I’m running Firefox 2 Beta 1 now. So far, so good, though none of my extensions work (except for the insanely handy Gmail Notifier). It’s a nice refined improvement to the Firefox 1.x series, with close buttons on the tabs and the like. The new addon manager is fantastic, as well as the ability for Firefox to restore my session after I close it. I already love that. It also lets you pick a handler for RSS feeds if Live Bookmarks aren’t your thing (I personally adore the Live Bookmark functionality) — amazingly enough, Firefox picked up Outlook 2007 as an RSS reader (which it is). You can also use Bloglines, Google Reader, and My Yahoo as aggregators. One of the wildest features is spellcheck, which took me by surprise the first time I saw a bunch of random red lines in my text box. Too, too cool.
I can’t tell any rendering differences yet. In fact, I’m not quite sure there are any. The release notes don’t hint at any core Gecko changes, new CSS support, etc. Firefox 2 does feature JavaScript 1.7 support, as well as something new called “microsummaries,” which the Mozilla wiki describes as a short summary of a Web page that can fit in a single line of a bookmark list. Mozilla is trying to make bookmarks more useful for people, and by giving a quick summary of the content (stock quotes, etc.) it can be quite useful. Check out the Microsummaries wiki page for more information.
Performance seems to be on par with if not ever-so-slightly snappier than Firefox 1.5.0.4. It’s just beta 1, too, so more optimizations are definitely coming.
All I hope for is my Web Developer and Flashblock extensions to work with this iteration of Firefox soon, as I kinda need those. :) All in all this is a good Firefox release, but it’s not ready for full public consumption just yet. I recommend most people stick with Firefox 1.5.0.4 until more extensions and themes are updated to the new version.
Discussion of Firefox 2 Beta 1 is now closed
It looks like Mozilla Firefox 2.0 is shaping up pretty good. The Addons Manager and Inline Spellcheck were present in the Alpha builds, along with Microsummaries (which was checked in around the Gecko 1.8.1a2 release, IIRC).
It’s too bad that the Mozilla Coundation/Corp. didn’t slpit the changelog up into two sections: one for new changes since Firefox 2.0 Alpha 3, and one for changes since Firefox 1.5.0.x. That would make it easier for testers to differentiate new features to that specific release cycle.
But regardless, there are a bunch of changes in Firefox 2, but not so many Gecko-related (since Gecko’s only moving from 1.8 to 1.8.1 for Firefox 2, the trunk (Gecko 1.9/Firefox 3) is where the action is at :-) ). Most of the new Firefox 2 features are going to go to improving the end-user’s experence with the inline spellchecking and Addons Manager.