Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Congratulations!

(I just literally watched Mozilla.com change O_O)

It's been great to follow the different Firefox 2 builds throughout the development. Thanks, and congratulations to all involved for a very well done job!

This is awesome ;)

about:credits

Congrats! (That's a nipt tuesday. In my timezone anyway. ;-))

Grattis, världen! (Congratulations, world!)

Got my blog button set up soon. Two friends already updated. This is going smooooooth.

Well Asa,

There it is! After months of sleepless days and nights, it is done. Just a few moments to bask in the sun, because now 3.0 is calling! LOL!! My Detroit Red Wings lid is off to all of us testers and to all of the men and women that have made the community of Mozilla and the web a better place. Now get out there and spread the word!!! Firefox 2.0!!

Go on; you know you want to tell really – what was it the culmination of? :)

Can't wait for 3.0.

(insert whine here about not having full css 2 support)

Congrats!
Normally I'd put a snide remark about how Opera's still better, but I'll let you guys celebrate the release.

I do have to say, though, with IE7 out there's really no reason for the average person to switch to Firefox (besides the cool name). Yes, I know it's better than IE7 and supports standards and all that, and I'm all for the standards. However, the problem is that the average user DOESN'T know about that, nor do they care about it. After all, if they did (heh, have to say it, sorry), they'd be using Opera.

Right now the only thing Firefox 2 has going for it is that it supports OSes

Err... my full comment didn't post. Here's the whole thing:

Oops, my whole comment

Congrats!
Normally I'd put a snide remark about how Opera's still better, but I'll let you guys celebrate the release.

I do have to say, though, with IE7 out there's really no reason for the average person to switch to Firefox (besides the cool name). Yes, I know it's better than IE7 and supports standards and all that, and I'm all for the standards. However, the problem is that the average user DOESN'T know about that, nor do they care about it. After all, if they did (heh, have to say it, sorry), they'd be using Opera.

Right now the only thing Firefox 2 has going for it is that it supports OSes

.... Forget about it. Something's messing up.

Congrats!
I like Firefox 2.0!! :-D

Congrats on finally releasing it! It's generally very nice, but there are some pitfalls I wouldn't have thought would make a release, such as:

1) No dictionary for the en-GB build? Who's playing "favourites" there? :P. Tip for anyone else from the rest of the English speaking world: download a dictionary yourself and add en-GB.aff and en-GB.dic to a /dictionaries/ folder in your Firefox program dir. Tada! Have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

2) A cool new session-restore feature without a "Save this session and exit" UI option (without permanently enabling it)? Argh.

3) No GUI options for disabling go-buttons and close-buttons-on-tabs? Yeah, these are in about:config... but still...

Off to post a few more votes on Bugzilla or download extensions, I guess...

Sorry to say that (don't want to spoil the party) but this is the worst release ever. :-(

While 1.5 had stunning new features and usability an update to 2.0 forces the user to fiddle about making things work again that already worked in 1.5 (partly with extensions).
Examples:
Session Manager. The new internal one is feature-poor, the one of TabMix Plus is way better but stops working reliably in Fx2. So I had to disable both.
Spell Check. What was wrong about SpellBound? I finally got it to wipe the internal spellcheck and install SpellBoundII but that took time and nerves.

Everybody now has to flood the boards with questions like "Getting rid of the Go button" and "how to get back the symbols in the FAYT-bar". What for?

The throbber on tabs has now the classname .tab-icon-image instead of .tab-icon, which only makes millions to adapt their userChrome.css files. I can't think of a good reason why this (and other coeds) has been changed.

The only advantages I found so far were the search in textboxes and a slight speed improvement when opening the searchplugin-menu.

This is not a rant about Fx2, it's a wonderful browser. But for those who came from 1.5 and know/used extension it's definitely a disappointment. Instead of developing poor copies the dev-team should have incorporated (and maybe improved) some ot the fine extensions.

Congrats! Of course was using RC1-RC3 but still it is cool. Time to party ;o)

I too have been using 2.0 since Bon Echo Alpha 3 - I don't really expect any change between RC3 and 2.0 final, but it's nice to be using the official 2.0 final release :D

Angus, better tip: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/dictionaries/?lang=en-GB

I have RC2 and when i check for updates it says RC3 is available when wll it change to firefox 2.0 for available updates

Greg -- yeah, I found that right afterwards, previous tip redacted ;). Part of my problem was that I installed an en-US version first and thought the problem was with my crossgrade to en-GB, assuming Mozilla would never be silly enough ship spellchecking without a dictionary!

Also, apparently the dictionary install link was listed on the "run once" startpage (that I promptly skipped past as soon as it loaded, as I'm sure many people do).

Still, hopefully the Firefox team can either bundle the dictionary in the installer, add a "get more dictionaries" link to the Options dialog, or something... as it stands it's a pretty unprofessional way to ship a major new feature.

Well, Asa, to quote you crap, it seems FF2 close tab button is a complete ripoff of Opera's close tab button.

BTW, I like the new theme :)

Good job, all!