Firefox 2 Beta
 

Has anyone tried Firefox 2 beta (Bon Echo)? I was wondering if it was easy to uninstall in the event that I don't like it and/or whether or not it's likely for me to have issues with it to cause the aforementioned uninstallation. Anyone tried it?

If you want to test it out, check out this article for a good explanation on how to test it without messing up your current install.

The beta works great for my petty browser needs. They finally fixed the damn tabs so that each one has an individual close button. And even if you fuck up that simplicity, which I have, there's a "recently closed tabs" option under the History menu. Wonderful.

Are you saying that's it becoming more of an Opera browser?

I don't know, I've never used Opera.

Can you turn that feature off? I'd hate that, personally.

I can't see me upgrading until it's the final release, though. I'd miss my extensions. I can't imagine that by some chance, the three or four extensions I find to be somewhere between necessary and highly desirable still work with 2.0-beta

The old Gmail Manager I was using before isn't compatible with the Beta, and trying to download the Gmail Notifier from the site isn't working, either. Hmm.

There's not that much I can tell that's different, other than the tab thing mentioned by knkwzrd.

i was using it and there was some extension that forced all old extensions to work on it, nightly something or other. all i noticed was they changed "extensions" in the menu to "add-ons", updated the integrated search thingy and added a spell checker (which is helpful and annoying at times)

i cant remember why but i went back to 1.5, however 2 beta is still installed, they work fine with each of them installed, and they use the same profile so it works pretty well to go back and fourth

The individual close buttons are retarded. It's just a waste of screen real estate. They already had a way to close individual tabs before; it was called "middle mouse button". Also (and I don't know if they changed this since I last used Bon Echo) but they removed the main tab close button, which was really useful for closing multiple tabs at once. Sure, you could just Ctrl+W a bunch of times, but why bother with the keyboard when the mouse should suffice?

Alright, I think I'm going to take the jump and see how I land... If I'm firefox-less until the final version of Bon Echo comes out, I'll just use opera...:)

I'm currently using it right now, and I must say, I'm very happy that the NoScript add-on is still compatible. Would a shame to not have that.

and/or double-clicking on them. Not sure where I was introduced to the idea, but it's how I've got mine set up.

I'm now running Beta 1, and I must say that I like it quite a bit. The best part (and probably only new feature that I use) of it is the spell check in large text boxes like on the forums. I agree that the individual tab close X's are useless, and I think there should be an option for them. Maybe there's something in about:config...

and what about the RAM usage ?

is there still the leak ?

right now on ff 1.5.0.4 i have 4 tabs = 90 Mb of RAM :/

Yeah, my biggest question is the memory leak too. I'd expect that to be one of the biggest fixes.

If I'm not mistaken, the memory leak "bug" is actually intentional. I have no links or source since it's been a while since I read it, but apparently the devs implemented it as a "feature" that Firefox would allocate so much RAM based on how much total RAM is in your computer to make opening and mantaining tabs easier/faster. There was a way to turn it off, but I only did it once before I re-formatted, and then didn't do it again because Firefox doesn't leak that badly for me :/

Edit: Found it
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

I just checked the memory usage with several tabs open and all values are within the limits described in the article's first paragraph. I can live with that.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozi...2/win32/en-US/

Or try http://www.public.iastate.edu/%7Ewag...ortable2b2.zip for the squeamish (and those not willing to mess with their older Firefox install).

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 out. It's improved (from 1.5.0.6, I didn't try the Betas or Alphas--minus the Bon Echo which messed up my regular Firefox extension), what else can I say?

I have all the plugins I need ready to go right now and decided to go with the default theme unitl MiniFox catches up (with missing art for the close tab and preferences buttons). I started using Firefox 1.5 with Beta 2 and didn't look back, now I see myself doing the same thing with 2.0 (I'll even ditch portable Firefox once this thing goes RC 1). Honestly if the improvements are mounting like this, I can't wait until Firefox 3.0 goes Beta.

Already is in nightly builds status atm, under the codename Minefield 3.0a1.

As far as FF2 B2 goes, I'm using the portable version as of current. Only thnig that annoys me is the tab functions, if you have a lot of tabs open the tab clsoe button will only be displayed on the last tab. Hopefully, this will be tweaked by Mozilla delvelopers or a extension that changes this to behave like tab mix plus (or hopefully soon enough there will be a 2.0 compatible version of TMP).

Sucks that 2.0 won't use the new revision of the Gecko engine though that passes the Acid2 test.