Last night, Mozilla unleashed Firefox 2.0 into the wild. Naturally, your’s truly promptly installed the new version, before the updater said it was ready. One tested Deer park, Firefox 1.5 betas and alphas, but since then little need appeared to beta test 2.0 before the release. 2.0 is an excellent browser, with a few things one wishes would be fixed. Primarily the spell checking ability is great, just an accustomed word processor user in windows natively presses the F7 key to spell check, well to say the least, it doesn’t bring up the spell checker dialog. Under history a ‘recently closed tabs section appears’, a definite time saver for those of us who inadvertently click close tab, only to have to find the link again. Improvements in tabs include an minimum width so that the titles are still readable, and the extras spill off into scrolling tab bar. The only eye candy feature that would be nice for tabs would be a hover preview of a tab, one believes IE7 has this, but it’s not about being IE7.
Now for the fun compatibility, short-sightedness of web programmers. Since some don’t think that newer versions of a web browser will be as feature rich as predecessors nice pop-ups show up alerting one that the browser version is unknown. dAmn, the deviantART message network (internet chat), has some flash failure issue, not very important as it does work. Then there is WebCT, a web application that the U uses for professors to get content to students easily. WebCT generates this nice pop-up window explaining that the version of the browser one is using is not supported.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]