Firefox 2 Beta 2

[Michael]

While Firefox 2.0 isn't expected for a final release until early 2007, the second Beta of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (Bon Echo) has been released. Of the many changes in this beta release include an updated Firefox 2 theme and visual effects, built-in phishing detector, enhanced search capabilities, improved tabbed browsing, browser resume session, preview/subscribe to RSS feeds, in-line spell checker, live titles, and improved add-on manager. The various Beta packages can be downloaded from Mozilla.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html

[Michael]

For those not able to download Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, or are addicted to some alternative browser, or are otherwise just lazy, below are a few views from Bon Echo Beta 2.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_window.jpg

Yep, it's finally here!

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_version.jpg

The spell checker at work

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_spell.jpg

A few improvements to the options...

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_preferences.jpg

Phishing detector

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_phish.jpg

Bookmarks

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_bookmarks.jpg

Add-On Manager

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ffb2_addon.jpg

An animated gif showing the search improvements, tabs, bookmarks, and updates to the default theme...

http://www.phoronix.com/misc/ff2b2_demo.gif

[1c3d0g]

The new theme is definitely a step in the right direction, IMO. Plus with the recent deal that some company will provide branding, things are looking good in this area. Now if only they'd concentrate on making Firefox less resource-intensive...

[Michael]

What resource problems do you encounter? There is the known memory leaks (or "features"), but I haven't come across any other resource problems, though maybe I should step back and use some common hardware ;)

[1c3d0g]

Don't you wish Firefox was a little less resource-hungry? For instance, open a few websites in 10+ tabs at the same time, and watch your CPU (and memory!) go down the drain. When switching between lots of tabs, it's slow and "jerky". Those kinds of things. Although, Swiftfox eliminates a lot of those problems since it's Arch-based. :)

[Michael]

Don't you wish Firefox was a little less resource-hungry? For instance, open a few websites in 10+ tabs at the same time, and watch your CPU (and memory!) go down the drain. When switching between lots of tabs, it's slow and "jerky". Those kinds of things. Although, Swiftfox eliminates a lot of those problems since it's Arch-based. :)

Okay, just tried it out. Opening up Firefox 1.5 on Fedora, using the Live bookmarks of RSS feeds, I right-clicked and did the "open in tabs", so it opened a LOT of tabs in Firefox. After the pages all loaded, and switching between them I did notice the memory usage had spiked (which I've experienced often after long browsing sessions), but it largely wasn't laggy. The CPU usage had spiked by a couple percent, but not too much. I should point out that this particular system is backed by four physical CPU cores. I can understand now your concerns though how normal users running through lots of tabs may experience some problems.

[1c3d0g]

Oh, well yeah, I only have a measly uni-processor system (P4C Northwood) and fairly low amount of RAM (512 MB). :p My next PC will be a dual core CPU and have 2 GB of RAM, which should hopefully alleviate most, if not all these problems.