beta @ amanzi

The news that IE7 will be released this month is big news on the web at the moment, but serious web browsers will be looking towards Mozilla for news about Firefox 2.0 which is also due to be released soon. Release Candidate 2 is now available and brings several new features which will be welcome additions.

Starting up Firefox 2.0 RC2 (hereafter referred to as just RC2) brings up a place-holder for a first-run page, as well as the additional Firefox home page which we’ve grown to love. I like the way it opens with two tabs, instantly letting people see that tabs are there to be taken advantage of. Earlier versions started with the tab bar closed, and tabbed browsing not selected as the default method of opening multiple pages. You’ll also notice that the close button is now located on each tab as apposed to on the right side of the tab bar, which is what I personally prefer. The chrome has also been tidied up a bit and now there is a clear defination between the tab bar and the toolbars. The buttons are now also a little clearer and have just a touch of glass (class?) added to them. The Options dialog has also been redesigned and looks a lot better and well-layed out.

Subscribing to RSS/Atom feeds in Firefox couldn’t be easier. As in IE7, you can click the little orange feed button to show a nice display of the feed on the current site you are visiting. You can then select to subscribe to the feed using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, or the feed reader of your choice. Most common desktop feed readers should be detected, and FeedDemon, my favourite, was obviously there. Unlike IE7 though, Firefox has given users the ability to subscribe to feeds with a single click. I selected FeedDemon as my default feed reader, and then clicking on the feed button instantly launched FeedDemon with the feed ready to be subscribed to. This can also be set in the options panel too.

Another nice feature which had been left to plugins previously, is the option to open the tabs that were open prior to the browser being closed. In other words, you could be in the middle of a serious browsing session with a whole heap of browser tabs open, when you need to reboot the computer for some reason. You can safely close the browser knowing that when you reopen Firefox, your existing browser session will still be there. This isn’t as good as the Google Sync extension as this can sync between different computers, but it is still very useful.

Another useful feature is the “Undo close tab” feature, which, as you may have guessed, allows you to reopen a tab that you may have closed accidentally. I’m sure many of you have closed a tab by accident before, only to have to try to find it in the history – this solves that problem.

There are lots of other cool features available, but hopefully I’ve given you a taste of what’s to come. If you’re not sure about switching completely to Firefox 2.0 yet, download the portable version (link below) that you can run on the same computer as a previous version without affecting your other profile.

• Download Portable Firefox 2.0 RC2
• Download Firefox 2.0 RC2
• Firefox 2.0 Release notes