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Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 Arrives
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Aug 31, 2006 03:37 PM
from the enjoy-the-pretty dept.
from the enjoy-the-pretty dept.
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."
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One question before I try this out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.pctools.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 09 2005, @06:08PM)
*sorry*
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.xenoveritas.org/ | Last Journal: Monday September 24, @04:04PM)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SoaF (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.evolt.org/)
Re:Firefox 2? (Score:5, Funny)
Portable version (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.evolvingword.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday December 17 2003, @12:09PM)
Portable version also available (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox Shakespear (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 24 2006, @07:52PM)
This alone makes it worth it (Score:5, Funny)
(http://5sexy/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 11 2003, @08:40AM)
FINALLY!
Re:Even better... (Score:4, Informative)
I might consider it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tabs will be broken (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://clintonhawk.net/)
Re:Solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday November 03 2003, @03:59PM)
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 (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.
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)
Re:Tabs will be broken (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 17 2006, @12:18AM)
(and moreso should be too words)
greetings from the year 3000 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
But will this detect antiquated Elglish, such as when people use "ask" instead of "ax"?
Re:greetings from the year 3000 (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
I guess if I were using Firefox 2 I'd be all set.
NSIS (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://pyile.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:33PM)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
cookies (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://1-800-where-the-white-women-at.com/)
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://slashdot.org/)
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)
(http://mozilla.org/)
- Asa
Re:This is INCORRECT (Score:5, Funny)
yippee!! (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday October 19, @09:21PM)
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)
(http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 11, @05:30PM)
64 bit? (Score:2)
But do they have official 64 bit support yet?
Linux builds (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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 (Score:1)
(http://www.lmgl.nglnetworks.com/)
I keep asking ... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://tumbleweed.smugmug.com/)
(Yes, 'Gah.' I went there.)
Google suggestions (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
More features? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.rulingwars.net/)
Looks ugly using Window's classic theme (Score:1)
See it for yourself:
1.5 [imageshack.us]
2b2 [imageshack.us]
Even the new icons look ugly using Window's classic theme.
gcc on AIX incompatibility? (Score:1)
(http://www.building26.org/)
100% CPU Utilization Feature? (Score:2)
FC5 (Score:1)
WMV? hopefully sorry to start new thread (Score:1)
developer only = alpha (Score:2)
Feature request: encryptable bookmarks (Score:2)
It would lessen the need to save history for sites that I currently don't want to bookmark for privacy reasons. I could include history in "Clear Private Data".
Page Zoom? (Score:2)
(http://127.0.0.1/)
I still use FireFox every day on my PC, but Opera and IE7 has a a REAL page Zoom (not just simple text-resize like FF).
Page Zoom is important on larger-screen hi-res displays. Opera 9.01 is really usable on a 42" display, from 5 feet away, running at 1920x1080 (HTPC setup). FireFox would only be usable if I keep changing the resolution to a much lower res.
The real problem of course is Windows and Linux don't have solid, consistent and well-supported methods for adapting to displays that aren't 72dpi. The OS doesn't know how to scale the UI to different DPIs, as you expect a printer to do. When you change resolution, things should simply be *sharper* but the same size (well, not always the same size or the resolution can be wasted, but you know what I mean).
I realize I'm trivializing the problems in the technology. Until it's fixed, multimedia apps (including browsers) can hack around the problem by offering scaling mechanisms. WinAMP does it. Opera's 200% zoom rocks.
But really, is the browser so important anymore now that there is competition? It's pretty amazing how much better IE7 is than the older versions (and I am a web UI developer who hated IE). Not perfect, but lots better. It's really a crime though if you think how Microsoft abused their market share from 1999-2006 and basically did NOTHING with CSS and standards. I'm convinced if MS remained competitive during that time, the web would be far better a place today, technology-wise.
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.popularculturegaming.com/)
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.
Re:Guess what (Score:2)
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)
(http://pyile.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:33PM)
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:1)
FWIIW, my firefox 1.5.0.4 still crashes in updated Fedora Core 5 OS everytime that I load it up with a few too many tabs or whenever it feels like it ( i.e. If I do something like interrupt an operation such as stopping a heavilyladen pdf from displaying.
BTW, I don't have this issue in WinXP using 1.5.0.6
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://www.ubuntunews.info/)
Mod parent up; not released yet (Score:1)
(http://www-student.cs.york.ac.uk/~ner102)
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:1)
Re:Really a step forwards? (Score:2)
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 properly. For those who do care about separating content and presentation, it's not much worse than img – all you need is <canvas id="dynamic_interactive_graph"><img src="static_graph_fallback.png" alt="Graph of global warming increasing as number of pirates decreases"></canvas> with the canvas scripting code split into a separate file in the same way that the static image data is split into a separate file.
Given that the canvas tag is already supported in three browsers (who agreed it was worth implementing) and has a written specification, it's a sign of much more cooperation than existed in the time of Netscape vs Microsoft.
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:2)
(http://jesusislife.net/micah/ | Last Journal: Monday November 24 2003, @02:09AM)
I have had two long-standing really annoying bugs in FF 1.x that I think were solved in 2.0b1.
On Linux, when you have the browser open and use it extensively for several days on end without closing it, eventually it wacks out: When you click a link it will open it in a new window, but not a "normal" browser window -- the tab where it should be is still in the main window, and the new window doesn't have any FF controls, but is otherwise functional. The tab in the main window doesn't respond, but you can still access other tabs. When you close the new window, Firefox immediately crashes.
I've been running 2.0b1 for a couple weeks, and have not had that bug. It has *never* crashed. However, my electricity did go out a couple times, so I'm not 100% sure I had the browser open long enough to trigger the bug, but I *think* I did.
Also on one forum I use, there's a little animated happy-jumpy smiley. After a couple days of being open, FF1 stopped animating it. (I know, boo hoo.) So far, FF2 has not done that.
So, I'm pretty happy about FF2, even in the beta1 stage. I can honestly say that for me it has been significantly *more* stable than prior "stable" versions.
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:2)
(http://blog.mzzt.net/)
2.0 b1 doesn't crash for me, try disabling some extensions.
It DOES, however, refuse to run on Vista. Hopefully this release includes fixes for that.