Last month, I tried out the Flock browser beta for a few days, but ended up abandoning it because their “cool” features weren’t things that I could use, and it was just too much of a memory hog. This week, I’m trying out the Firefox 2.0 beta. Aside from being able to make it crash within 5 minutes (I have a talent for that, as many developers who have worked with me in the past can attest to) by copying and pasting some HTML around between sites, it seems to be pretty stable. Four things that I’ve noticed so far:
- The close buttons for the tabs are situated on the tabs themselves (like Flock), rather than a single close button at the right-hand side. I’ve had a few mistakes with that by closing the right-most tab rather than the one that I’m viewing, but I can get used to that. The nice thing about it is that you can close a tab without viewing the tab.
- When the browser crashes, it has the decency to ask on restart if I want to reopen all the same windows, which it does — including any text that I had keyed into text fields before the crash. Handy, although wouldn’t be necessary if it didn’t crash. 😉
- I can subscribe to a site directly in Bloglines and other feed readers by clicking on the feed icon that appears in the right side of the address bar (the feed icon was there before, but wasn’t an active control). Sweet.
- As I type in any text field in the browser, such as the one that I’m typing in now to create this blog entry, it spell-checks my text, underlines unknown words with a dotted red line, and allows me to add them to the dictionary or replace them with a known word from a (right-click) context menu. I’m totally in love, just for this feature alone.
Definitely enough good stuff to make it worth the upgrade, although you may want to wait until the final release if you’re not into the occasional crash.
I’ve found that if you’re willing to give up some beloved Firefox extensions, Opera is the best browser to use. It’s the fastest and I find to be the easiest to use when managing many pages at once.
I’ve never even considered Opera, but may give it a try.
Hey Sandy,
Glad to hear you’re trying out browsers, but sorry to hear that Flock didn’t do it for you. Our next major release, scheduled for the fall, should be based on Firefox 2.0 – so we’ll get to take advantage of some of the cool features you mentioned.
If you’re trying out Flock again and have any questions or comments, please let us know.
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock
Will, I’m using Flickr more now, so that Flickr toolbar may be handy. The memory problems need to be fixed, however, for me to try Flock again.