As many of you probably already know, Firefox is a web browser, released in 2004, that is a direct competitor to Internet Explorer and Opera. It supports many standard features, such as tabbed browsing, and themeing, as well as having a powerful extension system which permits the adding of features made by third parties.
The 1.0 release of firefox proved to be very popular, and 1.5 fixed many of its shortcomings. For anyone who needed more features there have always been extensions to add things like session managments, advanced download features and integration with web services, but now the 2.0 release plans to integrate the benefits of these extensions into the core software.
The benefits are aimed at the end user, instead of just improving their technologies. The top enhancements are:
- Find what you need. All aspects of search in Firefox are being improved. From searching bookmarks, to the integrated search bar in the top-right of the screen. UI tweaks, backend rewrites and new systems for carrying out the same tasks are just some of the changed.
- Improved Tab interface, multitasking ability. Tabs will be even more integrated into the new firefox, with links defaulting to opening in new tabs instead of new windows and being more effective at handling larger numbers of tabs.
- Keeping up-to-date with feeds. By adjusting the way feeds are subscribed to, and allowing different feed aggregators to be used, feeds can become more efficient for the end user, than their current implementation. Changes include previews and the ability to use any reader.
- General usability improvements. With miscellaneous changed, such as spell checking, and more serious updates like reducing the number of notifications needed. These changes are obivous in the security update process, and the graceful way the browser will restore a previous session if the browser crashes.
- Improved OS integration. By providing new themes for integrating into Vista, OS X and Gnome, a more prefessional and streamlined experience is possible.
Of course their are technical updates, such as a smaller memory footprint, but these are less important than the above features that users will actually see.
Osdir has some great shots of Alpha 3.
