Firefox 2.0
Mozilla has released the 2.0 release of the Firefox web browser. Among the new features is built in spellcheck and javascript 1.7 support. However, there are critiques that are critical of the User Interface. (The blank bar, I thought, was the bookmarks toolbar folder area where you could put bookmarks of rss feeds or most frequently visited sites… I could be wrong…)
I do think George is right in one respect, tabbed browsing needs to be “more evident” in firefox.
I’ve had people see me open up a new tab only to ask “how did you do that?” Explorer 7 makes it more obvious. As for the UI between the two, well… I’ve already mentioned how I’m not thrilled with the default approach to menuing in Explorer.
It’s nice to see some real competition coming in the web browser area, I suspect the renewed activity there will mean the NEXT major releases of each should be VERY interesting to watch as well.
Bottom line…. competition will be good and already has yielded some benefits. IE7 now has tabbed browsing, better CSS compliance (including some ANCIENT rendering issues have been fixed.) Firefox has spellchecking built in, new javascript and the plugin architecture that really makes it an interesting tool for so many things online. Competition is good for the consumer. (Yeah, not exactly a news flash.)