SiteCrafting Blah Blah Blog
Oct. 23, 2006 at 10:50am
Firefox 2.0
Mozilla releases new browser when it's good and ready.
Hot on the heels of the Internet Explorer 7 release, Mozilla Firefox 2.0 is slated for official release tomorrow, but, as often happens, they have posted the full release version up on the mirrors already, so you can find what you're looking for at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0
So, some first thoughts... most of it is same old Firefox. Slightly different look (not that it matters to those who skin their browser anyway). I haven't gone out seeking fraudulent sites to see how well Firefox warns me of them, so at this point I'll have to take their word for that one. The inline spellchecker is quite nice. It manages to be visible without being obtrusive when marking misspellings, with word recommendations available via right-click.
The biggest advantage that Firefox 2 has over something like IE 7 (beyond all the things Firefox already had over IE) is this: it works. Some articles I've read have wondered why Mozilla didn't push a little harder to beat IE to the punch, release-wise. Well, the reason is simple: they wanted to release Firefox when it worked, and not a moment before. IE 7 is out there crashing Windows and shutting off audio plug-ins (or so my co-workers' testimonials would have it). Meanwhile, I downloaded Firefox today, and the only things that didn't work instantly were a couple of user-created extensions, for which the application immediately sought out, found and installed the updated 2.0 compatible versions. Everything is working as smoothly as (or smoother than) ever.
Microsoft is far from alone in this kind of error. Apple's iTunes 7.0 was, quite frankly, a disaster. If you have to start releasing such major bug fixes a week later, well... wouldn't you be better off releasing your application a week later, actually working? I sure think so.
I'm sure I or someone else here will be back for a more thorough review once we've had a little more time to properly digest the new features.
Posted in Critiques by Joe Izenman
Comments (2)
Yeah, my cousin says that IE7 is way better than FireFox... but he works for microsoft so I can appreciate how this view would benefit his current circumstance. look forward to the FireFox 2! Hope it works with the measure it extension. :)
1 | Left by RR Anderson | Oct. 24, 2006 at 9:37am
Joe says:
It surely does. Actually, MeasureIt (available at http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/measureit/) was one of the two aforementioned extensions which needed to be updated. Fortunately, Firefox handled that on startup, going and finding the newly compatible versions of that and Kevin's other extension, LinkChecker.
2 | Oct. 24, 2006 at 11:53am