Firefox 2.0

Well Firefox 2 has arrived, and after just a day of use, here's my initial thoughts:

• Most average users won't notice any dramatic difference. Most changes are under-the-hood or aren't immediately visible on the default interface. In fact, the only major difference most people will see is a slightly shinier look to the updated UI.
• Some new features, such as the addition of a "close" button on each tab, is somewhat annoying by default. Most any mouse sold today has a third button of some kind (scroll wheel, etc.), and the default functionality of that third button on tabs has always been fine. I found myself disabling the "close" buttons on tabs to prevent any accidental closing of tabs while I clicked among them.
• The in-line spell checker is nice... considering how many times it highlighted misspellings while I wrote this entry.
• I'm going to watch memory usage patterns and see how stable 2.0 is. The initial release of 1.5 was buggy as hell, with horrible memory leaks and lock ups. That situation vastly improved with later 1.5.x releases, and I can safely say that 2.0 does not yet suffer from any of these problems.

All in all, thus far, I highly recommend Firefox 2.0 as a download. I'm pretty sure you have to do a clean install of 2.0, since 1.5 won't auto-update. Either way, get it. And coming up shortly will be my opinion of Internet Explorer 7... and hopefully it's better than its beta releases.