If you’re a fan of the Firefox browser like I am then you’ll be excited to hear that the first release candidate for the 2.0 version is now available for you to try out:
Mozilla Firefox 2 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This preview of the next version of Firefox browser is aimed at Web Application Developers, testers and early adopters.
I’ve been running Firefox 2 since the second beta release and I already can’t imagine how I ever lived without it. Firefox 2 will be bringing a lot of new security improvements to the table including some anti-phishing technology that will make the World Wide Web a little safer, but that’s the bit that has me all enthused about it. The two big features that I love about Firefox 2 are:
- Built in spell checker. As a blogger this makes my life so much nicer. Under the 1.x series I made use of the Spellbound extension, but trying to explain to others how to track it down and install it was a bit of a pain so having it in right from the get-go is very nice indeed. I have to use Internet Exploder while at work and I’m not allowed to install any spell checker add-ons for it so that makes me appreciate it in Firefox 2 all that much more.
- Session recovery after a crash. No program is perfect and occasionally your web browser will crash on you when you’re in the middle of doing something and you’ll lose all the pages you currently have open. Firefox 2 has the ability to restore all the pages you had open at the time the browser crashed. This has saved my butt on more than one occasion. Now if you’re working on a blog post it may lose some of your work, but it often will have at least part of it when it comes back up and that’ll save you from a lot of hair pulling.
They’re not recommending that the general public make use of RC1 just yet because it may be flaky as bugs still remain to be squashed, but I’ve found it to be a pretty stable release. They’re hoping to have RC 2 available by the end of next week with the final release coming only a few weeks later so you don’t have much longer to wait if you’re not comfortable running pre-release software. I wouldn’t blame you if you found it hard to wait until the final release, though, as it’s a good improvement on an already excellent web browser.
Gotta love that built in spellchecker. It rocks! I have been using FF2 since beta 1 and there certainly is a difference between each release. But I think I like this release the best so far. The look is stunning, nothing short of beautiful. And the built in functionalities are wonderful. I like how you can move tabs around at whim.
My 2 cents.