Digital Journal — Firefox fans should pour themselves a glass of bubbly, because the latest version of the Web browser will be officially released on Tuesday, according to a posting on the Mozillazine message board over the weekend.
The Mozilla Foundations’s Firefox 2.0 promises several cool new features as well as more updated security controls. New add-ons include phishing protection, which reports if a visited site is malicious; session saving, which restores Web pages if the browser crashes; improved access to Web feeds; in-line spellchecker; and search suggestions.
In light of the popularity of Firefox’s tabbed browsing, the next generation browser will include a “close” button attached to each tab (now, you have to right-click and scroll down to “Close Tab”).
Squaring off against the new Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0 has all the making of a champion. Sure, the improvements are merely minor compared to IE7’s makeover (like tabbed browsing…sound familiar?), but the more user-friendly any browser becomes, the more market share it’s bound to attract. IE7 has been the leader for too long, and it’s time an open-source upstart like Firefox started winning fans.
The new features should already be exciting browser-istas, since something as simple as session saving was overlooked by the big-wigs at Microsoft. Expect the market leaders to start looking at young’uns like Firefox for inspiration, which can only help the key demographic: the average Web surfer.
