Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 Arrives

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...

Can this version happily co-exist with my existing Firefox 1.5 installation without screwing everything up? I'm eager to try out FF 2.0, but not if it causes problems with the version I have installed already.

Re:One question before I try this out...

Yes. I downloaded 2.0b2 and installed it alongside 1.5.0.6 and played with it for about 10 minutes. I like that you can reopen a recently closed tab. I don't like how Adblock and Flashblock are no longer compatible with it. I uninstalled it and am back to 1.5.0.6 without any problems.

Re:One question before I try this out...

Shit, its shared - backup before installing people.

Re:One question before I try this out...

Do I have to back up my people v1.5 profile and what type of people are you installing?

*sorry*

Re:One question before I try this out...

The -profile profiledir argument is your friend. Create a shortcut and stuff it in there.

Re:One question before I try this out...

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.

Firefox 2?

Isn't Clint Eastwood a bit old to be doing this stuff?

Re:SoaF

Yes, but where will they find snakes that think in Russian?

Re:Firefox 2?

Be honest: How long have you been saving that one up?

Portable version

For those of you that want to test this out without installing it, consider a portable version of Firefox 2 Beta 2 [cybernetnews.com].

Portable version also available

http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/08/31/download-t he-portable-version-of-firefox-2-beta-2/ [cybernetnews.com]

Firefox Shakespear

FireFox, 2B or not 2B.

This alone makes it worth it

"toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them."

FINALLY!

Re:Even better...

Actually, you have always been able to close a background tab; just do a middle click with your scroll wheel on the tab.

I might consider it...

...but 1.5 turned me off to Mozilla. Konqueror loads a lot faster, and uses less memory.

Tabs will be broken

Looks like Firefox drank the coolaid and opted for the tab closing button on each tab, thus presenting a moving target for closing tabs. I hope they make single button an option a least.

Re:Solution.

It's not a question of closing multiple tabs. It's the fact that if you want to close the current tab, you have to hunt it down visually, rather than going to the same place in the window no matter what tab you're viewing.

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.

Re:Tabs will be broken

-Red X (Close Button)-
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.

Re:Tabs will be broken

What about the middle button-click on the tab? (mostly using the clickable scrollbutton on your mouse)

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)

Re:Tabs will be broken

Oh yeah, your question. You can disable the 1.x red close button with Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org].

(and moreso should be too words)

greetings from the year 3000

New Firefox 2 feature: Inline spell checking -- A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms.

But will this detect antiquated Elglish, such as when people use "ask" instead of "ax"?

Re:greetings from the year 3000

jokes on my typo in 3...2...1....

I guess if I were using Firefox 2 I'd be all set. :)

NSIS

I hadn't heard that Firefox was switching to NSIS.

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.

Does it still hog memory?

Anyway, Opera has most of these "new" features, and consumes fewer resources. I switched, and haven't looked back.

More like opera?

Reading over the new features mentioned and looking over the screenshots, it looks like Firefox is starting to look like Opera. The interesting thing is that Firefox started of with the concept of having a completely minimal browser where the extensions are used to customize it to the user. However, now it just seems like their copying the concepts that a bunch of popular extensions introduced (or copied from other browsers like Opera) and incorporating them into the core because they want to either improve their performance or manage the memory leaks or whatnot that 3rd party extensions cause.

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

For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them.

Great functionality. Can't live without it!

Built-in phishing protection

Wow, pure innovation. I've never seen anything like that

Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com

Hello!! MSN user here!

Resuming your browsing session

Pure genius. How did they invented that?

Inline spell checking

Dot'n need thtat! Ohh.. and everything for the great price of... 675 Mb in memory when 7 tabs are open simultaniously!

cookies

am I the only one who thinks that cookie management blows in firefox? I mean, it's certainly worse in IE, but it's far from great and I haven't seen any enhancements to it in any recent versions (though I may just be blind or crazy, though not too likely) - sometimes, you go to a site for the first time and I've got FF set to prompt on cookies, so I say "hell no I don't want a cookie" then the site says "sorry, bro, this site doesn't work without cookies" so then I have to go digging around the block/allow list for cookies to try to find the right one so I can remove it from the blocked list so I can try to get into the page. considering that most of the people that use firefox are probably nerds and probably aware of things like cookies and probably are more likely to do things about them (like selectively allowing them) it is suprising to me that cookie management is so difficult inside this application - does anyone else agree?

One of the improvements

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

Really...THESE kind of "features" are considered a major version upgrade?

I repeat...

YAWN!!!

Why can't a god damned browser do what it is supposed to? JUST FUCKING BROWSE???

More noticable tabs

I put this in my userChrome.css file a while back to make the current tab stand out more. From the screenshot it looks like I won't need this trick any more.

/*
  * Make un-selected tabs less visible.
  */
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) {
  color: #777 !important;
}
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) .tab-icon,
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) .tabs-closebutton {
  opacity: 0.5;
}

Please use the mirrors, not the FTP site!

Please use the mirror infrastructure, not the direct link to the FTP site. You can get your builds easily at:

  http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.h tml [mozilla.org]

as soon as they are officially relased (which should be in a few minutes!)

Seems a bit more responsive

Been using today and it seems more responsive than Beta 1 and after a day a bit more reliable. Quick look seems to indicate that it uses less memory. Lots of add ins won't work with this and we should (hopefully) see a bunch of updates soon so that we can get our favorite add ins back!

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

We have not yet released Firefox 2 Beta 2. This story is incorrect.

- Asa

Re:This is INCORRECT

Oh what do you know?

yippee!!

I hope they finally support CDATA. Anybody know for sure? Until they do, I'll have to stick with Opera.

Phishing Protection

Built-Phishing Protection:

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??

Is it just me, or it feels MUCH faster than 1.5. Did they tweak things to improve speed?

Scrolling tabs?

FTFA:

Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs.

Am I the only person who thinks this is a stupid and counter-productive idea? When was the last time you (the population of /., the proported "power users") actually clicked on the up and down arrows to scroll, anywhere outside a Flash application that forces you? It takes forever! I usually use the middle mouse button, click in the middle scroll area to jump, or click and drag the scroll handle.

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?

Fortunately, there's also a drop-down menu of all open tabs at the far right of the tab bar, which will probably get a lot more use than those arrows.

64 bit?

Excellent. I tried 1.5 in beta, I might try this version out too.

But do they have official 64 bit support yet?

Linux builds

Have they done anything to fix performance on linux builds?

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).

Hmmm

These features seem familiar somehow.... Could it be because Opera has had them for ages??? Worst. Release. Ever.

I keep asking ...

... where's the multithreaded UI?! Gah.

(Yes, 'Gah.' I went there.)

Google suggestions

The new beta has search suggestions for google. Press Ctrl-K and enter some characters. Suggestions will appear. Enter sla and slashdot will be suggested, together with slavery and slackware.
However, enter sex, and nothing more will be suggested. Enter the f-word : equally silent. Enter the f-word, although in swedish, and see a long list of suggestions.

IE

Yes but can this set fire to the internet community and out fox IE??? that my friend is the question,

More features?

Can we have less features and just bug-fixes? I mean, the reason I used Firefox in the first place was because it was tiny. Don't go making it into Netscape again..

Looks ugly using Window's classic theme

I'm using Win XP with the Windows Classic theme (rather than XP one), and Firefox 1.5 looks as beautiful as ever, but Firefox 2b2 looks horrible. It looks good on the XP theme, but a *lot* of work should be done for the classic one.

See it for yourself:
1.5 [imageshack.us]
2b2 [imageshack.us]