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As I did with Internet Explorer 7, I avoided all beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 2.0. However, this wasn’t due to worries about permanently wrecking the laptop and not being able to uninstall, but so I could better contrast the new version with the previous one.

• Visual Refresh
• Built-in phishing protection
• Enhanced search capabilities
• Improved tabbed browsing
• Resuming your browsing session
• Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds
• Inline spell checking
• Live Titles
• Improved Add-ons manager
• JavaScript 1.7
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system
• Client-side session and persistent storage
• SVG text
• New Windows installer

I can’t possibly cover all those new features in this post, so I’m just going to concentrate on the main ones:

Visual Refresh

There’s not an awful lot to report here. The address bar and search box have gained a flatter look and the tabs have been given a more shiny-looking default skin. There one extra button to the right of the tabs, which drops down to give a tab selector, and the the tabs scroll rather than bunch-up to miniscule widths when many tabs are open at the same time.

Improved tabbed browsing

One of the more noticable changes to the UI is that every tab now has it’s own close button by default, much like IE7. Personally, I don’t like this and I understand that I’m not alone in this UI change. Fortunately, the developers saw to include an user-accessible parameter to change this behaviour - see below for details. Other slight tweaks to the tabbed browsing include opening links in a new tab rather than a new window, tab history and the ability to re-open an accidentally-closed tab.

Enhanced search capabilities

The QuickSearch box in the top-right corner now gains an AJAX-style autocomplete for certain search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com. What this means in practice is that a drop-down appears as you start typing giving popular search terms based on those first few letters. You can then opt to click on one of the suggested phrases, or continue typing.

Built-in phishing protection

It seems that no next-gen browser is complete without a Phishing Filter these days, and Mozilla have complied. I’ve yet to try the filter in a “real world” situation, but have received my fair share of eBay, PayPal and bank phishing e-mails, so I’ll be interested to see how it performs. Google are hosting a phishing test page which demonstrates the warning message in Firefox. This is a very forced test-case however, as IE7 doesn’t consider the same page to be suspicious.

General Browsing

Those are the new features, but how do they improve (or otherwise) day-to-day web browsing compared to the previous v1.5.0.7 release?

More of the same - i.e. nothing’s been horribly broken from the previous version.

Improved tabbed browsing - i.e. forcing links to open in new tabs rather than new windows.

Resumable downloads. Which apparently work this time!

Close tab buttons. I don’t like having to chase the close button around the screen - I preferred it anchored to the far right of the browser in v1.5.

Problems/Bugs

Memory. Well, it’s improved in my opinion, but Firefox still uses far too much memory (both RAM and Virtual). To be fair, it’s no worse than Microsoft, so maybe this is just the “way things are” now.

Removing the Close Tab Buttons

It’s purely a personal thing, but I don’t like the extra screen estate being taken up by having a close button on each and every tab. I think it’s duplicating functionality, when non-active tabs can be closed either by middle-clicking, or right-click/Close Tab. Fortunately the developers made the buttons on inactive tabs selectable using a configuration option. Unfortunately, you won’t find a simple checkbox in the Options dialog, but it’s not that much harder once you know the trick.

The key is the “about:config” page, which hosts a plethora of normally hidden settings. As with editing the Windows registry though, be careful what you change in here as it’s very easy to adversly effect the browser’s performance if you don’t know what you’re doing.

1. Enter “about:config” into the address bar, where a URL would normally go.
2. Next type “closeButtons” into the Filter text box and wait for the list of settings to update.
3. There should be only one entry, “browser.tabs.closeButtons” which will have the value “1″. Simply double-click the entry and change it to “0″ (zero)

That’s it. The update happens immediately. Feel free to clear the Filter text box and have a browse around all the other “hidden” settings, but do remember what you’ve changed - you can always right-click on the setting and “Reset” it back to it’s default value.

Update: Thanks to Bob for commenting that a value of “3″ will set the close box so it behaves just like it did in v1.5.

Conclusions

Many of the more technical members of the Internet community consider Firefox the browser of choice. Usage statistics for sites like Digg and SlashDot routinely report 60% or higher Firefox usage by their visitors. However, when you’re main customer base is so technical, you’d better hope the product stands up to close scrutiny. Historically, Firefox has done well - possibly due to it being Open Source, free, cross-platform, standard-compliant and non-Microsoft. Quite a list.

So what does Firefox v2.0 bring to this audience? Let’s be honest here, there isn’t a massive amount that’s new over the previous release. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing - after all, why fix something that’s not broken? Having said that, the core Firefox code has recently come under criticism for being slow and problematic - something the Mozilla team are aiming to fix in the v3.0 release.

It’s clear that Mozilla are also aiming Firefox at the non-technical Intenet user too - the addition of Phishing detection should appeal to the people I’ve converted to Firefox over the years, who don’t naturally smell a phishing scam.

But what about IE7? I think it’s actually advantageous for Mozilla that Microsoft have included tabbed browsing, PNG support and better CSS standards support in IE7. This will hopefully force all the lazy web developers to sort out their coding bugs and make more sites compatible across both browsers. The general Internet-using public will also get used to tabbed browsing, which some people used as an excuse not to try Firefox.

It could be said that Firefox v2.0 doesn’t really add that much compared to v1.5.0.7 - and certainly not compared to the massive leap Microsoft made from IE6 to IE7. However, there have been some nice improvements so in my eyes Firefox is still the best of breed and the others have got a lot of catching up to do.

Links

Get Firefox v2.0: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Release Notes: http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/

Technorati tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Firefox 2.0

* Mozilla hasn’t made the links public yet, so see my earlier post about how to get the installer.

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So Microsoft have finally released Internet Explorer 7. I avoided all beta and release candidate versions until today simply because of the hassle that’s usually involved in trying to uninstall early releases.

New Look

The main point to note here is the lack of a menu - you know, the File, Edit, View, etc. I applaud Microsoft for taking this bold step, but suspect they’re going to confuse a huge swathe of users by doing so. It can easily be reinstated by right-clicking on the toolbar, but I wonder how many people are going to discover this for themselves?

Tabs

Can I just say on behalf of everyone in the world — At Last! Tabbed browsing was one of the main reasons people moved away from IE to Firefox and Opera. Trust me, once you’ve got used to using tabs, you’ll never understand how you browsed without them. Fortunately (presumably deliberately) Microsoft have used the same shortcuts as Firefox, i.e. Ctrl-T for a new tab, Middle-click a link to open a new tab, Middle-click a tab to close it, etc. Very sensible indeed.

Printing

Printing web pages with IE6 is one of the most frustrating and paper-wasting exercises I have ever had the misfortune to embark upon. Often paragraphs would run off the page horizontally, or be completely illegible. Microsoft have finally fixed this most basic of features!

RSS Feeds

You’ve probably seen the acronym RSS floating around the web and wondered what all the fuss was about. Now that Microsoft have updated Internet Explorer to natively handle them, these feeds are going to become even more prevalent. I should add however, that although Firefox has supported RSS feeds for a while, I much prefer Netvibes to manage this data for me. If you’ve not setup a (free!) Netvibes page yet, you’re missing out on a hugely productive way to stay up-to-date with your favourite sites. [In fact, Netvibes deserves a review all of it's own, so watch this space!]

Search

Search Providers are the main addition here. Whereas you could always define Google, MSN or Yahoo as your homepage and launch a search from there, now there’s a separate search box always to hand, allowing you to kick-off a new search using your favourite search engine. For example, if you’re an eBay junkie then set eBay to be your default search provider. One annoying feature is that I couldn’t find a setting to launch the search results in a new tab - so always remember to hit Ctrl-T before searching.

Security

The last major area of new functionality in IE7 is the updated security settings, including a Phishing Filter, disable most Active-X controls, colour-coded Address Bar and (very usefully!) an option to completely reset the browser to it’s initial state. This latter option should remove all search toolbars, and other annoying add-ins that more often than not only succeed in bringing the browser to it’s knees.

General Browsing

So those are the new features Microsoft are pushing, but what’s the browser like to use in the real world? Naturally, I’m going to be comparing to Firefox as that’s been my browser of choice for the last 18 months or so. Here are my impressions so far…

QuickTabs is an excellent feature, whereby a thumbnail view of all currently open pages is shows. I hope someone will release something similar to this for Firefox as a plug-in.

New tabs are inserted next to the current tab, rather than stuck at the end. I find this very useful when picking off stories from news sites, or posts from forums, because closing the current tab with Ctrl-W brings those stories/posts up now rather than later.

The tab toolbar isn’t given enough screen space and consequently ends up in “scrolling mode” after just 9 open tabs on a 1024×768 screen.

Adverts are back! Wow. This was a real eye-opener for me and I came to realise just how valuable the adblock extension for Firefox is. Suddenly adverts are everywhere! Where’s the content gone?!

Problems/Bugs

Memory. If you thought Firefox was a memory-hog then IE7 has a surprise for you! Although I’ve not used the browser enough to point and shout “memory leak!”, I am fully justified in wondering where all my free memory has gone!

Processor. Opening up a dozen or so tabs for sites like Engadget, Digg, TechCrunch are all but killing this Pentium M 1.73GHz laptop. Processor usage skyrockets and I’ve had to kill the iexplore.exe task twice today due to 100% CPU usage.

Possibly related to the memory/performance issues above:

Hmmm… looks like a Javascript problem I guess but not one I’ve ever seen whilst browsing these sites with Firefox.

Favicons are forgotten. This problem plagued IE6 and seems to have infected IE7 too - quite often the browser will “forget” to display the favicon. No great problem per se, but they’re really useful when trying to quickly identify a site in a whole load of tabs.

Conclusions

Has Microsoft done enough in this - long overdue - browser update?

There’s no doubt in my mind that Firefox gave Microsoft a huge wake-up call. Internet Explorer, the one-time leader in the web browsing field, had been left for dust by a standards-compliant, free, open-source alternative. Microsoft’s IE team responsded well (finally!) addressing most of the major complaints directed towards their ailing software.

But I can’t help think that Microsoft stopped short of really stomping on the new breed of browser and reasserting themselves in this marketplace. There’s nothing especailly innovative here, for example there are no blogging tools, FTP support is still rubbish, external editors are relied upon for HTML source-viewing and so on. When you add the fact that Mozilla are about to release Firefox 2.0 (which I haven’t yet tried) and are taking suggestions for v3.0, I wonder if Microsoft are immediately going to get left behind again.

From a personal point of view, I’m glad they’ve finally sorted out PNG support, improved CSS handling and introduced tabbed browsing - but that’s just going to make by web development job easier, and not affect my personal browsing habits at all.

Firefox is still streets ahead.

Links

Try Internet Explorer 7 for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/

Or do yourself a favour and give Firefox a try: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Internet Explorer, IE7

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