New Firefox beta due this week

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 July 2006 05:33

Your IT - Home IT

While the world awaits the final release of Microsoft's long overdue IE7, the Mozilla Foundation is set to release its own beta Firefox 2.0 and, from all reports, it's a very nice piece of work.

A brief demonstration of a preview of release candidate of the beta illustrates that, unlike IE6 users, Firefox users will not have to get used to a new interface; they'll just get some extra functionality and, unlike Internet Explorer, a browser that works on just about every desktop operating system worth using - even MAC OSX. So Mac users, you can ditch Safari if you want.

Some of the new features include an inbuilt spell checker complete with the red uderline that Word users have become used to so that bloggers and posters don't have to worry about all the typos they invariably make when entering their content into text boxes.

Another new feature that some users may or may not like are automatic horizontal scrolling tabs. As you open more tabs, depending on the size of the display, once you get past a certain number, the tabs won't simply get smaller, they'll scroll sideways.

There are lots of other goodies such as a session restore capability if your machine powers down unexpectedly, inbuilt anti-phishing function which keeps track of bad websites and an undo close tab function, which those of us who are always closing tabs by mistake will find handy. July 11 is the official beta 1 release date and no doubt Microsoft will be among those watching closely.