Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Firefox 2.0 released today

The Mozilla corporation/community have released Firefox 2.0 today, with many improvements (mainly behind the scenes).

Similar to Firefox 1.5, this release has had some serious amount of QA pounding on it, I would say it is their most planned & executed release management to date.

The things that interest me for this release include:

  • Session restore (all tabs & data in pages return after a crash)
  • Undo close tab (part of session restore, but there's so many times I could of used this)
  • Inline spell checking (just need to download an Australian dictionary from Mozilla.com's Add-ons Dictionaries, why they make it hard to find that page, I'll never know
  • Plus lots of tiny stuff not worth mentioning

I'm personally waiting for a few of my many extensions to become compatible with 2.0. It's weird, I only used 1 or 2 extensions for years, but now I use a whole heap (with some disabled when not in use), but I've become so accustomed to them now, I can't live without them. Though based on the amount of time I've had to manually spell check some words in this post, it would probably be easier to be using Firefox 2.0 :-)

When Firefox 1.5 came out, I was already excited about 2.0, what with Places & the SQLite backends, but that didn't really pan out, should be in Firefox 3.0 though...

Firefox 1.5 released today
... Already waiting for Firefox 2.0 (from the 1.8.1 Gecko branch) with its "Places" support (redoing bookmarks, history, feeds etc. into a new user interface and storing in a super fast SQLite DB).

Firefox 3.0 will come off the 1.9 branch, with it's massive Gecko improvements (rewrite rendering using Cairo on all platforms, reflow rewritten, complete SVG support??) and the aforementioned Places with tagging system for bookmarks/history etc.

Get Firefox!Download Firefox 2.0 now.