What is your opinion of Firefox 2.0 [Archive]

feedback

27th October 2006, 08:13

I thought FF 2.0 was going to be the best thing since sliced bread but I have changed my mind, for now.

Moreover, I reverted back to FF 1.5.0.7 which is much, much faster for me. The spellcheck is a nice feature in 2.0, but I can't stand to wait so long for a page to load.

For me FF 1.5.0.7 is faster than both FF 2.0 or Opera, for that matter, when browsing the net.

Regards,

Shinigami-Sama

27th October 2006, 08:29

They've released it already?
I thought we still had a few weeks to go O:

feedback

27th October 2006, 08:35

It is released and ready to be downloaded but be warned that your speed will most probably suffer.

Get it below.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

DarkZell666

27th October 2006, 09:45

sysKin

27th October 2006, 13:43

There can't really be much difference in speed - most of it depends on your OS and internet connection, and the parts which depend on Firefox didn't change between 1.5 and 2.0.

Perhaps you have a broken extension somewhere? Try safe mode and see if it's faster.

For me, it's great. There was a couple of bad decisions and changes here and there, but I can live with them. Spellchecker is great, undo-close-tab is great.

27th October 2006, 16:33

Firefox 2.0 - in my opinion it looks better, has some nice extras, and is not slower than the previous version. And what I like best: they did not mess up the user interface like MS did with Office - everything is where you'd expect it to be.

bb

P.S.: I wonder why "Firefox" is not in the English dictionary by default - only "Firebox" and "Fire fox"...

check

27th October 2006, 16:38

Little change for me - the only thing I *intensely* dislike is how the tab list extends off hte edge of the screen. There's not even a slider to quickly traverse it! I'll spend some time looking on the weekend for a 2.0 compatible plugin that lets you have multiple tab rows, much nicer in my opinion.

Doobie

27th October 2006, 16:59

I don't like, or find useless, the new things in Firefox 2. But, maybe it'll grow on me. I think part of the problem is that Firefox 1 didn't need anything.

feedback

27th October 2006, 18:34

I haven't noticed any changes regarding the speed myself ... oO

Actually, are you talking about the page "download" time ? or the page "display" time ? ("Download" being the time for the page to be copied from the server to your computer, and "display" being the time for the DOM parser/renderer to do it's job ;))

Seems to be something with the server, maybe the anti-Phishing feature is the problem for me.

Anyway, in 2.0 when I click a bookmark, like doom9 or CNN for instance, it seems to just sit there for about 3 to 4 seconds then finally displays.
In FF 1.5.0.7 when I click a bookmark it takes about 0.5 to 1 second to display. BTW, I have DSL.

I checked the MozillaZine/FireFox forums and there various problems people are having with FF 2.0, many I am sure are related to their particular computer setup.

Nonetheless, I have decided to wait till the next version of FF 2.0 comes out to try it again.

BTW, this poor fellow in the FF support forum really has a slowness issue.

"Firefox is taking 2-3 minutes to load. When loaded, it frequently doesn't respond for about 5 seconds at a time (when opening new pages or tabs this is always the case). Even typing this takes an age for the text to appear)."

Of course, there are always issues when any new software is released.

Regards,

BigDid

27th October 2006, 20:24

Hello all,

I tried FF2.0 and went back to 1.507 :)

Because I am a frenzied tabbed user and I cannot get (ATM) the extension TabMixPlus (0.3.0.5 or the 0.3.5 RC1) to work reliably. That should be fixed in a few days the author said.

Beside that I had no real slowdown and did appreciate the new features. I use nightly tester tools and was able to make all my 1.5.0.7 extensions (25) to work in the FF 2.0 except TabMP.

I have read a review saying the gecko engine was the same between 1.5 and 2.0 so there should be no slowdown ...

So I think I will update ASA the TabMp extension is updated.

Did

DarkZell666

27th October 2006, 22:12

I've seen some GUI hangs in ewido antispyware on my SP1 system at work, where the same version doesn't hang at all on my SP2 laptop. Maybe it's the same sort of problem here with FF2.

Anything could be hanging on windows anyway, GDI to start with. Since every single graphical component passes through GDI, I would suspect some system's don't have all the hotfixes applied correctly, which could be a plausible explanation for a couple of them :) Why FF 1.5 didn't hang is beyond me in that case, but since they use nifty pictures for the tabs, I can imagine that something is indeed broken (or incompatible) in the new GUI code.

Perhaps you have a broken extension somewhere? Try safe mode and see if it's faster.
this is very plausible indeed too ;)

I'll be keeping FF2 anyway, cheers !

BigDid

29th October 2006, 20:44

Update:

The tabMixPlus 3.5.RC2 is now compatible with FF 2.0.

This is written in FF 2.0 :)

Did

Lokean

29th October 2006, 23:40

Firefox 2 is faster for me, but that is helped a lot by the Pango update (I'm using Linux of course). The default theme sucks, but with an updated Qute it looks acceptable again. The search engine improvements are mostly useful, as is the spell-checker. With a few tweaks and extensions it is a very solid browser, and still my favourite.

deets

30th October 2006, 00:58

im personally pretty underwhelmed by it all :)

im a big fan of firefox though, and this hasnt altered my view, just not much new that seems to affect me.

hpn

30th October 2006, 01:34

Firefox 2.0 is still buggy, but whether the bugs will bother you seems to depend on your exact current hardware setup and/or installed other software.
About 30 minutes after installing 2.0 i was simply forced to switch back to 1.5.0.7 cause all hell broke loose and I started getting for a few seconds completely black screens when switching between different running programs, plus random system lockups for 5 to 10 seconds. Guess there were some severe conflicts with some hardware/software I have installed, but that is no excuse, cause the other browsers (plus the older Firefox) works fine. Hope they'll fix the bugs in the next release(s).

foxyshadis

30th October 2006, 01:36

Most of firefox 2 is a few fixes combined with moving a few extensions into the core, so it's not going to be that big of a deal. I bet the real differences will show up in firefox 3, due in 6-8 months, when the underlying renderer and javascript engine, which is supposed to be faster, more featureful, and many bugs fixed. Maybe even smaller, but I'm not sure.

hpn, lockups might come from an unstable system, if one of the threads was stuck at 100%. (Which is bad, and shouldn't happen with clean extensions, but you never know.) But if you encode video, presumably you'd have noticed heat problems long ago.

prOnorama

30th October 2006, 02:36

It works noticeably faster for me as 1.5 on my (by now almost ancient) Celeron 900 and uses less memory. Also the most important extensions (add ons now) like AdBlock, NoScript, CustomizeGoogle work

Can't complain really :)

DarkZell666

31st October 2006, 13:50

int10h

31st October 2006, 21:06

I've noticed that FF2.0 is (right now) consuming around 80MB of ram, and that it regularly uses up between 5 and 10% of CPU time (even when it sits there doing nothing ...). The simple fact of writting this post with it makes the cpu usage climb to 25%.

I find this pretty wierd, has anyone else noticed this ?

Here, FF1.5 is using 72MB. CPU usage is probably depending on hardware, but it is logical that writing a post on FF2 boosts it due to the real time spell checking feature.

PS: I don't use 2.0 because it hasn't made it to Sid yet.

Doobie

31st October 2006, 22:45

I hate it when I accidentally close a tab by too causally trying to switch tabs.

shevegen

31st October 2006, 22:58

In my opinion, ever since a long time, using Firefox ate a lot of RAM just like mana Java Apps do, even though Firefox was written in C++ for most part.

What I nowadays do a lot (open a new tab, close tabs) is still fast enough in FF 2.0 so for me, this isnt an issue IF there'd be a speed penalty (which I havent seen compared to 1.5.0.7 btw)

(I am personally more annoyed at how Mozilla Corp. handles development. I'd rather appreciate if they'd do it more like the KDE Team, and if Mozilla wouldnt feel so stick-in-a** position at times, reasoning their points ... but thats just MY opinion.)

johnhamler1

31st October 2006, 23:29

i switched from IE6 TO FIREFOX 2 last week , IT S MUCH FASTER now ...

IE sucks...

foxyshadis

1st November 2006, 06:44

I hate it when I accidentally close a tab by too causally trying to switch tabs.

That's sort of what session managers are there to prevent. The session manager extension lists recently closed tabs along with a few other things you can open up, like a previous browsing session. I bet FF2's works very similarly.

In my opinion, ever since a long time, using Firefox ate a lot of RAM just like mana Java Apps do, even though Firefox was written in C++ for most part.
Yeah, it's the enormous numbers of templates they use that make it so damn huge, along with half of it being scripted in javascript and XUL instead of actual C++. I was hoping the next gecko integration would be smaller, or at least less monolithic, but it doesn't appear to be.

twist3d

1st November 2006, 08:21

I hate it when I accidentally close a tab by too causally trying to switch tabs.

You can undo accidental tab closes by clicking to the tab area and selecting "undo close tab" (it even works for multiple tabs).

But the question was, opinion about Firefox 2.0.
It's great. Installed over 1.5.0.7 and it kept my bookmarks (unlike the 2.0 betas), upgraded the adblock plus (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/)
and today I installed fasterfox 2 (http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/). Stability seems to have increased and also starting the browser seems a little bit faster.

Boulder

1st November 2006, 12:21

How can you make the tab close button appear where it used to be in v1.5, that is, where the tab selection button is now?

xyloy

1st November 2006, 13:08

FF loads itself a lot faster on my machine than any previous version.
I don't need Firefox Preloader anymore! :D

The great extension named "Tabbrower Preferences" was upgraded to ver. 1.3.1 on the first run, and since then it doesn't show a red error line(xml parse error ?) instead of settings like the previous 1.2.x with FF 1.5.x.x did.
Bye bye the "about:config" workaround. :P

Some of my extensions are still not updated in order to work with FF 2.0, but I'm very impressed to have only 4 extensions(out of 18) not working the day FF 2.0 was launched. :)

And the speel checker is awesome, but it gets mad when I'm writing in English insted of French :P

/me back for the 4th time to that good ol' Deus Ex. OMG, I've found new hidden stuff, oh no! not again! :D

Shinigami-Sama

1st November 2006, 17:51

I'm currently waiting for a few more extentions to be updated before upgrading
but it seems like its well worth it from everything I've seen

Schrade

2nd November 2006, 03:20

How can you make the tab close button appear where it used to be in v1.5, that is, where the tab selection button is now?

1) Type about:config in the addressbar and hit enter.

2) In the Filter: field type closeb to narrow it down to the right preference

3) Double click on browser.tabs.closeButtons (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButtons) and change it from 1 to 3.

0 = Display on active tab only
1 = Display close button on all tabs
2 = Don't display any tabs at all
3 = Display single close button at the end of tab bar, like Firefox 1.5.

Schrade

2nd November 2006, 03:24

I'm currently waiting for a few more extentions to be updated before upgrading
but it seems like its well worth it from everything I've seen
What extensions would those be? Most extensions will work just by adjusting their maxVersion number in the install.rdf of the .xpi. You can do this easily using extensions like MR Tech Local Install (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/421/) or Nightly Tester Tools (http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/nightly).

Shinigami-Sama

2nd November 2006, 03:28

flashgot
and
mozCC
it seems fasterfox has been updated
these two arn't a big deal
I'd also like to keep my theme
acid burn as well
or another greyscale atleast

and
I'm to lazy and busy with school to fuss with it all that much
FF1.5 is working for me now
it can dam well work for another couple weeks as well
:)