Since the 1.5.x branch of Firefox has been (or soon will be) end-of-lifed, I decided to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 last week, and have been running Firefox 2.0.0.4 on my Inspiron 2650 with CentOS 4, and my VMware guest at work (also CentOS 4 / i386).
Things that annoy me:
- It feels slow: Compared to the 1.5 branch, something is slowing this thing down. I'm running the same extensions I always have; Flashblock, and Hit a Hint. At home I also have Adblock, Filterset.G Updater, and ChromaTabs. Scrolling and page rendering does not seem as fast as with 1.5.
- I hate the new quick search functionality. /search-string still works, but now to find that thing again, I've got to Ctrl-F to change from the minimalistic quick-search to the real find capability. Why? What does displaying the "find next" and "find previous" buttons add that made it neccessary to tear them out of quick-search?
- I'd like to have the option of returning to one button to close tabs out. I do see the functionality of having tab close buttons on the tabs themselves, but I'd like to have the ability to turn them off and go back to the old way.
- If I want to use the built in Google search functionality, it seems like sometimes if I start typing in the box and hit return, it doesn't do anything. I have to click in the search box and whack the return key again to get it to actually submit the search. This may be a bug...it doesn't always occur, and I haven't been able to figure out yet the conditions to reproduce it.
Anybody else have thoughts on this?
Bogged on Windows too
It has seemed a touch slower, but I haven't been surfing all that much lately.
Regarding what you have come across:
Honestly, the 2.0 release of Firefox strikes me as a bit of a beta release. And it's entirely possible that's what it is, given the 2.0.0.4 designation. Could always try the 3.0 alpha for fun.
bogged
It's not touted as a beta release, although I do feel like quite a bit of the code that the Mozilla Foundation is releasing these days is not up to the same standards as it used to be. They took quite a bit of crap for delaying the release of Mozilla 1.0 about five or six years ago, but I really felt like it was worth it to wait. It was a huge leap forward as far as Linux based web browsing was concerned, and while it had its limitations (which Firefox tried to address, and did successfully, at least at first), it didn't have the code snafus that plague regular Firefox releases these days.
I'm not a developer, but as a reasonably skilled Linux/AIX/Solaris admin that can code when needed, I feel like I'm not too out of my league when I throw down the gauntlet and state that consensus/foundation/consortium driven open-source (and commercial) development project pretty well suck for the most part. They do release products, but they're usually so full of compromise in trying to cater to the lowest common denominator as far as user (or sometimes, developer) is concerned.
Firefox was a good example of a fork that started simply because the Mozilla suite was choking under its weight and excessive features that not everybody really wanted. Even people that used IRC typically didn't use Mozilla's chat. While I initially mourned the loss of the Mozilla mailer (Running Firefox and Thunderbird is just not the same), I was happy with how speedy and down to earth Firefox was. It's starting to lose its way these days.