Firefox 2.0.0.2 Released!

Friday, Mozilla officially released an update for Firefox 2.0 bringing it up to version 2.0.0.2. There are a number of fixes in this release, including a fix for a recently reported bug talked about extensively here on NIST.org's site.

The latest release also includes enhancements to make it more compatible with Windows Vista, and also now supports Afrikaans, Belarusian, Georgian and Kurdish languages. From the Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 Release Notes, you can read about over a 120 fixes and enhancements to the browser.  

I've been aware of Firefox since its inception, and would every once in a while download and install the latest version to play with. I'd always uninstall it after a few days, and go back to my favorite (at the time) IE based browser, Netcaptor. Netcaptor was one of the first IE based browsers to make use of tabs, which of course, is standard fare for a browser nowadays. I really liked Netcaptor and used for years. 

Then, development stopped on it, and I moved to Maxthon. Now here was a powerful browser. Tabs, loaded with security features and really efficient. It's still the most efficient, in terms of resources used, of all the browsers I've used. It's also very actively supported and has a strong following along with a number of plugins available to enhance it.

Then, when Microsoft released IE7, I tried to start using it. I tried to like it. Heck, I used to be an big IE fan. Well, I have to admit - IE7 is the version that lost me as a fan and there began the search for a browser that could provide (or have a good equivalent of) all of the features of Maxthon.

First up in the search was K-Meleon. K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine. I liked K-Meleon, and I still do as a matter of fact. Wasn't very polished, but it flat out loaded pages more quickly than any another browser I tested. The feature list was a bit on the short side unless you wanted to customize it by manually editing configuration files - not for the technically challenged-  but it was so fast, it was actually funny. The kind of fast that almost made it seem like it loaded pages before you clicked on a link :) 

Then came Opera. This is a good, solid browser - based on the Presto rendering engine - fast and feature rich, but I just never felt comfortable with it. I really don't have any complaints about it - it was a actually a very nice browser - it just didn't feel right. Opera also has a good community behind it, and as a result has a number of very useful (and some not so useful) plugins and enhancements (called widgets) available on Opera's Widgets site.

I also tried Seamonkey. Another development branch of Mozilla and based on Gecko, Seamonkey is billed as the "all in one Internet application". It was ok, a good browser to be sure, but was a bit bloated to my liking. I've never been a follower of the "one application for everything" school as in my experience, many of these application suites never seem to perform any one function as well as a program that is designed to to only that single task.

I also tried a few others that didn't last long on my PC - Netscape, Flock, Avant, Slimbrowser - to name a few, but none of them seemed to fit the bill.

Firefox has been one of the applications I would always keep installed on my PCs at home and at work. I need it to support various activities, so I keep it around. For the last couple of months, I've been using 2.0 as my default browser and configuring it my liking, and while I liked it, I always felt it was one of the least efficient (in terms of CPU and memory usage) and wasn't one of the faster browsers of the ones mentioned earlier. But, I started to use it more and more exclusively as my default browser.

All of this leads to where this article started - with Firefox 2.0, and specifically, the latest release, v2.0.0.2 released on Friday.  After downloading and dutifully backing up my profile (thanks to the great little utility MozBackup), I installed it and fired it up.

What a difference!  This version is actually faster than previous versions. I mean noticeably faster. Maybe it's the optimizations added for running it on Vista, or some of the bugfixes and memory-leak issues that have plagued the browser (in my experience). Whatever they've done, it worked. And at least, for now, Firefox is a keeper.

Get it here:

Take care,

Steve (aka Cheeseflavor)