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."
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.
Re:Tabs will be broken (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:I hope they improved the reliability (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Even better... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 enhances the former and doesn't change the latter.
Re:Does it still hog memory? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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).
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).
Re:One question before I try this out... (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Linux builds (Score:2, Interesting)
This helps tremendously with tab switching speed, and overall stability.
Re:Does it still hog memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
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. ;)
Once again, seems like you messed up your code somewhere. Care to show the JavaScript snippet you used so we could tell you what precisely you did wrong (and how to do it right, so it works everywhere)?.
If you keep your config files from version to version, you'll get all the consistency you want. Yes, small things do break when a new major version is released. But by and large, I still use the UI I've set up for Opera 7 ages ago without any serious changes.