Had a quick post up yesterday announcing the release of Firefox 2 beta 2. When I first played with the earlier beta 1 things were pretty horrible, but I managed to talk myself into having a run at this latest beta last night. I’ve since used all of this day, both for work and pleasure, and what follows are some of my initial impressions. In, of course, no particular order:
- The default theme is much more “modern” and/or easier on the eyes. Granted, this is a subjective thing, but I sure like this look better than FF 1.x’s default theme. Perilously close to IE7’s… but not quite as glossy.
- It feels faster! Or is it faster because so few of my plugins are working with it?
- Perhaps related to not having all my extensions running, but memory usage is down from where it was. My “minimize to reclaim memory” trick still works too.
Trivia: That was my most viewed post ever. Well, until this one.
- I’m going to quickly become addicted to the built in spell checking. omg is that handy to have!
- Speaking of plugins, I’m dying without my Web Developer Extension. /cry I guess I need to look into the Nightly Tester Tools extension.
- Closing x’s on tabs — without an extension? Sweet! As it should be, imo.
- Tab management has been beefed up quite a bit. Almost to the point that I may not be in a hurry to find updates for my old tab management extensions… almost…
- Yeah, almost… When I enter a search using the built-in search thingy, I want it to open the results in a new tab. Damned if I can find that as an option anywhere. Am I missing something obvious or does this take me back into “need an extension to do that” territory?
- This one’s a bit of a mixed blessing: RSS feeds are handled in a much more friendly manner. Nice for casual use, but I spend a lot of time glancing at feeds volunteering for WordPress and I’m going to miss not seeing raw XML.
I think those are the main things I’ve noticed so far. Definitely more stable than beta 1 (yeah I know – duh!) and I’m very pleasantly surprised at how it “feels” so far.
[Updated] I just figured out how to have search open in a new tab!
- Go to “about:config”
- Filter for “browser.search.openintab”
- double-click that row to change the value to True.
- Bob’s your uncle
[Updated x2] Apparently I’m in the minority of those who like the new theme. I was probably one of the few who ever thought the previous defaults felt too “tonka’ish” too. Ah well. Regardless of the default, I’m still a fan.
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September 1st, 2006 
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Dude I love the theme too (It’s broken a bit on corrupt profile, because it’s the same for Firefox 1.5 but it works fine otherwise)
To open the results of your search bar query type Alt+Enter. I think that is what you wanted to accomplish. No need for an extension. At least that works in Firefox 1.5, haven’t tested 2.0 Beta 2.
Sohil – I think we’re definitely in the minority as far as liking the new theme goes!
Pharod – thanks for that tip, I’d totally spaced it. Fortunately, I found “browser.search.openintab” in about:config and that’s now my default behavior.
[...] My first annoyance with FF2 beta 2 has popped up. How the heck do I unlock or reorder the tool bars? I fear I’m missing something obvious, but I sure can’t find a menu or right-click option. Surely I don’t need to tunnel into about:config for this too? [...]
I just use Alt + Enter to open searches in new tabs. Now if only web forms would respond to that/middle cliking on submit.
Hi Kwan, Thanks for dropping by. See my reply to Pharod from 9/2.
To view RSS source, just do view source when viewing it
@Ian – oh geeze. I just lost my captain obvious trophy for missing that. Thanks!
It takes a bit of getting used to—I have to retrain myself to move to the tab-specific close button. So far I keep clicking the window-list widget on the far right.
I kind of wish FF2 had more improvements under the hood. Gecko’s Javascript rendering, for instance, is pretty slow. I was disappointed that we have to wait until FF3 to see the 1.9 branch of Gecko.
[...] Saw this one just as I was finishing this article: Firefox beta2 Release Candidate 1 is ready for download. I’ve been loving the previous beta, hopefully the RC will be just as pleasant to use. I’m curious to see if the theme got tweaked. (reference this older post) Tags: beta, firefox, google, google notebook, web2.0, zoho, zoho planner Possibly Related Posts: [...]
I’m with you on the theme opinion… honestly: i love it
hehehe
) and it’s seems more responsive than the 1.5.x.x version…
Anyway, good overall review! I have been using it for days now, and it’s quite stable and … I’m always with 20+ tabs open (yeah… I’m geek I guess
Oh well… just my 0.02 :p
~Levi F. aka EinZteiN
[...] I mentioned Firefox 2, Beta 2 (which generated a large number of hits from being mentioned here). I then mentioned Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2. [...]
Help me please…
I just installed Firefox 2.0, and all of a sudden, my username/password isn't being inserted in the signon window (it always was before). I tried the usual suspects–I did not mistakenly tell FF not to remember the password for this site; and I also tried the remember password bookmarklet, but all to no avail–FF will not ask me to remember this password. What do I need to do to get around this?