John Cox

Firefox 2 Beta 2

Uff, I had to start using Firefox 2 Beta 2 this week as 1.5.whatever was giving me a real annoying error message on close. No matter where I search, I could not find a fix for it. That said, I really like what is going on with V2 of Firefox. One of the most notable changes for me, is the spell checking in forms. I absolutely love it. It's extremely easy to use without a lot of fuss.

Memory usage seems to be down by around 5 - 10%, but I think that has to do much more with the fact that very few of the extensions that I used do not work. That said, I don't really see any noticeable speed improvements, but I have a gig of memory, so I didn't really expect to see any.

Rendering for pages that worked on FF 1 seems to look the same, so the developer side of me doesn't have to compare pages in 5 different browsers, which is very much appreciated.

There are some things that I don't like though. OK, I know one of the changes that all are talking about is the closing of tabs from the individual tags, instead of a universal button. Great, except after two years I have gotten used to using that universal button to kill a tab. I don't like small UI changes like that completely kills a learn behavior.

Secondly, the majority of my extensions are not working. That was to be expected, but man, I really miss the web developer extension. The rest I can live without (although Firebug, FireFTP, GMail Manager, and HTML Valida tor work flawlessly) as the others are just nice to have extensions.

All this said, I am also using the IE 7 RC package. I have to say that if I really like FF 2, I really really like the new IE. Where the changes in FF have been slight from my untrained point of view, the changes in IE 7 are dramatic, and in some instances better implemented than in Firefox.

I like the tabs in IE better than Firefox. They feel more natural. I also like the UI better. Most importantly, I like the fact that pages that rendered in IE6 well, but not in FF, also do OK in IE7. It's not the end of the world, but for the folks in my organization it is going to make the transition to modern web development much easier to swallow than if I was to move the organization to Firefox. IE's timing is right on with this. Let the OS folks innovate and serve the good and the bad back to the majority of users.

I have a feeling that the IE UI changes are going to be to much for some users, and it will drive more market share to FF, but in the meantime, I have to be honest and say I like the changes. If IE7 had the developer extensions that I need and use, I'd consider switching back to IE.

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