Firefox2

So, Firefox2 has been released which inevitably leads to an onslaught of amature reviews. And who am I to disappoint?

The install process looked promising, after all who can resist the charm of an application that uses the term "A little housekeeping" for pre-installation checks? And, as this is a Firefox, it's never so much a case of reinstall as an upgrade. All my customisations are in place, even after the jump to the big 2 point O.

However, my initial reaction was disappointment. Gone is the OS inherited look, say hello to a strange Opera looking blue gradient skin. And, unlike Opera, there is no OS inherited option by default, you have to go hunting for one. Luckily it's not hard to find (though lacks some visual subtleties which I'm sure will soon be fixed).

So, a closer inspection of the new features. They've done a careful job not to upset the old UI, choosing to save any radical changes for 3.0. However, they have made some minor changes, the most significantly being crowbarring the Extensions and Themes dialogs into one Add-ons dialog. It's a little unsightly, but functional at least.

Then there's the session saving and Recently Close Tabs. The recently closed tabs is a nice option, playing catchup with Opera, while the session saving is quite frankly underwealming. It seems to be limited to saving your session when the browser needs to restart or recovers from a crash, which is very useful, but there is no way of explicitly saving your sessions. Some would say that this is in the realms of a plug-in, but I would disagree and say it is a commonly enough used feature to be included, especially when the backbone is already implemented. At least they went for an intelligent default of not recovering from the session every time you restart, though there is that option.

Then there is the change in the tabs, with scrolling if they're are too many (yay) and the close button has been moved to each individual tab. Some people love it, others find it too risky (you may accidentally click it when trying to select the tab). While there is no way of changing the behaviour in the options, you can, thankfully, change it in the about:config screen (You can even get rid of the close buttons altogether, which is good for people like me who only ever use middle click to close a tab) Same with the "Go" button that they have now elbowed into the URL bar.

I was disappointed to see that the URL search has still not yet been made a full citizen, the functionality instead being reserved for the search bar. I am contemplating trying to make myself heard to get it implemented for the next release.

The spell checker is very nice, bog standard, but what more could you expect? It works nicely and as expected, just like everything else with Firefox. Though you do have to install the dictionary manualy for some reason (which is strange, especialy as the website to download is able to automatically detect the language)

It seems to me that they have made a very intelligent catch up move with Opera. They have implemented all the right features that should come with the browser, while leaving the rest of the functionality to plugins. Why are plugins so good? Well, they allow flexibility and choice, though they are often poorly implemented when compared to native components. Then there is Firefox's holy grail of customisation. It's possible to tweak it right the way back to a 1.5 interface, look and feel whilst still getting the benefit of less memory problems and all the other bug fixes. In fact, I've been able to take it even further than 1.5 in the search for my perfect, minimalist UI.

A lot of people are going to be disappointed with Firefox2, but when they start to use it and mould it into something they are more comfortable with, they will forget they even upgraded.