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25 Oct 2006
The Mozilla Corporation has officially launched its new Firefox 2.0 web browser.
The final-version release of the popular open source browser touts built-in phishing protection and spell-checking for online forms, as well as an option to restore forms and pages after an application crash.
Firefox's RSS handling has also been updated, allowing users to decide whether to send feeds to an RSS reader or use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature, which shows the latest headlines from a site rather than a specific title.
"The improvements Mozilla has made to the ease of use, performance, and security in Firefox 2 reflect our ongoing, singular focus on meeting the needs of web users all over the world,” said Mozilla chief executive Mitchell Baker.
Originally slated for release in Mid-August, Firefox 2.0 had been delayed to allow for bug fixes. The browser entered its release candidate phase in September and October.
The release of Firefox 2.0 comes five days after Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7, the first major standalone update to the browser in five years. While Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser on the web, Firefox's market share has climbed to 11.5 per cent worldwide, compared to Internet Explorer's 85.85 per cent, according to web data from the onestat.com analytics service.
Firefox 2.0 is available as a free download for the Windows, Linux and MacOS X operating systems in multiple languages.
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Do you agree?
IE7 beats Firefox
I love the new IE7, it´s much slicker than Firefox, which is not really an upgrade. While IE7 introduced new features and functionality from IE6, Firefox 2.0 just look like the same old Firefox + new graphics... big deal... and it ruined my previous Firefox install, which means bye bye. I know many people are eager to say IE7 copies many features from the previous Firefox, but then again, Firefox copied IE from scratch, remember that!
Posted by: Paulie 25 Oct 2006
FireFox 'new' features
It is sad that you don't mention the fact that most of the 'new' features were already available in FireFox 1.5. The security and anti-pfishing are the important part of the new release but to some of the features that have been with FireFox since 1.0 is a shame. I am using 1.5 2.0 (beta), 2.0 and Minefield (3.0 beta). I would encourage you to focus on some of the features that are not readily or easily available and promote those. Or promote the features as being backward compatible or ... just do some more research.
Posted by: alex talmont 25 Oct 2006
One small step for Firefox one giant leap for IE7!
?There is quite a contrast between the release of Firefox 2.0 and IE7. Firefox 2.0 is, to the regular Firefox user, not a huge jump as there are few new outstanding features. The reason for that is simple - it already had all the core goodies that real world users like such as tabbed browsing. IE7 is still playing catch-up from the back of the field and is thus more visibly changed?. ?Firefox is also still way ahead of IE in terms of conforming to the web standards such as stylesheets (CSS2). It's also a much safer security play although, in the past, not without bugs that affect security. However, the impact of these bugs has nearly always been much smaller than is the case with IE bugs because Firefox hasn't been coded so close to the heart of the operating software. Unlike IE any bugs it does have are prevented from being exploited more widely on the victim's machine.? ?Lastly, Firefox is a multi-platform browser and will work on Microsoft Windows machines (or Linux or Mac etc). In the past, Microsoft have produced a version of IE that ran on Macs as well as Windows, but that is history now and the new IE7 runs only on Windows.? ?But the best news for the health of the development of the Internet in general, is that the new Firefox will not require web site managers to have to change their websites to make sure they'll work for visitors with Firefox 2.0. It is sticking close to the existing web standards and that will save thousands of hours for hard pressed web developers the world over. This is just as well, because right now they are losing a stack of time in ensuring web sites will work for IE7, which has changed so significantly, and broken many of its old features.?
Posted by: Deri Jones, CEO of webtesters of SciVisum 25 Oct 2006