Info on Firefox 2.0
While on the topic of Firefox, I came across an article today discussing the forthcoming Firefox 2 release. The Information Week article mostly mentions bookmark/history integration and improvements as well as tabbed browsing improvements, both of which are welcome changes, of course. Looking at the Firefox 2 feature list on the mozilla wiki, I also see a couple of other features that I’m pretty excited about: “In-line spell check” and “Session Restore”.
Firefox 2 is targeted for a third-quarter 2006 launch, which is pretty impressive to me considering that Firefox 1.5 released pretty recently. Firefox 3 is apparently targeted for first-quarter 2007, which seems even more ambitious, but I certainly hope they can pull it off.
Posted Saturday February 18, 2006 in by Chris Curtis
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I guess I didn’t look hard enough, but in the article I read, I couldn’t find a link to the feature list! There’s a downloadable version of a build that has the new Places. I gave it a unique name so it didn’t overwrite my Firefox RC, and it’s pretty neat. It is based on the 2.0 resource fork, even though it claims to be 1.5. This was evidently done so that extensions would keep working during the development process.
Essentially, it combines your history, bookmarks, and RSS feeds into one organized window. It even has a mini-calendar for the more visually inclined. It’s very vanilla and the UI is kind of ugly at this stage, but it’s a neat concept. Safari already does this for Bookmarks and RSS feeds, and is a little more adaptive on searches, but lacks the incorporation of searching and browsing the history.
Session Restore is nice; I really enjoy when programs do that. As for in-line spell checking, Safari’s already got it. Not to say that Firefox shouldn’t have it too, but it’s not a groundbreaking feature, and I think it will have a further negative impact on Firefox’s overall performance and memory usage. It would be wasteful and unnecessary on OS X (they could be hooking into it already), and I haven’t kept up, but I imagine Windows Vista will finally have an OS level dictionary as well.
I’m coming off as a Safari-toting Negative Nancy, but the truth is: I’m excited by anything the Mozilla Foundation does. This is good news for everyone, and I hope their release smashes previous usage records. If they are critically successful, IE7 won’t instantly enjoy the market share that IE5/6 had. If the momentum builds steadily, by the time IE6 is relegated to IE5’s current usage, Firefox could quite well be the dominant browser.
By Derek Jones on February 19, 2006 at 05:22pm link