UPDATE:
Here's a list of the pros I found about 2.0 so far:
Memory usage actually seems to have gone down somewhat - ok ok it probably couldn't have gotten any worse! I was half expecting memory to go through the roof with 2.0, but surprisingly it seems to actually free up memory ok when you close a lot of tabs or excess windows.
Generally speed wise, pages seem to load a lot faster than before.
Recently closed tabs are available via the history file menu. Can't remember that being there in 1.5.
The number of days of browsing history to keep track of also seems to be configurable in Firefox 2.0 - maybe it was in 1.5, can't remember seeing it obviously though.
Built in anti phishing tool is pretty nifty. Tried browsing to a phishing spam mail sent to my gmail account and Firefox spotted the site was fake, blacked the window out and popped up a warning instead with a few options on it - all in a jedi mind concentrate stylee. Smart.
Updates to extensions are now listed in a separate tab when they're found in the 'add ons' window (Tools, Options). Makes it easier than paging down through pages of extensions looking for the ones that have updates.
Interface is v snazmondo :D
And here's a list of the cons I have so far - so far it's mainly to do with tabs:
Tabs in 2.0 now have individual 'X'/close buttons on them. I find this quite annoying - apart from taking up extra space on the tab bar, the close buttons are now harder to hit with the mouse than they used to be. In 1.5 the X button was always to the far right of the tab bar, but now it's in a more random place on the tab bar depending on what tab you're reading/wanting to close. In 1.5 I'd just hover over to the right of the tab bar, whack on the close button and job done. Now though in 2.0 there's a split second where I have to think 'mmm where's the X this time then...?'. Minor annoyance but no doubt I'll get used to it.
UPDATE:As soon as I'd written this, sods law, the first thing I read was an article about pros/cons of Firefox 2.0 on Wired with a fix for the problem - just change 'browser.tabs.CloseButtons' in about:config to 3 instead of the default of 1. Still think this sucks though having to use about:config to change this kind of thing. Also there's something in those comments about setting Firefox to not resize images automatically - the option to do that has now dissappeared in Firefox 2.0 - you have to change stuff in about:config to fix the problem. That's another gripe I did notice but didn't think too much about last night.
Come to think about it I don't like the drop down button that lists all the current tabs open either. Again there's a fix but it involves editing the userChrome.css file found in the Firefox profile folder.
Here is a list of other tab tweaks for Firefox 2.0.
There's a new feature to allow Firefox to restart itself after extensions etc have installed themselves. Unfortunately though this useful feature doesn't seem to have a user interface - it's only available to extension installations (and themes?). It'd be good to be able to restart the browser when you make changes in the 'Addons' window - for example when you disable/enable some extension or another and want to restart the browser but keep your session going.
Too much faffing around in about:config!!!
Ok, yet another problem that needs config changing to fix it. I'm not mad about the 'restore from crash' functionality - if firefox crashes it automatically restores the last 'session' - group of windows/tabs. Unfortunately I often close my machine down using the power button on the PC and any open windows are 'gracelessly' killed - so next time I boot up, Firefox cheerfully asks me if I want to restore the crashed session which isn't really what I want and is quite annoying tbh.
The resolution is - surprise surprise yet another hack - to edit the config so the value of the boolean config option browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash is set to false. In my case the key didn't even exist so I had to create it first and set it to 'false'. Haven't actually tested it out yet but presumably it works and doesn't give the annoying nag about resuming the session after a 'crash'.
Have to say all these config changes I've had to make so far are pretty tedious and if it weren't for this article I'd probably forget how I did it all if I needed to reinstall. By the same token though the very fact you can hack away at the config at all via about:config so easily is quite nice.
Mozilla have just released a new point version of Firefox, version 2.0. I held off installing and testing the beta/release candidate versions for a while because so many of the extensions I use wouldn't work with 2.0, but now 2.0 is officially out it seems most of my extensions now work ok.
There were 6 extensions that weren't compatible with 2.0 - most of them I could live without, but there was one,
Clone Window, that I really couldn't do without. Clone window allows you to create a new tab/window with the history of the tab/window it was cloned from, without this the world just isn't right, bit like going out on the tiles for a few beers and waking up the next morning wondering how the fsck you ended up in a tent. :D
I ended up finding a similar extension called
Duplicate Tabs which effectively does the same thing as Clone Window and more even. As well as creating clone tabs/windows, it even allows you to merge all open windows or a selection of open tabs into one window which is quite cool (not sure how much I'll use it but it's a good idea none the less).
Only trouble with the Duplicate Tabs extension is that the default key mapping to clone a tab - ctrl-shift-t - wouldn't work. Turns out that mapping was already in use by the
Web Developer extension - tried changing the mapping in the web developer options, but that didn't seem to make any difference which was annoying.
Eventually tried to change the mapping using
yet another extension called
keyconfig - although annoyingly keyconfig wouldn't install because it wasn't compatible with 2.0! Grr... so I've now kind of hacked things up so it WOULD install by adding a boolean key
extensions.checkCompatibility in about:config in Firefox and setting it to false - this stops Firefox checking the compatibility of extensions when they're installed or started with Firefox. Not entirely sure this is a good thing yet since it's now enabled all the extensions (those 6 above) that weren't compatible with 2.0 and there's a chance that might cause problems. Will see.
Generally though moving to Firefox 2.0 actually seems like a positive experience - browsing does seem to be faster in some unquantifiable way. Whether this is just the smoother looking interface making things seem quicker... I don't think it is... pages actually do seem to load faster now so I'm a happy bunny right now. Once all my extensions are compatible without forcing them I'll be even happier :)
If you've not upgraded as yet, I'd recommend it now it's offical.
I'll add any extra comments about my experience as I go on.
