The Mozilla Corporation has officially released Mozilla Firefox 2 for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Coming just days after the launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7,
Firefox 2 offers a refreshed user interface, anti-phishing protection,
improvements to the built-in search feature, tabbed browsing changes,
the ability to restore an interrupted session, better support for Web
feeds, inline spell-checking, support for microsummaries and a number
of other enhancements.
The first thing users will notice is the the updated default theme.In
addition to refining the look of the buttons and other visual elements,
the new design tethers the Go button to the Location Bar and adds an
equivalent action button to the Search Bar. Several clickable buttons
(for example, the feed icon in the Location Bar and the search engine
icon in the Search Bar) have been refined to make it more obvious that
they are interactive.
Firefox 2’s Phishing Protection feature was developed from the Google Safe Browsing feature of the Google Toolbar for Firefox
using code donated by the search giant.
Firefox 2 enhances the search features built into the browser. The most striking addition is support for search suggestions:
as text is entered into the Search Bar, the selected search engine can
optionally send back a list of suggestions to be displayed in a menu,
similar to the Web-based Google Suggest technology demo but built into the browser. Several search engines distributed with Firefox 2, including Google and Yahoo!, support this feature out of the box.
In addition to Apple’s ageing Sherlock search engine plugin format, Firefox 2 also supports search engines defined in the OpenSearch plugin format developed by Amazon’s A9.com search engine. OpenSearch is also backed by Microsoft, so OpenSearch plugins created for Firefox 2 will also work in Internet Explorer 7.
OpenSearch
defines a mechanism to allow browsers to auto-discover search engine
plugins. When visiting a site that advertises an OpenSearch plugin, the
Search Bar icon will ‘light up’ and users can install the search plugin
from the search engine selection menu. Firefox 2 also adds a feature
for managing installed search engines, allowing engines to be easily
reordered or removed.
Tabbed browsing has also been improved in Firefox 2. In response to usability testing of Firefox’s tabbed browsing,
the close button has been moved from the end of the tab bar to the
actual tab. By default, all tabs have a close button but if many tabs
are opened the close button is just shown on the current tab to save
space. Any user who has closed a tab accidentally will appreciate the
new Undo Close Tab option on the tab bar context menu and the Recently
Closed Tabs submenu of the new History menu (which replaces the Go
menu).
Changes have also been made to the way large
numbers of tabs are handled. Each individual tab still gets smaller and
smaller as more tabs are introduced but there is now a minimum size
after which arrows appear at each end of the tab bar, allowing users to
scroll through their tabs. A menu at the far end of the tab bar allows
users to quickly switch to any open tab.
The new Session
Restore feature aims to reduce the frustration caused by losing work
due to a crash. When Firefox is restarted after being unexpectedly
closed, a dialogue offers the user the option to restore their previous
session: windows, tabs, text entered into forms and in-progress
downloads are all brought back.
Firefox
2 adds a built-in spell checker to allow text entered into Web forms to
be easily checked. This works much like the similar feature in
Thunderbird
Live Titles (also known as Microsummaries)
allow bookmark titles to be more dynamic and useful. For example,
rather than just displaying a static title, a bookmark for a news site
could display the latest headline. This data is then periodically
updated, providing a useful and non-intrusive summary of the current
state of a bookmarked page.
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PS: Firefox 3 is scheduled for a 2Q 2007 launch. Can IE stand this sudden onslaught? Do comment.
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