News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

July 19, 2006

software

First Look: Firefox 2 beta

Posted Jul. 19, ’06, 12:53 PM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Software

firefox.png Speaking of Firefox, make sure you go check out Rob “My-hints-are-bigger-than-yours” Griffiths’ first look at Firefox 2 Beta here.

This release of Firefox is being pegged as a major upgrade primarily due to changes that aren’t necessarily visible to the the everyday user. That’s another way of saying that lots of buzzwords have been updated or installed—things like support for JavaScript 1.7, OpenSearch, and SVG’s svg:textPath element. In addition, there’s better security for extensions (as well as better localization support), and session and persistent storage. Taken as a whole, however, these features will eventually make the user’s Web browsing experience better. But from a user’s perspective, these changes are more or less invisible. So what’s in it for the user to upgrade then?

While the Firefox 2.0 beta looks nearly identical to its 1.5 predecessor, there actually are a fair number of new features of interest to the typical user. Here’s a quick look at some of them, based on my testing with the 2.0 beta 1 release.


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