Firefox 2.0 officially comes out tomorrow. Unofficially, the Mozilla Foundation offered the download via ftp on their servers. I couldn’t help myself, I had to have it. I stayed away from the release candidates as I really wanted to wait until all of my extensions were up to date. (which at this time leave me del.icio.us and tabbrowser preferences - less)

As soon as I saw the ftp link on this or that blog, I went for it. ** Update - Apparently I am guilty of a little pre-official release downloading.

Is it a significant improvement? Probably not. It definitely looks prettier, not by much, but the icons are shinier, and as we all know, shine adds prettiness to anything. There are a few additional things to note.

Extension Integration

As everyone knows, Mozilla Firefox has a huge community of extension developers. It is nice to see many of the most useful extensions developed by the community, being integrated into the newest version of Firefox.

Added Functionality

There are a few good things noticeable on the surface of Firefox 2.0. As I mentioned above, the GUI got a facelift. The buttons look more crisp and they highlight when rolled over. While it is not a huge difference, it is a difference.

They also filed all the community extensions and themes under “Add-Ons” under tools. While it’s amusing to those of use using the browser for a few years, it actually makes a lot of sense for those new to the browser, whom are mostly composed of non-techie people.

Other noticeable positive additions include anti-scam protection, spell check for forms (which have already caught a few of my types), and a bigger diversity of options handling RSS feeds.

In all honesty I am happy with the Firefox 2.0 except for one thing. The tabbed browsing. Instead of listing all of my tabs all the way across (the way I am used to and the way I like) they decided to only allow 12 tabs and then provide the rest in a drop down over to the left. One can scroll from left to right with the addition of left and right buttons, but using them feel clunky, at least add smooth scrolling. It’s not that big of deal, and I will probably get used to it, but it will take some time. *sniffsniff

** UPDATE **

Thankfully I don’t have to get used to it, I stumbled on this in lifehacker. Long story short:

1. Type in about:config in firefox address bar
2. Scroll to browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
3. Change 100 to 0
4. Back to browser goodness

Conclusion

I have only downloaded Firefox 2.0 on my PC, but soon I will try it out on my Mac. I will add any differences to this post.

All in all I feel like the Firefox crew rushed out this version to counter the release of IE7. While strategically it is the right move, it’s not all that impressive. I like Firefox 2.0 because it is still Firefox. I just don’t think it improves enough on version 1.5 enough to validate a 2.0 release.

Anyone feel the same?

Popularity: 6% [?]