Firefox 2 Love

Firefox RC2

I am always hesitant to profess my love for a new product or update, and there is the risk of jinxifying my life, but I must say that I am loving the new Firefox 2.0 (actually it’s in the final Release Candidate 2, or RC2, stage). You can see the list of new features at the FFRC2 site, but let me give you my top three:

1. Built-in spell-check!!! Yes, that’s three exclamation points. Great for checking those words as you blog, or write in your Wiki. It gives you a red underline for unrecognized words, just like MS Word (only less obnoxious in my opinion). Right-click the word for suggestions or too add it to your dictionary. I know there were plug-ins to be had to do this, but “built-in” is the way to go!

2. Close individual tabs with a close button on the tab itself, not off to the far right. Hey, I’m using a widescreen monitor now so enough said.

3. This one is big and it works. Session recovery. What that means is when your doing your research and you have fourteen tabs open and something causes Firefox to crash, when you restart Firefox it will ask you if you want to recover your previous session. I can tell you first hand that it works.

This version seems as stable as 1.5, though there are a few things that I notice don’t work. Since it’s a new release it has compatibility issues with some extensions. One of them being the Bloglines toolkit, you know the one that gives you the red dot on the “B” in your browser when there are new articles to read. Not a big deal for me because it seems there are ALWAYS new articles to read in Bloglines. Anyway my fix for this is to add a toolbar link to my feeds in Bloglines. I also had to update some themes, and the throbber doesn’t go to the Firefox home page (it does nothing).

The final release of Firefox 2 should be done by the end of October. I’ll update if I notice anything agregiously egregiously (thank you spell checker) wrong with the RC2. Also, let it be known that jinxifying has been added to my dictionary.

UPDATE: There is a new Bloglines notifier for Firefox 2 (but it’s not on the Bloglines site yet).

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3 Responses

  1. I love the way you use love! Great stuff, Andy, as usual. I guess someone has to blog at DTLT to save some face!!! (Three, count ’em, three exclamations.) 🙂

  2. I remember quite vividly your presentation on “10 reasons to use Firefox,” Andy. I guess that was over two years ago. I switched immediately and never looked back. Thanks for continuing to share your wisdom and contagious enthusiasm for the little browser that could. You were right!

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