Firefox 2.0 RC2 Review

segphault writes "Ars Technica has a comprehensive review of Firefox 2.0 RC2. It includes screenshot comparisons that illuminate the user interface changes that have transpired since the second beta, and it examines the similarities between the browser tab implementation from Internet Explorer 7 and the new tab management features in RC2. From the article: 'If RC2 is any indication, Firefox 2.0 is an incremental improvement of the 1.5.x series with performance improvements and a handful of relatively useful features. Based on my own experience, I consider it stable enough for regular use, but I endorse caution for users that rely on a lot of extensions, as most extensions aren't yet compatible with Firefox 2.0.'"

Extensions

All but one of my ~dozen installed extensions (largely developer oriented) currently work, with the exception being TBE. Firefox 2 seems pretty good, but it would've been fairer for this to have been v1.5.

Re:Extensions

Less than half of my extensions worked, but even worse was that my theme didn't work. That made me go back to 1.5. And none of the spell check features in the forms worked either. Loved the "tab remember" feature where you can close the browser and it will remember all the pages you had open in the previous session.

Re:Extensions

Loved the "tab remember" feature where you can close the browser and it will remember all the pages you had open in the previous session.

This was one of my favorite features from Opera 4-5 years ago. Glad to see the idea finally spreading.

Re:Extensions

Well some people might not want those fifteen tabs of porn to reopen after hurredly closing the browser, since the person next opening the browser might be the one for whom it was just hurredly closed. I hope there's an override key.

pun intended

and it examines the similarities between the browser tab implementation from Internet Explorer 7 and the new tab management features in RC2.

One could almost say that they've been "keeping tabs" on the competition.

Re:pun intended

One could almost say that they've been "keeping tabs" on the competition.

That pun stunk so bad I had to open a new window.

RC2 woes

You know, I installed RC2 on my computer last night after I performed the recommended hardware upgrades, and my video drivers wouldn't work, my sound broke and it kept bugging me about activation. It wouldn't even let me download files from my favorite websites!!

Oh wait.

Solid, but no biggie

I've been using the Firefox 2 betas and RCs since beta 1. It is, overall, better than 1.5, but there's no "gee whiz!" factor this time through. (Though I'll admit inline spell-checking is quite nice!)

Of course, as a web developer, I'm really looking forward to Firefox 3, which will be built on Gecko 1.9 and should have some good improvements to the rendering engine. (Firefox 2 jumps from Gecko 1.8 to 1.8.1 -- minor changes only.)

Oh, yeah, on the extensions issue -- admittedly I don't use very many, but most of the ones I rely on have been updated by now. At this point I'm mainly waiting for the HTML Tidy-based validator.

extensions and themes

out of ten most popular themes only 3 compatible with coming 2.0.* line, including one claiming up to 3rd version compatibility. of course change of default theme can make a difference for new users, but i bet majority of existing users would prefer they shiny thingy in place.

Re:extensions and themes

To make your 1.5 extensions and themes work:

1. Download the .xpi file
2. Unpack it (it's a ZIP file, really) into a directory
3. Edit the install.rdf file - find the line with "maxVersion:" and change it to (for example) "3.*"
4. Replace the install.rdf in the .xpi ZIPfile with your modified one
5. Install the extension/theme: in Firefox, browse to "file:///wherever-you-put-it/whatever.xpi"
                                                                in Thunderbird, use the Installer

I have yet to see an extension for 1.5.x that didn't work with 2.x after doing this
 

Nightly Tester Tools

If you're too lazy to bump the maxversion of your favorite extensions, you can use the Nightly Tester Tools [blueprintit.co.uk] to fore the app into thinking an extension is compatible.

Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

It's kind of ridiculous that they still have such a huge bug at this point, but does anybody know if Firefox's memory leak(s) is(are) fixed yet? I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page. It makes me not able to commit my company completely to Firefox (that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX).

Why ActiveX?

(that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX)

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology. Even Microsoft is trying to get away for the security holes they've created with that.

Sometimes, security means not implementing something if it cannot be implemented securely.

Re:Why ActiveX?

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology. Even Microsoft is trying to get away for the security holes they've created with that.

ActiveX [wikipedia.org] is just an implementation of OLE and COM via the Internet Explorer browser. Anyone is able to write an interface that supports ActiveX controls. The idea that they are inherently insecure is an oft-proclaimed falsehood on Slashdot. IE's implementation has had problems, but that's not the same thing as the technology behind it.

ActiveX : Internet Explorer :: Extensions : Firefox

It all comes down to implementation of the interactive extension to the browser.

Sometimes, security means not implementing something if it cannot be implemented securely.

That is true enough, although the problem is usually between the chair and keyboard. The biggest problem with ActiveX, and the way it got it's bad reputation is users who click 'Yes' to everything. Give Firefox enough market share and it will become profitable for these malware authors to write extensions that screw a computer/browser the same way ActiveX can.

Re:Why ActiveX?

"Active X is INCREDIBLY useful for applications"

Yes, it has full access to your machine including the ability to read and write to hard drives, reboot your machine, muck with your registry etc.

"t's much more advanced than AJAX, and it was there 5-8 years ago. "

Yes. It was Microsoft's answer to the applet. Applets were first of course. Too bad Sun never could make them work because they were much safer then activex.

"Java never cut it (buggy, bloated, and hard to relatively hard to develop)."

Bloated maybe, buggy no, hard to develop? Nonsense. Much easier to develop java applets then activex components.

"AJAX is just another Javascript kludge. "

Yes.

"Active X is pretty damn useful when done correctly. I have a bunch of Active X apps that I use via IE."

Great if you are willing to use IE and windows.

Re:Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

Yes and no.

Because there is no big fat memory leak. There are a whole bunch of little ones that add up. They've fixed a lot of them. They fixed a bunch of 'em in the 1.5.0.x series, and a bunch more in 2.0.

I doubt they've got everything, but 2.0 should have less of a memory problem than 1.5.

Re:What big fat memory leak?

I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page.

When I leave Firefox overnight, I come back the next day and it's using the same amount of memory as the night before. Even after days of continuous use, it's using only about 100 MB of memory, as all browsers seem to do when I use them for days at a time. If you can show how to reproduce over 200 MB of memory use by having Firefox have a single web page open overnight, please do so. Is it some particular page that causes that memory use?

Re:What big fat memory leak?

Probably their myspace page.

Almost ready..

After upgrading to V2 RC2, its working pretty good so far. Session restore is pretty handy (now I can install new extensions, restart the browser and start from whereever I had left), and tab management is pretty good too.

Though there are some bugs - esp the toolbar customization needs to be looked at. My V1.5 toolbar customization is not sitting well with RC2 - esp the Search Engine. Its hogging all the screen from left to right, and I had to move it to its own bar (previously, it was sitting with Google Toolbar).

And of course, better memory management was a welcome change.

All extensions except on worked fine (had to disable extension compatibility check for Greasemonkey, and it worked perfectly fine).

Deliverance touches

What's up with the dirty old house?

Eric

I'm liking the OS X version...

The built in spelling checker is my favorite addition. I've not had much luck with the extensions that offered this feature. Now I'd really be happy if Firefox would honor the browser.tabs.loadOnNewTab - I just want my homepage in each new tab. I suppose I could again use one of the many extensions, but if the setting is there it should work. Any opinions on the use of large numbers of extensions verses getting it in the browser directly?

Tab changes suck!

I've been testing the upcoming version for a while and I hate the tab changes. The tab changes are crappy. I'm an experienced user and I think so and my girlfriend that is a casual user complains about the changes too. Sure, you can make things mostly act the same as we're used to but it takes an effort to reconfigure and still doesn't work very well.

Having a close widget on each tab wastes space and is more work than a fixed location, the drop down doesn't work very well and should only appear if there are to many tabs, tab scrolling doesn't work very well and is probably not needed with the dropdown listing, and more tabs should be allowed to appear before they start scrolling.

Re:Tab changes suck!

What about one global close widget?

You can do it. The parent poster had an incomplete list:

0 - only the active tab has the close widget
1 - the usual look (close widgets on each tab)
2 - no close widgets.
3 - global close widget (at far right)

"most extensions"? FYI !

Well, I use a lot of invasive extensions, and I only lost Session Manager, which is unsurprising since Fx now includes a similar feature and they would probably step on each others' toes. Survivors:

• Adblock Plus
• Video Downloader
• Inspect this
• IE Tab
• IE View Lite
• JS View
• EditCSS
• GMarks
• Google Notebook
• Sage RSS Reader

All in all, I agree that this is mostly an incremental upgrade, and it is somewhat faster, but I'm not sure it deserves the new major version. Several tiny UI bugs didn't get fixed.

spellcheck

I jst upgreaded to RC2 and I musht say that the neu spellchek feeture works lik a charm

Improvements for developers, too

Probably the most interesting features to programmers are the addition of the SQLite engine [mozilla.org], and significant JavaScript enhancements [mozilla.org] heavily borrowed from Perl and Python. You can use generators (yield statement), Pythonic iterators, array comprehensions, and what the Mozilla people call "destructuring assignment". Some examples from the article for the curious:

/* Destructuring assignment example - swap two values */
[a, b] = [b, a];
 
/* You can return multiple values from functions now */
function f() { return [1, 2, 3]; }
var [a, , b] = f();
document.write ("A is " + a + " B is " + b + "<BR>\n");
 
/* Easier fibonacci sequences with generators */
function fib() {
  var i = 0, j = 1;
  while (true) {
    yield i;
    var t = i; i = j; j += t;
  }
}
 
/* Array comprehensions */
var evens = [i for (i in range(0, 21)) if (i % 2 == 0)];
 
/* New scoping semantics with 'let' expression/definition/declaration */
if (x > y)
{
  let const k = 37;
  let gamma : int = 12.7 + k;
  let i = 10;
  let function f(n) { return (n/3)+k; }
  return f(gamma) + f(i);
}

Good stuff.

Close button in the active tab. Argh !

Whoever came up with this idea needs to be slapped. It's not _quite_ as bad as having a close button in every tab (which commits the additional sin of wasting a section of screen space that's already scarce), but it still makes a destructive action (closing a tab) _far_ too easy to trigger accidentally (by clicking _just_ the wrong part of a tab).

Having the tab bar suddenly become scrollable when you open "too many" tabs is another stupid idea. Took me a minute the first time it happened to realise I wasn't seeing a bug (tabs not being created) but a piece of awful UI.

Re:Close button in the active tab. Argh !

Blame it on conflicting usability studies [mozillazine.org] -- or maybe conflicting usability goals.

Close buttons on the tabs are good from a discoverability standpoint.
A close button on the end is good from a clicking-in-the-right-place standpoint.

Firefox has traditionally given discoverability a high priority.

Does it use WMP on Windows by default?

'cos if so your internet tracks will not be erased.

I hope someone here is intelligent enough to come up with a sensible alternative or fix which does not involve installing Linux or another OS.

here [mozillazine.org] is the issue, is it a problem?

New Obligatory Question

Is it available for Debian?
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?archi ve=no&bug=354622 [debian.org]

useful tip

I found a really useful tip from the article

Unfortunately, the green arrow button is difficult to remove from URL bar, but it can be accomplished by hitting about:config and tweaking the browser.urlbar.hideGoButton, changing it to "true."

still has UI consistency/key command problems

I reported this bug years ago and was told "probably won't happen until 2.0" and the bug was promptly closed/ignored:

In most modern operating systems, lists in dialog boxes can have a range of items selected by holding down shift, and individual items flipped on/off with a modifier key that varies slightly; in OS X, it's the apple/command key. Open up the cookies box, a place where selecting lots of items would be REALLY handy (ie, deleting all the crap cookies that will expire in "2046"), and try selecting multiple cookies. Bzzzzt, no go. And guess what? In pre-1.5 versions, you COULD do this, so it really WAS a bug/feature delete with 1.5. Now, select one cookie and hit the delete key. NOTHING HAPPENS. Why the hell not?

If you have partially typed anything in the URL bar and hit tab, half the time you aren't taken to the next text box in the browser window. Similar behavior happens elsewhere, only on a page.

It gets worse: just like older versions of 1.0/1.5, the current release candidate suffers from "keyboard-go-dead-itis." I've had to close Firefox FOUR times today because I could no longer enter text ANYWHERE. Not in forms, not in the URL bar, not in the search bar. Command keys (ie, apple-T for new tab) stopped working as well (1.5 still does this, though now usually only when Flash is on the page. Why Firefox allows flash to intercept command keystrokes is beyond me.)

Oh, and I still haven't figured out how to do the resume-where-you-left-off bit, despite having poured through the prefs pages several times.

Has the memory leak been fixed?

Yes, the one that has been present for as long as I've been using FireFox (2+ years).

mozStorage (SQLite) and Zotero

One of my favorite aspects of Firefox 2 is the new features for developers [mozilla.org], including storage with SQLite [mozilla.org]. This enables neat things like the new Zotero [zotero.org] extension, which stores bibliographic data (a'la Endnote, but with automatic recognition of metadata by programs like refbase [sourceforge.net] and on sites like google scholar).

Damn it

I endorse caution for users that rely on a lot of extensions, as most extensions aren't yet compatible with Firefox 2.0
I thought - at least, based on what people told me at the time - that each new release breaking extensions was supposed to be a thing of the past once FF got out of beta. Hopefully the FF devs fix this.. it's unacceptable.

Hard to make more than an incremental improvement?

I have to admit that when I first moved to Firefox from IE, the tabbed browsing was a feature that I didn't know that I needed until I tried it; and then I was hooked.

I don't really hear about any great new must have features in the RC2 version. Though I do acknowledge that coming up with great new features and ideas that most people appreciate but don't know that they need yet is no easy task, but I really don't see any key features in this version of Firefox to make me really want to upgrade. As I said before, great ideas in the browsing experience may be hard to come by since the idea of the browser and its application are mature. It's a bit like coming up with a great new feature for a word processor . . . a lot of the "low hanging fruit" is already taken.

What this means to me is that upgrading the browser is like upgrading the word processor; it's not a very high priority because there isn't a very compelling reason to do it (at least IMHO) . . .

He says the 'quick-search' is new?

FTFA
I'm not entirely sure why, but forward-slash now initiates a "Quick Find" which closes after a short period of inactivity and doesn't display the rest of the page find interface. elements

I've been using the '/' key to quick search in FF for ages.. I'm using it now in 1.5.0.7 in fact.

And while I like the new discussion thing, I do notice that the dancing moving comments box on the left (reminds me a bit of the net in 1997 when all menus followed you)doesn't stop at the bottom of the other sections/vendors/help etc area, it sits over the vendors bit.

Extensions

Why do extensions have to be changed for every release? Does the interface change that much?

Spell Check Only?

Is the 2.0 designation deserved? I suppose that depends on your perspective. At the risk of veering into a largely irrelevant philosophical rumination on the ontological significance of version numbers, I feel inclined to point out that the implications of version numbers vary greatly between various open source projects. In some cases, there is a well-established nomenclature and version numbers can be used to infer all sorts of useful things about the nature and status of a build. In other cases, it may simply be an arbitrary value selected for the sole purpose of making it possible to distinguish between builds. For Firefox, it doesn't seem like there is a fully consistent version numbering model yet. Rather than expressing disappointment about the lack of new features in the upcoming 2.0 release, users should remember that Firefox release numbers aren't always going to be a helpful medium for establishing expectations.

Sheesh... Judging by the above paragraph it also comes with a thesaurus.

I for one...

Finally decided to switch to opera today, and i'm quite happy with it so far.
The auto satisfaction of the firefox team, marketing gimmicks and now version number pushing finally got me. Well no, in fact those three are the last straw, the real reason is the total crap that ff has become. I've been moaning about the memory leaks for more than 3 years (no, i'm not talking about the slow as hell cache "feature"), pages take forever to parse and display (it seems like 10x faster in opera, really...), and basically switching to opera gave a new life to my venerable Athlon 1.2 / 500M. On this kind of machine, you can really see the difference... Feels like switching from an interpreted BASIC app to C++ one. In fact when you think about with all the XUL code that sits on top of gecko, it's probably the case...
The only thing I could miss are the developper extensions (which, combined with the inspector are really good), but I'm not into web programming any more for now (happy me !)

Maybe I should just stop hoping, and file a bug

I kind of find it a little ridiculous that Firefox is one of the browsers that made tabs a hit new feature, yet for it to work in any kind of consistent, sane manner, I still need an extension [mozilla.org] for it even in 2.0.

Not really looking to start a flame war, but jeez, an addon should not be necessary for this kind of functionality. It makes the default tabbed browsing behavior look half-assed without it.

Never change UI on upgrades

It seems like nobody likes any of the UI changes, which is entirely what I'd expect, because every change to a UI is a major hit to usability. This isn't to say that the new UI might not be more usable for new users. But experienced users will continue to try to use the UI the way that worked before, and it will cause problems for them. This is especially true if the improvement is in discoverability, because experienced users will only benefit in that, when the stupid computer refuses to work like it's supposed to, it's not quite as difficult to figure out what you have to do instead of the natural thing as it might be.

Of course, it's also good to offer improvements to the UI for users who decide to retrain themselves or for new users. But this should be done by adding configuration options (ideally with UI-driven configuration methods, like the Customize Toolbars dialog), and making the upgrade process configure these options based on what used to happen, not based on the current defaults. (Of course, if you're importing settings from a different program, set the options to match the default or configured behavior of that program, not the local defaults.) The ideal is that, when the user gets a new version of the program, everything looks the same as it did before, but new behavior is available when the user decides that it is desireable.

SQLite enables new extensions like Zotero

Firefox 2 includes a critical new underlying database engine--SQLite [sqlite.org]--which enables new kinds of extensions, such as the free, open-source citation manager and digital research tool Zotero [zotero.org].

SVG

Full and native SVG support would be a big feature to have. Sure most big sites would still stay away without IE support, but being able to do flash like things without a plugin and having vector graphics that are xml based and scalable would be enough to entice some smaller sites and application developers to start making some cool applications. Which would spur developement further. So far the basic SVG support that they have has been very good since 1.5, but there is still a lot to do apparently:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html [mozilla.org]

firefox codebase crud

I know this is heresy here, but....

I have found that firefox has grown less and less stable with each revision. The bugs that I used to submit were very minor and esoteric to the tune of "touchpad scrolling doesn't work well with this synaptics driver revision," etc. Now they are just full out crashes! While the early releases were rock stable, 1.5 for windows crashes all of the time, and frequently decides to just stop resolving DNS after a little while. (I have no extensions, and I've observed the same trend on my laptop and three desktops that I use frequently. All have vastly different hardware and different software configurations. I have to restart firefox at least once a day)

I'm sure that this is mostly due to the complexity of the codebase growing, and I still use it because I can't quite swallow the alternatives right now... but still... firefox has gotten under my fingernail plenty of times this past half year... food for thought... balance between new features and stability, please!

-Tom

My CPU got exhausted while playing with infoRSS

Is there anyone had the same problem.

If you have infoRSS ran in Firefox RC2 , and in some occasion while Firefox is rendering a page, CPU is utilized at 100%.

System themes no longer apply

From TFA:

Although the new tab theme looks very attractive, it isn't consistent with the computer's default system theme. Visual integration is one of the factors that contributed to Firefox's initial success over the original Mozilla browser suite.

Opera is looking better and better every day... System themes also don't apply in Opera, but at least I get superior speed.

... RC 2 will overwrite your existing installation

*crap* I thought of trying it out. But http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releaseno tes/#install [mozilla.com] warns that it will replace my existing installation

Where's it gone!?

Since FF2.0, I've been unable to post using ALT + S on various forums. I figure it's cos they've decided to stick a History menu in FF now. Great, very useful?!?

So, I work out how to remove the history menu, hoping I'll get my ALT + S functionality back. No. It doesn't work.

Anyone know how to sort it?!

Best bug fix in FF 2.0

The finally got around to fixing the bug where FF would consume 100% CPU on Mac OS X when you press and hold the left mouse button. This was a major issue for everyone with a laptop (it goes through battery much faster) and also annoying on the Mac Pros (the CPU fans spin up when you select text).

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14171 0 [mozilla.org]

It is absolutely GREAT for me

There were so many sites that were using some sort of javascript redirect functionality (don't ask me, I don't know javascript nor develop websites), none of them would work with the 1.5.x series (Firefox would just display an empty screen rather than follow the redirect).

I was seeing more and more of these broken web sites (and again I don't know whether it was an issue with FF implementation or wrong use [IE-specific] of javascript) and I was getting desperate considering if I'd move completely back to IE (and I wasn't recommending FF to others anymore because of this same issue).

FF 2.0 RC2 fixes all of that. All the sites I used to have to open in IE now work again, including GMail. So I'm happy. I'll be recommending 2.0 to all the people i know.

And I'm seeing the spell checker in action for the first time I type this. Love it!

Thanks to all the developers who work on this and hope you can keep the regressions at bay!

Leapfrogged by IE7?

I am mostly enjoying IE7's new zoom feature. Mostly - still a little buggy. Anyhow, not seeing anything like it in FF2. Other IE stuff I like better: integrated ultra-simple FTP support (FF hummingbird-stlye extension is okay, but overkill) Ctrl-N behavior: opens you on same page (with history) rather than homepage OTOH, integrated spellcheck in FF2 is nice. For some reason, it doesn't like "okay", though. Sticking with FF2 at home for now, but some zoom would really be sweet. xxxoo, Daffy (long time listener, first time caller)

Can I copy and Paste?

Does this version still have the random clipboard emptying and the dissapearing copy and paste functions?

Yes I know they were supposed to be fixed but I still get them (and my computer is malware free)

Close button per tab

Have they fixed or provided a work-around to the close button per tab problem?

When I tried RC1 this "feature" drove me absolutely batty. All of the other buttons such as go back, go forward, refresh, etc. remain in one place on the user interface, but for some misguided reason it was decided that close tab has to follow the tab. I typically open several tabs at a time then read through them deleting as I go. Having to chase the tab with the mouse is terribly annoying when moving rapidly through search results, news articles or whatever group of tabs I happen to have open. This is especially an issue when I have more than 20 or so tabs showing, which makes the target small and the page title non-existent on the tab.

Comprehensive review?

This review does not even mention that e.g. the option for accepting cookies from the original server only has been removed. This is not even mentioned in the release notes. They claim in the corresponding bug it was done because a workaround based on Javascript from other than the original hosts exists, but instead of adding an option to also disable Javascript unless it is from the original host, they removed the option alltogether.
The spell-checker solution is far less than optimal: instead of creating an interface to existing dictionaries users might have, e.g. for OpenOffice, with their own additional words etc. they come up with yet another dictionary.

Re:Firefox 2 fixes the most common leaks

It appears that the more common leaks are fixed in Firefox 2 [mozillazine.org].

Re:But...

Yeah, I know. Firefox's incompatibility with KDE made me switch to Konqueror. I don't mean to troll, but it is faster and more stable. Unfortunately, it doesn't have all those nice firefox extensions :-(

Re:They don't even give HEAD right...

LOL @ the sexual reference

The bug [mozilla.org] was listed as FIXED quite a while back. Are you sure it's still broken?