25 October 06

Firefox 2.0 is out

You may have read it from the BBC with their appallingly titled article Firefox browser for the Web 2.0 age [cue hundreds of non-techy readers emailing their ISPs to upgrade to Web 2.0]. You may have read it from one of thousands of other blogs that have already covered this story. Yes, it’s arrived. Firefox 2.0 has been released.

But is this merely a marketing exercise for Firefox? Like a browser version of the space race, Microsoft and Mozilla have been battling it out to see who can release their browsers, but compared to IE7, there hasn’t been a marked improvement in Firefox 2. Apart from the new skin, which now makes the Mac version look somwhat decent, and the completely undersold microsummaries feature, is there anything new that warrants a brand new versioning number? The average web user does seem to like whole numbers for their programs, so if IE7 and Firefox 1.7 went head-to-head, I wouldn’t be surprised if think users would be more drawn to a “brand spanking new” IE to a “updated” Firefox.

I have to give some credit to Microsoft, they’ve really improved their browser, by pinching, I mean implementing, valuable features from other browsers, but that’s okay. Surely browsers should be caring about giving users a valuable experience, not trying to one-up other vendors. I can definitely see why people hate Microsoft and IE, a lot of my time is spending fixing IE’s CSS bugs, but it has improved greatly. Still not top of the class, but was anyone’s expectations that high?

When it comes to browser wars, shouldn’t we all just be content with the choices of other people? Does it really matter if some guy in America on Digg/Slashdot is using Opera instead of Firefox, or using Netscape 4? There’s so much animosity and pompousness between browser users that you wouldn’t get anywhere else (excepting Mac/Linux/Windows but that’s a whole new topic…). Seriously… it’s only a browser.

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