Firefox 2.0 Officially Released

Many readers wrote in to make sure we all knew that Firefox 2.0 has officially been released on Mozilla.com, unlike yesterday's early preview. Here are builds for all languages and Win/Linux/Mac, and the release notes.

Needs more colours

Once again...

If you find the Firefox 2 theme too bleak, I've got your fix right here [davidnaylor.org].

Re:Woot

The download page picks a random mirror. Linking directly to the file would put all of the load on a single mirror.

no, it would not:

# host releases.mozilla.org
releases.mozilla.org has address 64.50.236.52
releases.mozilla.org has address 64.50.238.52
releases.mozilla.org has address 130.239.18.158
releases.mozilla.org has address 130.239.18.159
releases.mozilla.org has address 155.98.64.83
releases.mozilla.org has address 216.165.129.134
releases.mozilla.org has address 216.165.129.141

Re:Hehe nice cover

http://www.wordorigins.org/Words/LetterL/lockandlo ad.html [wordorigins.org]
Lock and Load
This imperative phrase originally referred to the operation of the M1 Garand Rifle, the standard U.S. Army rifle of WWII. Its meaning is more general now, referring to preparation for any imminent event.

To load a Garand, the bolt would be locked to the rear and a clip of ammunition loaded into the receiver. The command lock and load was immortalized by John Wayne in the 1949 movie The Sands of Iwo Jima: "Lock and load, boy, lock and load."
There are earlier uses of the command reversed, load and lock. This command, primarily used on firing ranges, referred to the loading of a single round into the Garand (or into another weapon). In this case, the lock referred to striking the bolt handle with the heel of the hand to ensure it was fully closed and locked into place.

And you want to mess with something the Duke said? Shame on you. :)

it IS "Lock and load"

My deer rifle is a 30-06 Remmington slide action. I'm a southpaw and a lefthanded bolt was more than I could afford when I got the gun (used): the slide action is ambidextrous. It has a 4 round clip. I've owned it for 31 years now. I don't use it much any more, but at one time it helped stretch the grocery budget.

I learned to shoot from a couple guys who had grown up hunting in the 1930s and who learned to shoot all over again when in the service in World War II. Both saw more action on the Pacific islands than they would ever talk about.

The litany they taught included these steps (done just before the first steps of the hunt)

1. check the receiver for crud
2. check the clip for crud and alignment of the top round
3. check safety is on
4. insert clip into receiver
5. LOCK clip into place by slamming it with the heel of your hand
6. LOAD the first round into the chamber (in my case, work the slide)
7. check the safety is on (again)

I doubt that either of those guys saw any of the John Wayne war movies (they liked his westerns though). But I'm pretty sure neither one would have thought "Lock and load, son" was wrong or laughable. It is the way it was done.

Sorry about the rant. But this argument among people who have never had to worry about extracting a jammed live round from a rifle because the shooter hadn't locked the clip into place before trying to load the chamber has grown tiresome.

Too Many!

Wow! The third firefox 2.0 article in 24 hours. Boy, I can't wait to read all the insightful comments people will leave. Again.

-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

Re:Too Many!

I'm sure there will be plenty of insightful comments in the next little while..

Just wait here while I go, umm, write some..

CTRL-C CTRL-V
CTRL-C CTRL-V

2.0?

I have been using Firefox 2.0 for a day now. I can't really see how this warrants a 2.0 release. It seems like there should be more added features and innovation that we have come to expect from the Mozilla team to jump to 2.0. Don't get me wrong, I love the software and I have converted just about everyone I know to Firefox. This is a Solid release, but maybe a 1.6 or something.

Re:2.0?

Part of me wants to agree with you, but the other part of me says the whole point of Firefox is that not all of the cool features are built in. While I would like better RSS integration, I'm glad they are leaving the major feature upgrades to the add-on developers.

(although would it be so hard to add the cool click-and-drag margin resize features for printing that IE7 has?)

Re:2.0?

IMHO, this release warrants the 2.0 moniker. Aside from the inline spell checker, it appears the dreaded "memory usage" problem has finally been nailed. FF 2.0 does appear to reclaim memory much faster than the older version. To me, this bug fix together with the perceptible increase in launch time and page loading/rendering is a major improvement, which combined with the inline spell checker is enough to warrant the 2.o moniker. I also agree that additional features are better left to extension developers.

Part of 2.0 release it appears is also not just contained in the browser code itself but in Mozilla's Add-ons website which gets launch when you click the "Get Extensions" link in the Add-ons dialog. Add-ons or extensions are now grouped together by functionality as opposed to being grouped together by popularity, ratings, etc.

Re:2.0?

I have been using Firefox 2.0 for a day now. I can't really see how this warrants a 2.0 release. It seems like there should be more added features and innovation that we have come to expect from the Mozilla team to jump to 2.0.

First, Firefox 2.0 is supposed to be a "0.5" upgrade from 1.5; that is, approximately as much of a change as 1.5 was compared to 1.0.

Now, Firefox 2.0 offers these noticeable features, among others:
- Updated UI
- Anti-phishing
- Tab close undo
- Session restore
- Form spell checker
- Microsummaries
- JavaScript 1.7
- Loads and loads of bug and stability fixes, including improved memory usage

I'm really not sure why this couldn't be a 2.0 release? What else should it be? 1.6 would be way to minor for its features anyway. Heck, this is the scale e.g. IE 5 -> 6 was on IMHO, if not more, and then that was an incremental step of 1, not 0.5 as Firefox 2.0 is.

It looks out of place on the Mac

Firefox 1.x made a reasonable attempt at mimicking the interface of OS X using XUL. Sure, its contextual menus weren't slightly transucent and some of its metrics were slightly off, but it didn't look completely out of place on the system. Firefox 2.0 has thrown away the Aqua interface and replaced it with some generic chrome which looks rather poor per se, but is especially jarring on Mac OS X.

I hope someone comes up with a decent Aqua skin, but it still doesn't make any sense to force users to resort to skinning just to make a program fit with the default system interface. The Mac build of Firefox should look like a Mac program by default; skinning should be for those people who want to make it look like a pink christmas tree or whatever.

Please do not bother mentioning Camino: it lacks support for Firefox extensions, which are the only reason I have for using Firefox.

Re:It looks out of place on the Mac

The Mac build of Firefox should look like a Mac program by default;

Agreed. It is really annoying when developers of cross-platform apps don't realize that you need to conform to what users are accustomed to on their platform by default. Even Sun figured this out with Java (eventually), when will Mozilla?

Re:It looks out of place on the Mac

Near as I can tell, they've been shifting away from that philosophy and moving towards a "their way or the highway" tactic. With 1.0 they usurped the use of ctrl-u to clear a line of text, which has been a convention with unix (emacs introduced it afaik) as far back as I can remember. Now, it opens the "view page source" window.

Disabling it requires mucking with dotfiles, and I appreciate that the capacity is there.. but that's not the point. Running firefox under a given platform should cater to that platform's conventions. I don't want it to be the same under all platforms, I want to be the same with MY platform.

Not so fast..err..fox!

Ack, that horrible thing seems to sometimes cause weird problems with some websites that don't like all the simultaneous connections, and it can also cause memory leaks. Just be hardcore and modify your about:config yourself. [ubuntuforums.org]

Same binary as yesterday....

Yesterday's "pre-release" (CRC32): 4F3CF1D7
Today's "official" release (CRC32): 4F3CF1D7

I guess not much has changed since RC3...

Don't wait for automatic update

The auto-update system will automatically apply security and stability updates. We're planning on providing an "optional" update to Firefox 2 through this system, and that will likely happen in a few weeks. In the meantime, please do download through getfirefox.com [getfirefox.com]. As long as you do not use a direct ftp.mozilla.org or releases.mozilla.org [mozilla.org], we're pretty confident in our ability to handle demand, thanks to our volunteer mirror network.

TabMixPlus

A new version of TabMixPlus that works with FF2 will be released within the week according to the author's note here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/ [mozilla.org]

In the meantime, you can install a pre-release version of the extension here:

http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3515 [garyr.net]

To get rid of the close buttons on all tabs, go to about:config and set

browser.tabs.closeButtons

to 0 if you only want the close button on the active tab

or to 0 if you want the close button only at the right hand side of the tab bar.

Buggy Release

Am I the only one getting all kinds of bugs in the new release?

The search engine box starts blank, and the 'get more search engines' link does nothing.

Right clicking and selecting 'new tab' opens a blank tag that doesn't react to the location bar at all, and refuses to close by clicking on its button, right click + close, or hitting 'close all other tabs'

It lost every single one of my bookmarks, even though it kept most extensions intact.

I don't want to sound like a troll, but is this really the quality we want in a new release?

Best. Feaure. Ever.

I just installed 2.0 on XP and it seems to be working quite well. Most of my extensions work, and I'm happy.

Then I discovered The Feature(tm). A website popped up a window, rather than a new tab, with no ability to control the size and whatnot. I discovered a button in the upper right corner that says "open this window in default browser". Clicking it opens that window in a new tab in my open browser.

Thanks to whoever added that feature. Brilliant idea.

Take control of your windows!

(Notice: Lower-case 'w' in subject.)

Enter "about:config" in to the Address bar.

Filter on "dom.disable_window".

Make sure every resulting knob is set to "True".

This prevents JavaScript-spawned windows from having their title bar, address bar, tool bar, menu bar, status bar, scroll bars, or other decorations removed/disabled. Now I can move, resize, or otherwise twiddle with all the windows in my browser, the way I should be able to.

Me to web developers: They're my windows; get your grubby JavaScript off them!

Official 64 bit build?

Will mozilla ever release an official 64 bit version of firefox? Not that I really care that much since I am usually running the 64 bit trunk build that I compile weekly anyways. But supposedly one of the reasons that Sun won't release a 64 bit java plugin for firefox is because there is no official 64 bit firefox. I am hoping that by Mozilla releasing an official 64-bit firefox Sun will finally get a 64-bit java plugin out.

Re:64-bit support?

The problem I think is that a lot of browser plug-ins won't work with 64-bit support, i.e. Flash. Konqueror solved this problem by making plugins run in a separate process context than the browser, so while the browser is 64-bit, it handles 32-bit binary plugins just fine. It has an added benefit that if a plugin goes berserk it doesn't take out the browser and I can kill the plugin task without affecting the browser.

yesterday's FF2 tab close button problem solved

Okay, so I had a problem where when I hovered over a tab's close button, it would disappear (though it would still when clicked). Also, when I installed the beta of the upcoming Tab Mix Plus, the main tab close button would flicker when hovered over it, and I'd have to click several times very quickly to make it work.

The problem: a theme I had installed (which has since been updated today).

So, if you experience any UI weirdness, you may want to switch over to the default theme and restart to see if that makes a difference.

Now that I have my Tabs Mix Plus, I'm doin' okay with FF2.

Shame about the non-multi-threaded UI, though. Maybe someday.

Not stable enough on my mac

I have been using RC3, which I believe is the same codebase as the actual release. For several months I have found that the Firefox 2.0 branch froze up on my Mac (10.4 MacBook Pro) several times a day. Every time a new release would come out I would try it for a day or two, then it would freeze up, and I would switch back to the stable release. I'm sorry to say that RC3 has been freezing up on me in much the same way, meaning that even with the official 2.0 release, its not stable enough for me to use it as my primary browser (and yes, I do submit bugs when the occur if I can, I have been submitting bugs to Mozilla since the project was first open sourced).

Cookie Monster

You can no longer block 3rd-party cookies.

Re:Cookie Monster

Yeah, I was disappointed to see this gone from the UI, but it is still available via about:config . The key is network.cookie.cookieBehavior, default value is 0 (all cookies allowed). Change this to 1 (no 3rd party cookies). More info from the MozillaZine knowledgebase [mozillazine.org].

-molo

Gripe #1

I've had v2.0 for all of 3 minutes and already have a gripe. The X tabs icon has been moved from the far right to the right of each individual tab. I rather liked the old version as I could quickly X all my tabs down to the original window that I had open. Now I must mouse around to click all tabs.

Re:Gripe #1

Two about:config settings that I changed after installing Firefox 2.0:

browser.tabs.closeButtons

• 0: Only show close button on currently selected tab
• 1: Show close button on all tabs (default)
• 2: Never show close buttons on tabs
• 3: Show a single close button at the far right (1.5 behavior)

browser.urlbar.hideGoButton

• false: Show Go button next to location bar (default)
• true: Hide Go button next to location bar

I couldn't find anything related to the tab list drop-down button or for the magnifying glass button next to the search box.

Attention Mac Users

OS X users should be aware of the following:

1. Firefox 1.5 users will be happy to know that Firefox 2.0 includes numerous performance and usability improvements over v1.5 specifically for the OS X platform, bringing the Mac version closer to the Windows version in terms of quality. You'll want to upgrade immediately. If you thought that Firefox 1.5 sucked, give 2.0 a try. Big improvements on the Mac.
2. If you're a fan of the smooth, pixel-resolution scrolling that comes with two-finger touchpad and Mighty Mouse scrolling, and you lament the lack of this smooth scrolling in Firefox, well lament no more! Smooth pixel-resolution scrolling was introduced in Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, and it rules. Unfortunately, this feature was removed because it made the bookmark manager scroll too quickly. If you're like me and do a lot of scrolling (and don't care about how the bookmark manager scrolls) you'll want to stick with Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 [mozilla.org] on OS X, like I do.