--------+
Faster?? (Score:2)
Scrolling tabs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I the only person who thinks this is a stupid and counter-productive idea? When was the last time you (the population of
I like the idea of having more tabs than window space, but fer cryin' out loud, two scroll buttons are not the way to handle it. How about multiple rows of tabs? Or right click + drag to scroll back and forth? Or a drop down menu of tabs?
I thought we all agreed that Flash applications that break scrolling are a Bad Thing (tm).
Re:Scrolling tabs? (Score:4, Informative)
64 bit? (Score:2)
But do they have official 64 bit support yet?
Linux builds (Score:4, Interesting)
It's sad watching FF on a dual boot system run significantly slower under linux than under window on the same machine. Especially when other linux applications fly.
And it's not even just DNS lookups. Simply switching tabs can take up to a second (?!) under linux whereas under windows it's 0.2 seconds (the perceived direct interaction threshold for most people).
I keep asking ... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Yes, 'Gah.' I went there.)
More features? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, beta 1 was unstable for me as well until I realized that it was because of a couple extensions that I had installed with the nightly tester tool that were crashing it. Since I removed those I haven't had any trouble with beta 1.
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I have found I need far fewer extensions as FF defaults now act the way I want, so I no longer need an extension to fix the behavior.
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I really hope you're not actually surprised by this. Any update to Firefox ever has broken a few extensions (or all of them). Give the developers of those extensions a little time why don't you? It's still a beta anyways.
And if you're still using one that there isn't a developer for anymore... well... too bad I guess. You don't HAVE to update.
Re:Testing? (Score:5, Funny)
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Bugs (Score:2)
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It's a roughly similar situation to <img> and <object> – you lose out on accessibility and on the ability to work in the widest possible range of browsers, but there are sensible fallbacks so you can provide an alternative implementation for those who can't see it. If a web developer doesn't want to provide an alternative implementation, then it's no worse than if they used Flash or AJAX or image maps or table layouts or 7pt font sizes and didn't care about everyone who couldn't see it pro
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The spec states [whatwg.org]:
which sounds like what you want. Unfortunately Mozilla hasn't implemented that behaviour, which is a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3025 66) that ought to be fixed. (I guess you could get the right behaviour by creating the canvas element in script and adding it to the DOM, but