The new Firefox beta just came out and I have been playing with it a little and to be honest with you I am not that impressed with the changes over the last beta.

The visual enhancements that you can clearly see (ie, shadowed mouseovers on new sleeker icons), are really not that impressive. Personally I think the new icons and such look pretty cheesy, hopefully they will be cleaned up more by the time the browser comes out.

I didn’t really test out the anti-phishing alerts because I am not really sure where to go on the web to get solicited. However I do think the idea is a good one and I hope they pull it off well. Only time will tell here.

As far as enhancing the search bar in the top right corner; the suggest feature appears to be nothing more than a drop down of terms you have previously typed in. It doesn’t seem that intuitive. I do however like the idea of offering search extensions from a web page, much in the same way a developer can advertise to a browser an rss feed or a favicon. But, I couldn’t really test this out to see how it worked.

Also being able to resume your browser session is a nice feature, but it is one that I really don’t much care to use. The only reason I got to experience it with this beta is because it crashed a couple of times. But I am sure they will have that fixed up before they release it though (it is just a beta after all).

The new add-ons manager looks promising but you really can’t tell if it is any good because you can’t install any extensions. This is because of the compatibility restrictions and the lack of 2.0 extensions (this is just because the browser is not out yet). I have also always thought that it would be nice if you could search and browse the themes and extensions within the context of the options menu; instead of it just launching a new window.

The bottom line is that Firefox 2.0 is going to be a great step of improvement from Firefox 1.5, but this beta is nothing to get excited over.

Here is a review I read that inspired the post.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3852026030.html

Here is where to get a copy of the beta to try for yourself. Just be careful, it is not a finished product.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html