Firefox 2

Shortly after IE7 was released, Firefox released a new version as well. I was a little bit wary to run through the installation since I didn't want to get distracted by any crazy CSS changes on my existing projects. I went through it anyways, in a separate directory, and so far so good. The UI has changed slightly - but not so much that it would bother you.

Like IE there is some built in phishing protection. I can't believe that so many people are so gullible as to require phishing protection as a major browser feature, but I guess that's just the way the world is. I suppose I'll change my tune when I become a victim one day.

It has a built in spell checker - which hopefully will decrease the amount of spelling mistakes I make in this blog. There is also a "Clear Private Data" menu item that's been part of portable Firefox for a while now. There is also support for a new thing called "Live Titles" which I haven't played around with too much yet, but I imagine there'll be a how-to post coming down the road. It seems similar to an microformat, but implemented more akin to an RSS feed.

Aside from that, nothing really revolutionary. I do notice a speed improvement. There are things like Javascript 1.7 support, improved Live Bookmarks, etc. that you won't notice off the bat - and others like the ability to restore a session that have been provided by plugins in the past. One item that is a concern is support for persistent storage of large data client side according to the not-yet-finished WHATWG spec. I see something like that and it just screams security issues down the road. Still - it's nice that the Mozilla team is actually recognizing new, powerful, and useful standards and making use of them rather than trying to re-implement them outside of spec a la Microsoft's standard modus operandi.