Blog News Watch

Long wait is over guys. The king of browsers (Don’t say I am being pessimistic about other browsers out there, it’s just the fact. You know it, I know it even big blue know it too) just got a new castle, Firefox 2.0 is now available for download. Remember my last article on Firefox? I covered some upcoming features supposed to be operational in this Firefox 2.0, well it’s all there, and some more too.

• Integrated search: IE7 already have this feature, now our favorite Firefox has it. The Firefox Search bar comes pre-loaded with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com, and Creative Commons search. You can add additional search engines too. There are hundreds to choose from, including the Internet Movie Database, Technorati blog search, and Craigslist online classifieds. Microsoft doesn’t give a dam about blog search, but Firefox do care.
• Button Control: You can now select new button controls for your toolbars in Firefox.
• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.
• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.
• SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.
• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.

Some Issues you should know:

• In windows Firefox 2.0 hang often when closing after viewing a PDF file in some older versions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug in. If you experience this, make sure you are using the newest version of the plug in. And also the installer don’t not work on Windows NT 4.0 without version 5.80 of the Comctl32.dll (in System32) library installed.
• Mac users might face trouble if more than 20 Tab open, Java does not run on Intel Core processors under Rosetta and After installing a new plug-in, Firefox may continue to display information for the older version of the plug-in in about:plugins (solution delete the pluginreg.dat in profile folder).

Oh Firefox 2.0 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux i686 in 39 languages, IE7 team never think of this in 5 years did they?

You will love the speed and new looks trust me. Straight example load windows vista site in IE7 (count the time) and load that site again in Firefox 2.0. You will notice Firefox is the fastest. Oh I forgot to mention that Firefox 2.0 themes are not yet out, probably in few weeks there will be some, but some themes of 1.5 do work in Firefox 2.0. For more information on Firefox 2.0’s capabilities, features and instructions visit Firefox 2.0 project page.

Firefox 2, Download, features, project, Mozilla