Firefox 2.0 Beta 2

I just installed the new Firefox 2.0 beta 2. There are a few nice improvements over 1.5:

I don’t see much negative stuff anymore so I think I’m going to use this build until the release candidates start appearing. I’ve blogged previously about the version number. Given that the half finished spellchecker + rss fixes are the biggest changes and the rest is merely minor cosmetic work, I still don’t think this counts as worthy of a major version number bumb. However, this seems to be another ‘heels digged into sand’ kind of thing. Everybody has been pointing this out for months and all the 2.0 reviews I’ve read so far seem to point out that there isn’t that much new in Firefox 2.0 as well (I predicted that this would happen on Ben Goodger’s blog a few months ago, seems I was right). For example, ars technica, which usually does a decent job of reviews, says this about the version number: > Is the new release really deserving of the 2.0 moniker? It’s hard to say, given the fact that it looks and feels very much like 1.x. Is it a better browser than 1.x? Definitely. I think I agree with this assessment 100% It’s definitely a nice incremental improvement and who cares about version numbers anyway :-).