I've been a firefox user for a long while, and normally stuck with the version of the browser that came with my Linux distribution of choice (currently: Fedora Core 6). Recently, however, the Firefox 1.5 builds that are distributed by Fedora seemed to suck up all the memory on my machine, and for good measure started crashing when they encountered complex web applications.
I figured I could try Firefox 2 as well, so I finally installed the thing.
Overall, I'm not noticing huge feature changes. However, some effects are worth it for me:
- The RSS feed auto-detection is now able to redirect to web based feed readers' subscription interfaces; I can subscribe to a feed in Google reader by clicking on the feed icon in the address bar. That's a huge plus.
- The tabbing UI has improved significantly. I'm finally able to manage my tabs reasonably (as opposed to just accumulating them until Firefox crashes, or until I close the window).
- The entire thing feels faster and leaner. That might be related to my previous point above about tabs, though.
Overall, I'm still amazed how a graphical UI that lets me run a terminal, a graphical web browser, an HTML editor, (recently Skype, some other instant messaging software), and an office suite seems to consistently eat all of a PC's memory, at any given point in the curve of PC and software development history.
(Off to order a memory extension. ;-)
