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.

Re:Needs more colours

[Despero]

Well, I was just gonna say... Firefox is much better looking than I ever expected it to be! Isn't it Opera's job to look modern? Congratulations to the people who designed this new theme. It's nothing special, but definitely a big step up from 1.5.

2.0?

[stonefry]

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.

It looks out of place on the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

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:2.0?

[OneSeventeen]

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?)

64-bit support?

[empaler]

Godsdamnit, why must it be so hard to get proper 64-bit OS support? Yes, I know I can get an alpha-build of Minefield/FFx3 in 64-bit, but that's just not cutting it on a work computer. Might be fun in a VM, though (which is where I always use unfinished and dangerous softwares, e.g. IE7)

Not stable enough on my mac

[Sanity]

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).

MOD PARENT REDUNDANT x 2!

[BeeBeard]

Just kidding, you're right. I think we're all on Firefox overload at this point.

Still no preference to disable tabs

[organum]

How hard can it be? Is the development team so ossified and chauvinistic that they want to force a particular navigation scheme on all users? Let folks who want to use tabs use them, but don't make the rest of us drink from a separate drinking fountain around the back!

Re:Memory usage not fixed on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I have to have 178MB memory usage (including swap) with just 3 tabs open

You obviously have little/no understanding of how Linux memory management works.

Re:It looks out of place on the Mac

[Sanity]

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:Not stable enough on my mac

[Dhalka226]

Do you have any extensions?

I had a similar problem earlier today and yesterday (though I don't use a Mac). I'm not prepared to say 100% that it was the cause, but at least so far, I have yet to have the freezing issue recur since disabling the official Google Toolbar extension. If you have that installed, you may want to try disabling it and seeing if you have any better luck.

Re:It looks out of place on the Mac

[Xzzy]

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.

Re:Woot

[eurleif]

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

Re:Gripe #1

[Anonymous Coward]

The downside is that the majority of people who don't know how to muck with about:config may not know it's even possible. I think this is a big enough change that it deserves a spot in the normal FF prefs UI.

Re:2.0?

[drew]

IE 5 -> IE 6 included a substantial improvement in DOM and CSS support (which is a little sad when you consider how awful IE 6 is at both...) while Firefox 1.5 -> 2.0 changed virtually nothing on either front, so I would say this is nowhere near the scale of IE 5 -> IE 6 (or even IE 5.5 -> IE 6).

Anyways, IMO even if Firefox 2.0 is, as many people have claimed, as much of an upgrade from 1.5 as 1.5 was from 1.0, than no, it doesn't deserve to be called 2.0. If they didn't think the last upgrade was worthy of a major version jump, then why would another equivalent upgrade suddenly be worth it now? And from what I've read regarding the changes (based only on reviews so far- haven't had time to test it yet) it really doesn't sound like this version jump is even that big. It sounds to me like it belongs around 1.7 or 1.8 or so...

Of course if every other browser out there is jumping the major verion every other release, I guess you have to as well, or people will think you're falling behind.

Re:2.0?

[reub2000]

A 0.5 upgrade from 1.5 would be 1.10. Compare Konqueror 3.0 to Konqueror 3.5. You'd find much more of a difference.

Re:It looks out of place on the Mac

[Yvan256]

That's the problem right there. Why the hell does Mozilla creates its own UI? Every operating system already has windowing and widgets APIs in place. Heck, one of the reason I hate Firefox on OS X is because even the form widgets don't look like OS X. I feel like I'm using an old version of Windows when I see pull-down menus and radio buttons in Firefox!

Re:it IS "Lock and load"

[lucifig]

Are the guys in the RAF armory working with equipment made in the 30's caked in dirt and blood? If not then their advice really isn't applicable to his example now is it?