Browser Security News

The first beta of Firefox 2.0 was officially released yesterday, and I couldn’t wait to take it for a spin to see what new and exciting features would be available. After spending the day with beta 1, it looks like Firefox 2.0 has plenty to entice users to upgrade.

I tested the new release on Ubuntu Linux 6.06 "Dapper Drake" on two machines. On the first machine, I moved my .mozilla directory so I could start with a fresh new profile; on the second, I left my profile in place. If you’re going to test Firefox 2 Beta 1, it might be a good idea to back up your ~/.mozilla directory, just in case, so that your profile isn’t corrupted if you decide to switch back to the Firefox 1.5 series.

Firefox handled importing the 1.5 profile just fine, and on the clean slate machine it offered to import bookmarks and settings from my Opera profile when it fired up for the first time. On the machine with the existing profile, Firefox checked all of the extensions I had installed, looked for updates for the extensions (none were found), and disabled the extensions deemed to be incompatible with Firefox 2.0. NewsForge | Firefox 2.0 preview