Firefox 2 more like a reburbished home than new

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 17 October 2006 18:00

Your IT - Home IT

Having downloaded Firefox 2 RC3 and played around with it for a while I can say that the product feels very much like what I just had. It definitely feels faster, there are some subtle cosmetic changes and some nice new time-saving features but at first glance the latest Firefox is not so radically different to justify a new version number. It's more like a refurbished home than a new one.

The famous Firefox tabs system, which all the other browsers have copied including IE7, has certainly been improved a bit. For a start, you can now close individual tabs by clicking on a red x on the tab button instead having to use your right mouse button to bring up a menu and choosing the close tab option. That's one click saved.

It's also easy to reopen a tab that you've just closed using the right mouse button and there's a configurable history list of previous tabs you've had open.

Other little features that could be deemed improvements include suggested searches when you type a word into search box, scrolling tabs when you have too many to fit on a single page and inline spell checking of text entered into web forms.

More important than these minor usability features, however, is the anti-phishing security feature, which purports to warn users in advance when they look like they might be going to a dodgy web page. IE7 will also have a similar feature.

Another handy feature is a session restore feature, which can resume your browsing session if there's a system crash.

There's plenty more to look at like the ability to add RSS feeds as live bookmarks and more under the hood technical enhancements. However, to the ordinary web browsing user, the new Firefox will seem more like version 1.6 than version 2.0.