On the Soapbox

I have been using Firefox 2 as the default browser on my regular machines (vs. running it on a VPC test box) for nearly a month now, ever since the first candidate for RC1 was spun (yes, that's a release candidate of a release candidate), and now that it looks like that RC3 is in all likelihood going to be the final version, I thought that I might comment on Firefox 2.

1. It has a much better memory footprint. It also seems faster and snappier, too.
2. Session saving and undo close tabs are now built-in features. This is great because I used to get these features from an extension. Unfortunately, the only extension to reliably provide these features was a horrible memory leaker and was somewhat processor-inefficient. Being able to dump this extension alone was worth the upgrade, and probably contributed to #1 above.
3. New tab management. I often have lots of tabs open, and I often overrun the tab bar, so the overflow scrolling and the drop-down list is extremely useful. The close button on each tab is annoying (since I close tabs by middle-clicking) and the wider minimum tab width is wasteful, but both of those settings can be changed in about:config.
4. Speaking of about:config, there is a new hidden setting that lets you disable compatibility checking for extensions. There are many Firefox 1.5 extensions that will not install in Firefox 2.0 because the author had set the maxVersion in the extension to 1.5 even though the extension really is compatible with 2.0. This configuration setting will allow me to install these extensions without using the NTT or manually editing the maxVersion code in each extension.
5. There is a handy button to restart Firefox after installing an add-on. The new session saving will also automatically kick in during such a restart to restore all of your tabs and even what you have filled into forms after the restart. Makes installing stuff much less painful.
6. Built-in spell check. No more copying-and-pasting into Word to check for typos.
7. Much better RSS handling; live bookmarks was lame.
8. Various minor bug fixes, such as the improved password auto-fill handling.
9. I personally love the look of the new theme and the little visual tweaks that were made here and there. The old tabs looked rather ugly on Windows Classic, and this is the first Firefox where I did not have to manually re-skin the tabs in the default theme to make them look decent in Windows Classic. Now combined with ClassicFox, Firefox looks quite stunning on Windows Classic. But of course, that is a matter of personal taste.
10. Personally, I do not care much for some of the other major features added in Firefox 2. Phishing protection is useful for Joe Sixpack, but not for me (I have it disabled). I liked the old-fashioned auto-complete instead of search suggestions in the search box (which I have also disabled), and microsummaries (live titles) just seems like a novelty.

I think this is the first time since the Firebird days that I was actually excited for a new release (well, okay, I'm not really excited about it because I have already been running it for a while, but you get the idea).