Firefox 2 goes public

 

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Posted on 25 Oct 2006 at 13:02

The Mozilla Corporation has announced the release of Firefox 2, introducing anti-phishing protection, improved built-in search tools, changes to tabbed browsing, the ability to restore an interrupted session, better support for Web feeds, a spelling check and support for dynamic bookmark titles.

The updated default theme refines the look of the buttons and other visual elements, attaching the Go button to the Location Bar and adding an equivalent button to the Search Bar. Several other buttons, such as the feed icon in the Location Bar and the search engine icon in the Search Bar, have been redrawn to make it more obvious that they are interactive.

The Phishing Protection feature was developed from the Google Safe Browsing feature of the Google Toolbar for Firefox using code donated by the Google itself. By default, it checks every page you visit against a local blacklist of known phishing sites and displays a warning if the site is fraudulent. This list is periodically updated by Firefox while the feature is enabled.

Users can also choose to send details of every site they visit to a remote service for checking. Currently Google is the only service provider, though other phishing data providers can be supported. In addition, details of how users respond to phishing warnings are also sent. While such real-time checking can offer greater protection, Mozilla concedes there are obvious privacy implications, which is why only the local list is enabled by default.

The most notable addition to the integrated search is support for search suggestions: as text is entered into the Search Bar, the selected search engine can optionally send back a list of suggestions to be displayed in a menu. Several search engines included with Firefox, including Google and Yahoo!, support this feature.

Firefox also supports the OpenSearch format developed by Amazon. This is a mechanism that lets browsers auto-discover search engine plugins. When visiting a site that has an OpenSearch plugin, the Search Bar icon will light up and users can install the search plugin from the search engine selection menu. Firefox includes a feature for managing installed search engines, so engines can be reordered in or removed from the search menu

Improvements to tabbed browsing are a response to Mozilla's usability testing. The close button has been moved from the end of the tab bar to the each open tab as they are in IE7. There is also a new Undo Close Tab option, for those times when you accidentally close a tab. Changes have also been made to the way large numbers of tabs are handled. Each individual tab still gets smaller and smaller as more tabs are introduced but there is now a minimum size after which scroll arrows appear at each end of the tab bar. A menu at the end of the tab bar lets users to quickly switch to any open tab.

The new Session Restore feature kicks in when Firefox is restarted after being unexpectedly closed. A dialogue offers the option to revert to their previous session: windows, tabs, text entered into forms and in-progress downloads are all restored. The feature is also activated at restarts required by application or extension updates.

The viewing of RSS and Atom feeds has been modified to more closely mimic the behaviour of Apple's Safari browser and IE to display a 'more friendly' view of the feed data. From this view, users can subscribe to the feed using Live Bookmarks.

The built-in spelling checker checks text entered into Web forms, including forums, with a variety of language options. Mozilla has provided website authors with some control over which fields are checked by default, using non-standard HTML attributes.