Firefox 2.0

The best browser. Reloaded.

They did it again.

Firefox 2.0, announced for today, was “secretly” released yesterday, on Mozilla company’s servers and made available for download for all platforms. (Thanks Bert-Jan for letting me know).

I downloaded and installed the Mac OS X version and of course I gave it a try.
At a first glance, the first thing I noticed was the new toolbar with brand new icons.
I have to say that I don’t like the new theme that much. Maybe I got used to the good old Pinstripe theme… but the new one is nothing extraordinary.
Compared to the IE 7 new theme, I have to admit Microsoft did a better work this time, in terms of innovating their UI.

Apart from this useless consideration, the 2.0 release seems to work great.
Among the new features of Firefox 2.0 there is a brand new RSS and XML feed reader, that is a lot better then the previous one and includes short excerpts of the feed posts.
However, I personally don’t use Live Bookmarks and prefer other ways of aggregating and reading feeds, but this is definitely a nice addition for Firefox users.

(Sorry, screenshot is of my Italian version…)

Tabbed browsing has been improved. Now we have a “Show all tabs” button that list all open tabs. This might be quite useful when you have lots of tabs open and you want to quickly jump from one to another.
One thing I noticed of the new tabbing system is that it wastes a bit of space. Let’s say it could have been more compact.

I have to say that IE 7 has a new, tasty bird-eye view of open tabs, and this is for sure a plus. It would have been a nice addition to FF 2.0 too, I think.

The improved FF search tool, with as-you-type keywords suggestion is quite useful, it reminds me a bit of Spotlight (Mac users know what I’m talking about).

Also the Preferences / Options panel has changed a little bit, with some new security functions. I’ve not tested it personally, but I’ve read FF 2.0 now features built-in anti-phishing controls.

What about performance? Well, at first sight, the new 2.0 seems as fast as the previous version and, at least on Mac OS X, startup time is really quick.
This article has an interesting comparison between FF 2.0 and IE 7 performances. It seems like there is no noticeable difference and IE has in some way filled the gap.

The new Firefox also features a brand new built-in spell-checker, that should proove quite useful, even if haven’t tested it yet.

FF 2.0 has an improved customization tool and makes installing new themes and extensions easier.

One thing I have to mention, the localized Italian Mac version is 17.3 MB in size which is quite a lot for a browser (for example Safari is just a 7 MB download). Anyway, it is definitely worth downloading even if it might take a while on slow connections.

As an overall consideration, the new features of Firefox 2.0 are for sure useful, but are not ground-breaking innovations. By the way, what did we expect? How could they change a browser that was already the state-of-the-art?
They did a great job, improving a lots of little things to keep FF ahead in the browsers competition.

In the end, my suggestion is to download and try both IE 7 and FF 2.0, just to see what the new generation of browsers has to offer.
And then, when you finished testing, get rid of IE and keep using Firefox..
The new features of IE 7 and its new good-looking UI are not enough for a browser that still has bugs in handling CSS layouts.
Proper CSS rendering cannot be considered an option. No more.