It’s been really interesting tracking the progress of Firefox 2.0 over the last few months. I’m getting more confident every day that Firefox 2.0 will turn out to be a beautiful upgrade, though I think the spell checking, microsummaries, anti-phishing and feed support have already sold it to me.
Find as you Type
One of the things which has bugged me and many other people about Firefox was the fact you couldn’t search text inside text boxes using "Find as you type". This has now been fixed. For Wikipedia and editing of large documents, it’s a real boon.
Tabs
We’ve already seen that there are close buttons on each tab – there is now also a minimum tab width. When you have too many tabs, you’ll see arrow buttons at the side of the tab strips allowing you to scroll the tabs. This means the text on the tabs will always be readable. I’ve found that there are still some issues with this feature. There are also some extension developer improvements relating to tabs.
Autocomplete
Autocomplete has been enhanced so that it doesn’t just try to find terms which start with what you’ve typed – it’ll also give you a spelling suggestion (equivalent of Google’s "Did you mean:" feature). I really love this; it’s a real easy and quick way to check a spelling and makes autocomplete a lot more useful. (Look at top entry)
Note: You won’t actually find any of these features in the latest build of Firefox 2.0 as the branch is currently frozen as Beta 1 is prepared. However, they exist on the Trunk (Mozilla Minefield, Firefox 3.0). I believe they will be checked into the branch soon.
Waht abuot the spelcheckling faeturs?
All of which get broken by this annoying WYSIWYG thing…
Spellchecking works with WYSIWYG in recent builds of Firefox 2.0
It also gives you a proper context menu.
Sure, but WYSIWYG still sucks!
What’s wrong with WYSIWYG. It’s just a text area and a little bit more
Perhaps its because it slows down every page load, and I’ve never had a reason to use it?
And because it can be confusing as hell to use when the line you’ve just written jumps around and moves to the right.
I’m not sure what you mean by it jumps around. I’m gonna develop a switch to use plain text editor and have better plain text support anyway (nl2br) so in the future you should be able to choose
only prob with the new theme is there’s no contrast on the tabs. the grays all blend together, and it’s hard to read. rest is awesome.
mo