Wednesday, 27 September 2006

Mozilla Approaching Firefox 2 Stable

Mozilla Foundation has announced the availability of Release Candidate 1 of its Firefox 2 browser with a new look and features like enhanced security, anti-phishing, inline spell check, and improved tab browsing…

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the availability of Release Candidate 1 of its Firefox 2 browserThe release came with a warning urging users not to expect all extensions, plugins, and themes from previous versions of Firefox to work properly. This release signals that the second-generation browser is nearing completion. Firefox 2 RC 2 is scheduled for release in the first week of October and the final version is expected to be released by the end of that month.

According to market analysts, currently only a little over ten percent of the web surfing is done using Firefox, as opposed to 84 per cent on Microsoft’s Internaet Exlporer (IE), but Firefox has been steadily gaining ground since the 2004 release of its version 1. With the enhanced security features of Firefox 2, it could give IE stiff competition.

New Features in a Nutshell

• New Theme: the RC1’s tool bar is transparent, and the tool bar buttons glow when you hover your mouse over them.
• Built-in phishing protection: phishing protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, by graying the window and displaying a dialogue box, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites.
• Enhanced search capabilities: a new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.
• Improved tabbed browsing: by default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.
• Resuming your browsing session : the Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs; text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. And the users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.
• Inline spell checking: a new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms without having to use a separate application. This can be very useful if you post on online forums regularly.
• Live Titles: when a web site offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title", that will appear instead of the static title.
• Improved Add-ons manager : the new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.
• JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.
• Extended search plugin format: the Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.
• Updates to the extension system : the extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localisation of extensions.
• Client-side session and persistent storage : new support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.