Firefox 2 in Ubuntu

After my last post, I decided that enough was enough, I wanted the real deal: Mozilla Firefox. A little experimenting later and I had switched to the official 1.5.0.7 version. You can read the instructions on my site (Edit: that link is for Edgy now; for Dapper, see this page and search for “Iceweasel” ;).

I then decided, that since I was getting the official version and FF 2 is due out on Tuesday anyway, I might as well use the RC 3. Here are some things I noticed:

- both official versions I tried (1.5 and 2.0) seem to be faster; probably because they’re compiled for 686 instead of 486 like the Ubuntu version was iiRC.

- fonts look a little different (even in just the official 1.5 version) on some sites like Wikipedia, but not bad and easily tweaked.

- the non-removable Go button and “Quick Find” are hateful. Fortunately, there are extensions to clear up both of these problems: No Go Buttons and Find Toolbar Tweaks

- half of my extensions are broken! :) Clearly 1.5 has been popular to write for; if you can’t live without them, you might want to hold off on upgrading until more are updated.

- tabs now have individual close buttons which will take a bit of getting used to. There is also a nifty down arrow that when clicked lists all the titles of the tabs.

- spell checking in form fields is really nice for blogging ;)

- the default theme is a bit dark for my liking; I would switch back to the 1.5 theme (though I do like the new reload button), but the particular package has an odd side-effect, it makes the toolbar wider! Hopefully a future version won’t have that issue and/or someone will introduce a lighter version of the current theme.

Overall, its quite a nice browser and I’m happy to be using it :)

Update: Nightly Tester Tools got most of my extensions working again :-)

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