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[Nvyseal]

It's a new day for Mozilla. Only a few days after OneStat reported that its Firefox Web browser has reached nearly 13% market share worldwide, the open-source software development organization this morning released Beta 1 of Firefox 2.0 With this release, Firefox devotees will be widely testing the next version of the browser.

New Features

Mozilla was forced to push off some of its more ambitious goals for Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3.0. The list of what's new, as a result, is modest, and yet the changes are all welcome.

Firefox 2.0 adds built-in phishing protection. According to Mozilla documents, it warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries.

Firefox adds a built-in RSS and XML feed-viewing capability, which works like the Feedview extension available for earlier versions of Firefox and a similar feature in IE7. The new functionality lets you click on an RSS or XML link to see headlines and descriptions of the items in feeds. A Subscribe Now button lets you save the feed URL.

Although it's a small feature, Firefox 2.0's new inline spell checker will be highly appreciated by bloggers, forum posters and anyone who types into Web-based text fields and sometimes makes typos and spelling mistakes.

A new feature Mozilla calls bookmark microsummaries allows bookmark titles to display a bit of text that represents the current state of that specific Web page. So, when you bookmark a Web page that has a microsummary,

Mozilla has added several minor refinements to its tabbed browsing features, the best of which is a new Undo Close Tab function. Simply right-click the tab bar, and the last tab you closed during the current session will be resurrected when you choose the "Undo Close Tab" item from the pop-up menu. This functionality was previously available through a wide range of Firefox extensions, so formally including it in Firefox is a good move.

There's also a new Session Restore function that automatically offers to reopen all the tabs that were open in Firefox prior to some unexpected problem, such as a program or operating system crash or a power outage.

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