Everyone is doing it, so I guess I can’t escape this. Here is a FF2 review.
Same browser we all know and love… But better.
I upgraded to Firefox 2 recently, and I noticed that not much has changed for me in terms of functionality. I have been using session saving, and active spell check for ages now. The only difference now is that these features are built into the core browser functionality which is really nice. That’s two extensions I do not need to install now.
I really like the Add-Inns dialog which now consolidates both themes and extensions and makes the installation process a little easier on the eyes.
I also love how they integrated the most popular readers into the RSS subscription functionality. Now I can subscribe to your feed in Bloglines with just one click.
Most of my extensions survived the upgrade without any problem. Most notable exception was the BookmarkBackup and Timestamp extensions that I was particularly fond off. But then again, that’s not the fault of the browser, but of the extension author who never upgraded it.
I have been running it for 2 days now, and it haven’t crashed or gave me any other issues. The memory footprint is still a little bit high, as it has always been. But, I haven’t noticed the steady growth that happened with 1.5 so perhaps they finally fixed that memory leak.
All in all, it is the same browser we have grown to love. Only now it is better, with more functionality out of the box.
My rating: stars
Ok, done… Now we can all get along with our lives. I should probably go and trash IE7 next just in the name of “fair and balanced” coverage. :twisted:
[tags]firefox, firefox 2.0, mozilla, review, browser[/tags]
Not so much a replacement for BookmarkBackup, but something to help you… Google have an extension called Google Browser Sync, it’s available on the Google site somewhere, and works on Firefox 2. It saves your bookmarks, cookies, history, saved passwords and currently open tabs from the last time you close your browser. The next time you open your browser, on any PC with that extension loaded and your login info setup, it will return as you left it last, regardless of what PC you’re on :)
Google Browser Sync
..and so google can know even more about me
but it looks nice ;-)
Yeah…. Wikke is right – I don’t want to give google more of my information. It already knows more about me than I do. :P
I started using this extension which allows you to backup your whole profile. It’s not as good as the Bookmak think that worked seamlessly in the background as it shows a big progress bar and freezes firefox for a good minute if you do a full profile backup. Meh…
I might just write a script to do this for me. All I need is to have few copies of the backup.html file because I tend to loose it every once in a while for some untold reason.
I personally don’t really mind Google… At least everything they do is free, and doesn’t come with ridiculously long licenses like some other large software companies I can think of :P
I used to use FEBE to backup my extensions… the freezing thing is annoying, but it seemed to work pretty well. I have it disabled now, as I have so many extensions that after about half an hour of use Firefox has leaked over 200MB of RAM, and continues to leak more either until it crashes, slows my PC to a crawl, or I restart it.
Hmm I’ve just noticed that the spell checker can get *really* annoying… It doesn’t recognize a lot of words, such as lowercase “PC”, “Hmm”, and I can’t seem to find how to make it ignore stuff in upper case, such as “FEBE”… Oh well, I’m sure there’ll be another half-a-dozen extensions to do it for me :D
Hmm… I’ll see if the freeze time decreases if I only set it to backup the bookmarks and nothing else.
Btw, if you right click the underlined word in FF2 you can add it to the dictionary. I found that it is no more annoying than the spell check in Word.
Oh, and so far it beautifully ignores all HTML tags which is awesome. Spellbound always used to complain about href, img, src and etc…