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---
date: "2006-09-15T17:25:35Z"
title: Thoughts on Firefox 2.0b2
---
<p>I've switched over completely to <a href='http://mozilla.org/firefox/'>Firefox</a> 2.0b2. It's not out yet,
but the beta is a <em>lot</em> faster in Linux, so I decided not to wait.
What's new?</p>
<ul>
<li>Faster. It's a lot faster than Firefox 1.5. It's still slower than
I'd like. It's still slower than I think it <em>should</em> be. But hey,
faster is always better.</li>
<li>Built-in Session Management. I was using the excellent
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/436/">SessionSaver plugin</a> in Firefox 1.5, but Firefox 2.0's
built-in session management is good enough for me. It's a bit
finicky, but I'm sure that will get sorted out.</li>
<li>Better Tab Management. The tab bar doesn't shrink tabs until they're
unbearably small any more. Instead, a nifty drop-down menu on the
right lists all your tabs, and you get a couple of scroll buttons. I
tend to open a lot of tabs, and after using the new tab interface for
a bit, I realized that works really well with my style of browsing.
Here are three shots of the new tab interface:</li>
</ul>
<p><img src='http://pablotron.org/shots/firefox-2.0b2/ff2-1.png'
width='604' height='300' border='0' style='border: 1px solid black;'
title='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (1 of 3): Tab Bar'
alt='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (1 of 3): Tab Bar' /></p>
<p><img src='http://pablotron.org/shots/firefox-2.0b2/ff2-3.png'
width='604' height='300' border='0' style='border: 1px solid black;'
title='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (2 of 3): Pop-Up Menu'
alt='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (2 of 3): Pop-Up Menu' /></p>
<p><img src='http://pablotron.org/shots/firefox-2.0b2/ff2-5.png'
width='604' height='300' border='0' style='border: 1px solid black;'
title='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (3 of 3): Scrolling Tabs'
alt='Firefox 2.0b2 Tab Behavior (3 of 3): Scrolling Tabs' /></p>
<p>Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0 isn't all sunshine and roses. A huge number
of extensions broke. While most of the important ones (read:
<a href="http://adblockplus.org/">Ad Block Plus</a>), have been ported, really useful ones like
<a href="http://http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/">Greasemonkey</a> haven't. There appear to be some minor quirks
with inline find. They also attached the Go button on the URL entry to
the URL entry itself; you can disable it using the Customize context
menu option any more. I found <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2449279&sid=395883098fcc1f429a5bee14f847b4ea">this forum post</a> after a bit
of searching, which basically says to add the following snippet to your
<code>userChrome.css</code> file:</p>
<pre><code>/* don't display the annoying go button */
#go-button { display: none; }
</code></pre>
<p>You can disable the resizing search entry in there too. I still haven't
decided whether or not I like it. The behavior of the backspace key
changed too, although I'm not sure if that was a Firefox 2.0 change, or if my
config got munged during the upgrade. Anyway, you can switch it to go
back instead of doing nothing by setting <code>browser.backspace_action</code> to <code>0</code> in
good-old <code>about:config</code>.</p>
<p>By the way, if you can't keep all the versions of Adblock and Adblock
plus straight, it's because the <a href="http://adblockplus.org/en/history">history of the both</a> kind
of reads like a soap opera.</p>
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