Quick Trial Report of FireFox 2.0 Official Version

The official version of Firefox 2.0 was released yesterday, and after installing it this morning, I've been using it for about 12 hours now, and it feels pretty good! Here are some quick thoughts:

Good!

1. Most of the extensions I use can still be used with 2.0. For example: GreaseMonkey, Gmail Manager, DownThemAll (the three extensions I use the most all work fine with 2.0, goooooood). Unfortunately, the delicious extension and Tab Mix Plus are not yet compatible with 2.0, but the tab browsing function in 2.0 is sufficient for my needs, so I'll just wait for TMP to be updated.

2. Speed? As someone who isn't very sensitive to speed differences, I always think that the key factor affecting internet speed is the network connection speed. It's hard to tell if the 1-2 second improvement you feel is from the browser or a sudden increase in network speed.

3. Stability? Nice! Compared to IE7.0 which crashed three times in half a day, Firefox is much more stable.

Not So Good!

1. The memory consumption issue doesn't seem to have improved much. Even with only a few tabs open, it's already consuming over 200MB.

2. Google Reader's shortcut keys still don't work properly with FF2 (this should probably be blamed on Google, right?).

Please feel free to add your own thoughts! Let me say a couple of things...

It's been a smooth transition from 1.5 to 2.0, and I'm already looking forward to the release of FF3.0.

By the way, here's an introduction to the three biggest changes in FireFox 2.0 (mainly illustrated with pictures):