Ars reviews Firefox 2 RC2, and concludes: “I personally never managed to get any of the third party spellcheck extensions to work right, and the availability of spellcheck support alone was enough to convince me to use 2.0 pre-releases rather than the 1.5.0.7 build that comes with Ubuntu. All things considered, RC2 adequately meets most of my needs, but doesn’t exceed my expectations as major releases have in the past. Hopefully, development on the Places system and other delayed features will make future releases more interesting.”
I am a regular Firefox user. Love all its extensions it provides. However they should consider improving its speed.
Also there should be better way to open Link in new tab using keyboard. Right click mouse -> ctrl-enter may not be good for everyone.
For me it was primarily the spellcheck and minor interface tweeks.. however I think something that should be a way to select a URL in the middle of text, then right-click it and select “Open” or “Open in New Tab”..
There’s probably an extension for this.. I just haven’t found it yet.
I have noticed however that since I started using RC2 that my computer can now randomly hang when trying to exit my screen saver. It never happened prior to this on any Firefox version including RC1.. so it may just be co-incidence, though I certainly haven’t installed anything between the RC phases.
can it be caret browsing (F7) what you are looking for?
“There’s probably an extension for this.. I just haven’t found it yet.”
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/190/
Apparently this turns text urls into clickable links.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/518/
your method already uses a mouseclick, so why bother with the keyboard? a single middle click will open links in new tabs, with zero fuffing about
Opening a link in a new tab has always been middle click for me. I beleive that has been the default behavior in Firefox for some time now.
Of course, if you only have a two (or less) button mouse, this won’t work for you.
> open Link in new tab using keyboard
Keyboard mouse combo : <CTRL> + Left mouse click
Keyboard Only : Focus the link using the tab key, then hit <CTRL>+<ENTER>
Mouse Only : Middle Click
My favorite keyboard method is to hit ‘ to start highlite search for links, type a bit of the link I want, then <CTRL> + <ENTER>. Much faster than TABing, I find.
Of course, my primary method is middle-mouse button. Using the middle mouse button on things (urls, bookmarks, folders, buttons even) is the prime killer feature of FF, imho.
“Killer feature” implies only Firefox can do it, but Opera supports middle clicking to open new tabs or windows from links or bookmarks/history etc. and Konqueror lets you use middle click on links, bookmarks, files, toolbar buttons etc.
Ah, didn’t know about Konqueror.
Opera, though, doesn’t support middle-clicking in nearly enough places for me to consider the feature complete.
I am a regular Firefox user. Love all its extensions it provides. However they should consider improving its speed.
Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 2 is snappy speed side. It also loads the pages much fasters than 1.5 version and cache much better as well when clicking either back or forward button. Some initial loading slowdoads are cause by NoScript extensions. I also notice an improvment of performance using Foxpose extension.
One additional option of Firefox is to warm users about slowdown when opening multiple tabs which is come handy for users with low RAM systems.
The test was done on AMD Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB Ram and Nvidia Geforce FX5600XT running Microsoft Windows XP SP2.
For technical users, Firefox 2 will be the last version for Windows 9x/ME. Future version won’t be compatible because of the use of Cairo engine instead of GDI.
Cairo can support GDI, and subsequently Win98, but Mozilla is not prepared to do the Cairo grunt work to maintain this as Win9x has been depreciated. If you are a 9x user, or wish to support 9x for Firefox 3, and you’re capable of programming, get hacking on the Gecko codebase, and Cairo backend.
Easy keyboard navigation.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1341/
If you would like to take it to the extreme and also like Emacs.
http://conkeror.mozdev.org/
Also there should be better way to open Link in new tab using keyboard. Right click mouse -> ctrl-enter may not be good for everyone.
I’m running firefox 2.0b2 on Edgy Eft and a mouse wheel click on any link opens it in another tab:-)
The spell check is nice. Unfortunately that’s about all I can say about 2.0 – I ended up taking some time to change it back so it behaved like 1.5. I strongly dislike the close button on each tab – they’re too easy to hit by accident.
The article does have a point about visual consistency, but I’m not sure it really matters – millions of people happily use Office, which continually breaks consistency with Windows; heck, it’s just about impossible to find a media player these days that doesn’t. Winamp never has, WMP has to be different (in an odd and annoying way) and itunes doesn’t blend at all in Windows. Doesn’t seem to be hindering their uptake though.
My personal pet hate is that find as you type now only activates the “quick find” feature, which has no next/previous buttons. WHY?? Frequently you don’t want the first search item, so why force users to press ctrl+f to make the buttons appear? It’s not like there’s not space for them!
“The article does have a point about visual consistency, but I’m not sure it really matters”
Indeed, the situation on Windows is a mess, but does that mean projects shouldn’t care about adding to the mess?
Also, users of Gnome and OS X seem to care much more about this sort of thing.
“My personal pet hate is that find as you type now only activates the “quick find” feature, which has no next/previous buttons. WHY??”
Press CTRL+G /Shift+CTRL+G instead?
Well, RC2 is nice in a lot of ways, but it could be better. Specially the spelling support. It would be nice not to need to change the spelling languages every time I switch sites.
A big improvement is memory usage though! No hundreds of megabytes in use anymore… ah…….
I have used the new tabs sine the early beta’s. For someone like me who is lazy with their spelling it is a *must have* upgrade.
The tabs when you first use them are awful. The highlighting of the tabs is really useful. The close on each tab and left and right scrolling, frustrated me because I lost so much screen real estate, but I *changed* my usage, and now I love it. I open all tabs, and when I am ready to read the next page. I simply close that page with one click. Its actually an improvement, but I have never used the dropdown *ever*.
The early beta’s did suffer from memory leakage soo badly that I had to close firefox down. I do leave my machine on all the time. The restore last session became my friend and is *fantastic*. RC2 seems to have fixed this although I have only used this a few days.
As someone who was concerned greatly be feature bloat. Its not happened everything added has improved my experience.
The only feature missing now for me is the download dialog sucks. I’m forever searching for my downloads.
Edited 2006-10-10 05:10
To me and I like the inner shadow and effect on that tabs. Nice to see some cairo love, nice icons and UI improvements, like the spell checking as well. The best version so far indeed.
I am an Opera user, but I cannot tell “I don’t like FF”. it is just a matter of taste, I think (and the speed…). But there is one feature I like Opera for: zooming pages. FF gives only zooming text, so if you use high res. monitor, and a badly made site is shown as a 5cm wide vertical column, you cannot zoom it, instead you get a 5cm wide column with one broken gigantic word per verse. In Opera you lineary scale ALL the page, so you get everything OK in good (or better: as designed) proportions.
PageZoom is the extension you are looking for:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1499/