Willing to risk browser stability at work, I’ve installed Firefox 2.0 Beta, just for giggles. It seems to be working smoothly. The huge downer is of the twelve extensions (now called Add-ons) that I use daily, only three made the transition while the rest are in limbo till updated versions are released. No big deal, this is a beta product anyway and I should have all of them back by the final release as they are all popular extensions.

As I type this post, I realize that I’m immediately sold on Firefox 2.0’s built-in spell-check. It fucking rules! All misspelled or questioned words are automatically underlined in red as I type. I have waited so fucking long and meddled with so many damn alternative extensions to manage my inability to type like a competent person. It’s great.

RSS feeds are better supported with most of the features of the LiveLines extension being integrated. When I click the feed icon on a website, I’m prompted to choose how I want to handle feeds such as staying with the old Live Bookmarks, which i never liked or adding to Bloglines, which I’m currently using as well as some support for other readers. It’s a small improvement—really I’d rather have the answer to all my RSS gripes, but at least I have spell-checking.

I also notice that accidentally closed tabs can now be recovered, and crashed sessions can now be restored. All good things, I guess. Anti-phishing measures have been built in and the close button for tabs are now placed individually for each tab—something I was handling with an extension previously. However, to be picky, I dislike the left-side placement for the close button on each tab. I’d prefer it on the right. As far as bloat goes, on OSX, it seems to be running pretty damn fast.

I’m not going to bother trying it on Linux until the final version comes out. All in all I’m happy, but perhaps a little underwhelmed. I guess with the big jump to 2.0, I was hoping for everything to be turned upside down, which is definitely not the case. It’s nicer, but still the same browser.

Whatever, I have spell-check now!

****Addendum****
The Nightly Tester Tools extension forces Firefox extensions to work with whatever version your currently testing/abusing. With this installed, I now have all my usual extensions running as normal. It’s great.

A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

(more…)