“Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. “Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community,” the team said on the Mozilla development website. “Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly.”
right here
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0b2/
WOW! I think I like it. Built in spell checker? Nice subtle graphical improvements. I have stuck with 1.0 until now I think.
Edited 2006-08-31 19:21
I really like the in-line spell checker. Very handy for posting on sites such as this. I’m missing my mouse gestures though. I really wish Mozilla would just build them in instead of having to rely on a separate plug-in since most tend to break in the beta releases.
I wonder if the spell checker will be smart enough to use the OS X when available. It seems daft to have a separate dictionary for just your web browser.
I believe that 2.0 does not, although that is planned for 3.0 along with several other OSX enhancements.
Not only for OS-X
There would be – as far as I know – and take it with care :
– a cairo based interface, called Thebes
– Places (at least, yes, for 3.0)
– a new engine version (gecko 1.9)
– a lot of bugs squashed
All of those are almost certainly in.
– a cairo based interface, called Thebes
– a new engine version (gecko 1.9)
Cairo/Gecko are basically the main change that 3 is supposed to introduce. There is no way I see them dropping this. If it isn’t ready I expect them to delay the release instead of dropping it.
– Places (at least, yes, for 3.0)
Since this was supposed to be in 2.0 originally, it had better at least get into 3.0.
– a lot of bugs squashed
Obviously. All the known memory leaks are supposed to finally be corrected in 3.0, so that will be nice.
Does this version still have that odd window problem like the current one? I’m getting tired of going to a site where it opens up a new window (say a media player of some sort) and half the damn site is somewhere beyond the border. This has happened to me on many sites. Also noticed that some content won’t show up on Firfox but would on say IE or Opera. Now maybe this is just my copy of Firefox, but from what I have heard this is not so. This was not an issue in earlier editions of Firefox. Well, I hope this situation has been attended to or will be in version 2.
Could you give us some examples? I have not ever run into anything like that.
I can:
go to : http://www.nyit.edu
and in Resources menu click on NYIT Connect – it opens in a new window although in settings I set it to open only a new tab. This is on Firefox 1.5.0.6 (Fedora 5)
If I use the NYITConnect link on the main page then it opens in a new tab. If I go thru the resources menu then I get a new window because it is designed as a popup I believe. Not sure if anything could be done about this? I am clueless.
Some goofy design.
Why using onclick=window.open(“http//whatever”) instead of target=”blank”?
Yeah, I’ve had that problem. FF 1.5 (in Linux, at least) seems generally a lot less stable than earlier versions.
I haven’t had that problem – can you give an example of a site that does it? Or is it doing it randomly?
I really dislike how Firefox is adopting an XP-look by default. Makes the browser look horrid under a classic theme. Anyone know if there is an extension for the new XP-ish tab look that will change things back to the classic look?
That’s easy, switch to OSX or Linux and stop whinging. I did.
What, to both?!
diacritic marks don’t work in some fonts …still
…or do extensions and plugins often fail to work between one *release* version and another, anyway?
They *work*, but often the developer of the extension just fails to update the extension to include the new version of Firefox as compatible. You either have to wait for the developer or use the Nightly Tester extension to override.
I don’t think there’s much of an elegant solution to it, besides perhaps Firefox building-in auto-update functionality for extensions (which currently does not exist).
I hadn’t heard of the Nightly Tester extension; I’ll try it. Thanks for that.
Nightly Tester works like a charm! Thanks a bunch!
No, same here and everywhere, of course.
When I read “Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly.” I thought “Is this something new?”
It is one of the most unnerving feat^^bugs of Firefox, moreso given how often it is updated. The extensions system are one of this browser’s greatest selling points and at the same time its greatest annoyance. I vent^^wrote about this in a short piece
http://www.nezmar.com/minefield-and-the-extensions-mess/
when trying out Minefield, a version of Firefox tailored for Mac OS X.
nda
when trying out Minefield, a version of Firefox tailored for Mac OS X.
Minefield isn’t a version tailored for OSX, it is the trunk. IOW, it is what will someday become Firefox 3.0 and is currently very, very, very far from even alpha status. Which is why they called it “Minefield.” You never know when it will blow up in your face.
I don’t know how people can complain about 3rd party extensions not working with a pre-alpha or even beta product. Start complaining when they don’t work with the 2.0 final release. Until then, if you expect things to work then you shouldn’t be using betas anyway.
I’m cool with betas and alphas. Actually, and maybe I didn’t make myself clear on this, the extensions mess isn’t that much worse on Minefield than on Firefox.
My beef is with the mechanism of routinely disabling extensions plus the attempt to check for new versions coupled with the high rate of updates of Firefox which is frustrating, user-wise.
“it is what will someday become Firefox 3.0 and is currently very, very, very far from even alpha status. Which is why they called it “Minefield.” You never know when it will blow up in your face.”
Indeed. But you know what ? I am using it on a daily basis (building it from trunk sources) and they are very stable.
My today user agent :
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060901 Firefox/3.0a1
And the namecode of 3.0 will be “Gran Paradiso”
Source ?
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=pdighgf028nmbjbrno8oed8vsg…
gets my thumbs up!
i see that “not sticking out like a sore thumb on the macintosh” isn’t enabled in the builds yet. looks like it won’t make it in time for 2.0. sigh
Hmm, Asa left a comment on Slashdot saying Beta 2 hasn’t officially been released yet. This seems to happen with Firefox alot, probably because release candidates have to be release-ready…
Still loving the new beta.
Maybe a bit overboard on the glassy/glossy icons – not sure.
One other thing is that close button on the ACTIVE tab should already be glowing imo. It seems to fit in better with the tab already being active if the close button is active also.
It does seem to use more memory but maybe that will be cleaned up before final or maybe it is just the nature of the beast.
Still love it though!