Browser Security News

Not to be outdone by the debut of Internet Explorer 7 last week, the Mozilla team has released Firefox 2.0 with a minor makeover, a few new features, and a number of enhancements to existing features. It’s not a drastic change from the 1.5 series, but Firefox 2.0 bring enough improvements to make the upgrade worthwhile.

Many of the "new features" were already available as extensions before, but there’s a substantial difference between making a feature available as an extension and building it into the browser. While savvy users will seek and find (or even write) extensions to satisfy their every whim, the Mozilla folks are trying to reach a broader audience — an audience that by and large won’t assume that it can get phishing protection, spell checking, or additional tab features by adding more software to their browser.

The new release includes a few subtle look and feel changes, but nothing dramatic or even very noticeable. I suspect that if you swapped Firefox 2.0 for Firefox 1.5 on most average users’ desktops, they wouldn’t notice the new icon set or theme changes.

One thing that users will notice right away, or at least I did, is Firefox’s spellcheck feature. When you are writing an email using Gmail or another Web mail client, or composing a blog entry, or just posting a comment to a forum, Firefox will provide the familiar red squiggly when a word is misspelled or not in the dictionary. Right-clicking on the word will bring up a context menu with spelling suggestions (if there are any) and an option to add the word to the dictionary. The spellcheck feature is fairly clueful — it doesn’t highlight email addresses or URLs in text fields, and isn’t on by default for search fields and other text entry fields that you would usually not need to spellcheck. Linux.com | Review: Firefox 2.0 is a solid improvement