Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 released

A big advantage of 2.0b2, in my mind, is that the bookmarks menu now shows favicons. I had been missing that feature from Camino. Favicons in the bookmarks bar would be nice too, but that's not a big deal to me.

Camino does have some enhancements available, but there are things about Firefox I prefer, such as the superior find-as-you-type interface.

I think the visual enhancements in 2.0b2 are terrible. The "end caps" on the search bar and location bar may not look like butons to newbies, and are ugly to the rest of us. Now there is no way to get rid of the "Go" button or the "Search" button because they are part of the same UI element as the location/search fields. There is still no clear button (an X, like in Camino) in the search bar. The icons look washed-out because they get more saturated when you mouse over them, which I think is a generally poor UI principle. The buttons should appear button-like to users without them needing to scrub over the interface elements to see them light up.

Does anyone know of an Aqua or MacOS-esque theme like Aquafox that's compatible with Beta 2? Aquafox is not compatible, nor is Aqua Tint.

People bitching about a close button and it's location should wise up and realise that you can close tabs by clicking ANY part of a tab with the middle / scroll button.

The new icons look terrible. Definitely need replacements asap. The tab close icon looks like its' from windows 3.1 and it's in the wrong place. I wish there was a more proactive way to get extension developers to upgrade their apps.

Looks really beautifully...

For folks that use more than one OS regularly, I think Firefox is king. You don't have to remember 3 different sets of keyboard shortcuts and you get all those lovely extensions. I tried Safari and Camino, and they are pretty and fast, but seem neutered when coming from Firefox.

It does look a little out of place in OS X, but there are themes for that (I think they were even featured on TUAW). Icons are a non-issue as Firefox makes it super simple to change them to whatever you want.

Actually, 3.0 isn't even an alpha release, it is a nightly build that won't become an official release until Mozilla considers it one...

The new UI looks terrible. I thougt they were set on making Firefox feel more like a native app on OS X, not the other way around. This seems to break just about every UI convention available.

The icon sizes are 24x24 for the big variants and 16x16 for the small (instead of the conventional 32x32 and 24x24), and the icons themselves looks washed out and bland. The tab close button is on the right instead of the left, like in any other tabbed OS X app, and the search field has a new look that doesn't look at all like the standard OS X search field. Just to name a few things.

Let's hope that Aronnax will have some themes available for the 2.0 beta soon: http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

#7: Version 3 is not yet in beta form. It is an alpha test version for developers.

Adblock Plus works with 2.0b2. Link: http://adblockplus.org/en/