Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard

ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.

Stats

[Tim_UWA]

Chris said that current stats indicate that Firefox usage peaks mid-week, as opposed to the weekends - which he said is the reverse of what it was two years ago when they launched Firefox.

Where do they get these stats?

After running both....

[w0lver]

IE7 and FF2, I have to say its really no contest. Despite just plain hating how much vertical real estate the new tab toolbar takes up, performance with IE 7 is just horrible. Even a light page like the Google home page take about about half second longer to render on my Core 2 Duo machine. Let's not forget only really giving lip service to CSS standards, there is still going to be a ton of web pages that need hacks or workarounds for IE CSS issues. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/ [positioniseverything.net] for the latest hoops you need to jump through for IE. In no means is Firefox perfect in its CSS support but at least they respond to incompatibilities in a reasonable time frame.

Re:Get a clue already.

[Silver Sloth]

I still can't get them to download it or install it.

I wait until their PC is toally virus/adware ridden and they call me in to help. That's when the now will you believe me when I advise Firefox starts to work. Admittedly this is a slow, user by user, transfer but once converted they never return.

OT -- bookmarks disappearing?

[Ender Ryan]

having your bookmarks vanish for no reason, etc

I have more bookmarks(a few hundred) than anyone else I personally know, and I've never seen this happen. Is this something people besides yourself have experienced?

I'm Just curious.

Cheers.

Re:Get a clue already.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the Pharmacy companies I've worked for use FF as their company intranet browser. Something to think about.

Undo close tabs?

[lowid (24) _________]

Gotta love how the release notes say "a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab." Anyone know what said shortcut is?

Neat sounding feature, but kinda useless if you can't find the shortcut anywhere.

P.