The newest beta version of the upcoming major revision of Mozilla Firefox has been released today! This new version takes us one step closer to the plethora of new features expected in the second incarnation of the browser that is currently holding about 10% of the market share!

The big news was posted to Slashdot in the last 24 hours and it seems it has yet to spread too far. This article on DesktopLinux.com describes the major changes between this beta version and the previous one. The new version can be obtained in a lot of languages and for a lot of platforms right here.

I am actually typing this thread from the new beta. I must admit it looks great! I'm not one to generally zealot browsers, so I'll try to be objective. I've tried both Internet Explorer 7 and the beta versions of Firefox 2.0 (I have yet to try the latest Opera) and I must say that the fox greatly over-performs the E.

Some stuff you can notice straight away when installing Firefox 2.0 beta 2 is the updated default theme. The major idea of the look is intact but some little things are enhanced. This is supposed to be an increase in accessibility for the application, but not being a disabled person I wouldn't know. All I can say is that I just have an even better time looking at my browser now!

Haven't noticed that many new things other than previously mentioned (except that now most of my favorite extensions are not compatible, but oh well... ). The configuration panel changed slightly, mainly the RSS feeds section, which now lets you open your favorite "Live Bookmarks" with any program you choose (or any web-based syndication program).

I urge you all to check it out! I've been browsing the web with it for nearly an hour, and no special bug popped up to make me thing to myself, "oh yeah, I'm using a strictly developmental version!"
Oh yeah, just one final warning! I think most of the forum-goers shouldn't care, but you mustn't forget that this is a beta version after all, and should not be used for everyday life. Stupid warranties.

Good luck!

Yay, after so many delays, it's finally out! The feature I wanted to see most was the new theme.

I hope this version fixes the many bugs in the Mac Beta 1 version. It crashed so often that it seemed worse than Internet Explorer on Windows.

The new beta was interesting...but I didn't really notice all that many significant changes. Sure, the skin was different--not-in-use tabs were dimmer and the current tab was highlighted. The background behind each tab had a smoother gradient and if you used more than 12 tabs there'd be a scrollbar. Although personally I would prefer to have two layers of tabs when there's too many to fit on the screen than a scroller.

And most of the things listed in the desktoplinux site were already in the first beta--things like session restore (I made good use of this one), inline spell checking and the built-in phishing protection (though I have heard that this feature didn't work very well in the last beta). And while it's true that a couple addons don't work for the beta anymore, most of my preferred extensions (such as Adblock and the Gmail notifier) still work fine. Also, it seems like the memory issue with Firefox has quieted quite a bit. Before Firefox 2 Beta 2 came out, FF's memory constantly rose to around 80-90000. Now it's gotten cut down by half (hopefully not because several extensions are incompatible).

I guess the major advantage IE7 has over Firefox would be the tabs preview thing. That I thought was really interesting, but I later found out that it can be obtained as a Firefox extension. The new RSS feeds thing was interesting and pretty useful too..

This post has been edited by Arbitrary: Sep 10 2006, 07:10 PM