FireFox 2.0a2 Bon Echo

I've just installed FireFox 2.0a2 Bon Echo and I'm mightily impressed. Truth be told I've never got on well with 1.5. It was always extremely sluggish for me and a bit of a resource hog, both in terms of memory usage and CPU cycles. I'd even gone as far as to semi-migrate to Opera 9, which while incredibly fast and efficient, I missed my favourite extensions (Web Developer, CSE HTML Validator, greasemonkey, Gmail Manager, AdBlock).

I could live without some and there were workaround replacements for others but now I can see what is up and coming with FireFox 2 I'm willing to stay put. Writing this post I notice it now has a built in spell checker, which behaves very similar to MS Word's and is worth the upgrade alone! The UI has taken more than a few pointers from Opera (close buttons on tabs, search box) which is certainly no bad thing, although I'm glad they haven't changed the order in which tabs are focused on once one is closed. That drove me mad in Opera!

I've installed the Nightly Tester Tools to get all the 'incompatible' extensions working and only RoboForm has complained which I was considering ditching anyway. I'd recommend giving it a try, especially if like me you found 1.5 really disappointing. Here's a summary of the big changes.

  • Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
  • Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behaviour is slightly different
  • Inline spell checking in text boxes
  • Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
  • Search suggestions now appear in the search box autocomplete for Google and Yahoo!
  • New search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
  • Improved support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
  • New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
  • New Add-Ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes
  • Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
  • New search service that supports Sherlock and OpenSearch engines
  • Support for SVG text using svg:textPath