11.16.06
Changes in Firefox 2.0
You have to look hard to see the changes in Firefox 2.0.
Firefox’s new spell checker
Anyone who writes blogs, forum posts or blog comments, or who works in Web forms on social networking sites, for example, will find Firefox’s spelling checker a boon.
It works almost exactly the same as Microsoft Word’s built-in spell checker, underscoring an apparently misspelled word with a red line. By right-clicking the underscore, you can opt to change the spelling to any of the suggested spellings, or choose to add it to your local dictionary, to be remembered and ignored from then on.
When you’re printing Web pages with text areas, if the text area contains a misspelled word and inline spell checking is enabled, all the content in the text area following the typo will not be printed. The work-around is to right-click the affected text area and uncheck “Spell check this field” to turn off spell checking temporarily.
Your extensions
Firefox users have a tendency to become very attached to their extensions. The Mozilla team definitely understands this, and it appears it has made a good effort at outreach to the more popular extension developers. But Mozilla cautions users that previous versions of Firefox extensions, themes, and plug-ins may not work until updates for them are made available. Don’t trouble - your Firefox 2 will be automatically updated to the final release of the extensions when it becomes available.
Mozila has new extensions available only with Firefox 2.0.
More secure with Phishing Protection
Mozilla’s built-in Phishing Protection may be its most important new feature.
A large comic-strip word balloon emanates from the Phishing Protection warning icon - the red circle with the white dash that appears in the icon area at the right side of the Location bar. The word balloon reads “Suspected Web Forgery,” and you have the options to “Get me out of here!” and “Ignore this warning.” Unless you know the site, it’s best to get out of Dodge. Doing so returns you to your home page. To see this in action, for yourself without risking a real phishing site, point Firefox 2.0 at Mozilla’s safe phishing protection test page.
The Firefox browser may not be the target of much malware or many phishing scams yet, but as its market share grows and it becomes more mainstream, that may change. It’s much better to be prepared.
Session Restore
Session Restore restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It activates automatically when you’re installing a Firefox update or extension.
When the browser shuts down unexpectedly, it displays the Session Restore dialog box on relaunch, giving you the option to restore your previous session or start a new one. That’s it!
Test it for yourself. Open three tabs and load Web pages into them. Under Windows, open Task Manger (click Ctrl-Alt-Del and select Task Manager), click the Processes tab, select the “firefox.exe” entry, and click the End Process button. Now just relaunch Firefox to see Session Restore in action.
Tabs
There are four main improvements to tabs in Firefox 2.0:
- The right side of the tab bar now features a drop-down menu that lets you see all open tabs and quickly select the one you want. Also, once you have so many tabs that they can’t fit into the width of your browser window, they begin to push off into the ether. When that happens, left and right buttons appear on the sides that let you click to scroll left or right, one tab at a time.
- Firefox 2.0 lets you resurrect accidentally closed browser tabs. Recently closed tabs can be reopened by right-clicking the tab bar and choosing the Undo Close Tab menu item.
- The default tab settings direct Firefox to open all new links as tabs in the active Firefox browser window instance. Of course, if Firefox isn’t already running, a new browser window will be opened. This behavior can be changed in the Tools > Options > Tabs settings area.
- The good news is that it’s very easy to customize tabs in Firefox 2.0 to change the Close-button-on-every-tab behavior. Two good alternative options are to reveal the Close button only on the active tab, as IE7 does, or to put it back on the right side of the tab bar. Here’s how to make the change you prefer:
- Type in the address bar: about:config
- Find the line browser.tabs.closeButtons (you can just copy and paste this value into the filter) and double-click her
- Change the value. Type the number from the list below that matches the Close button behavior you prefer:
- 0 = Display a Close button on the active tab only
- 1 = Display Close buttons on all the tabs (Default)
- 2 = Don’t display any Close buttons
- 3 = Display one Close button on the right of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x’s behavior)
Removing the Close buttons does help slightly with this.
You can also experiment with this setting in about:config to further win back text space: browser.tabs.tabminWidth (minimum tab shrink size; the default is 100 pixels)
Maybe 90 pixels will be a better setting for you?
RSS
Taking a page from the Feedview extension, Firefox 2 can interpret RSS and XML streams in human-readable form. The free Sage extension for Firefox provides a similar RSS-reading experience to IE7.
Web search tweaks
Firefox 2.0’s Search box automatically expands to fit the available area.
The new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and reorder search engines.
Firefox 2.0 also adds a type-ahead-style drop-down box that appears as you begin to type your search term if your default search engine is Google, Yahoo or Answers.com. There’s also a new search-engine manager that makes it easier to select, order and control search engines.
Live Titles
Live Titles can dynamically change the text label of some of your bookmarks so that the label describes the newest content placed on that site. When you look in your Bookmarks, instead of a static name for the bookmarked site, you’ll see a text description of what’s new there.
The bookmarks submenu (on picture) is displaying microsummaries, or Live Titles, where the site names would be normally.
Remember, Firefox 2.0’s Add Bookmark dialog box is modified to support Live Titles.
It’s also possible for Firefox add-on developers to create Microsummary generators for sites managed by others. You can install some of those available from this Microsummary Generators link page and then add the bookmark as a Live Title, as described previously. Firefox 2.0 does not offer a user interface for uninstalling microsummary generators. To delete a microsummary generator, you open the “microsummary-generators” folder in your Firefox profile and delete the corresponding XML file.
Live Titles is a nice idea that isn’t likely to catch on in broad measure. Even so, for certain sites, it could be truly useful. The biggest problem with Live Titles is that most of the sites that have enabled it haven’t opted to include the names of their sites in Live Titles. That’s a problem, because for the most part, all you get is the description — and it can quickly become difficult to know what site the description refers to.
JavaScript
One of the mostly unsung improvements in Firefox 2.0 is the upgrade from JavaScript 1.6 to 1.7, a set of JavaScript functionality offering a long list of additions and improvements.
It’s true that Firefox 2.0 was a less ambitious upgrade than Internet Explorer 7, becouse Firefox 2.0 is the better browser by a length, and the one this Web professional will continue to use. Microsoft hadn’t released a new browser in five years.
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