What's to come with Firefox 2.0

As a true goober, or professional geek, I try to check out everything I can before my users start asking me questions about it. This includes everything from new platforms like Apple's Intel platform and AMD's new AM2 platform, all the way through to new software. Today, I'm looking at a preview of Mozilla's Firefox 2.0, currently known as Bon Echo.

One of the most handy things that this release will eventually bring us is "Text Field Spell Checking." While most people are thinking "Why do you need spell checking in a web browser?", I personally can attest to it's helpfulness in posting things like blog entries and forums posts. While my grammar may still be a little sub-par, at least I know my spelling will be good without cutting and pasting into TextEdit first.

Other big additions to the Firefox realm are an improved search field and a couple of security features. Soon Firefox will compare the URL address of a website to a list maintained by Google to help prevent phishing. Also, by using McAfee's SiteAdvisor, we can see if a website is known to sell out your email address to spammers and the like.

All in all, this release of Bon Echo is very stable, and has enough enhancements for me to finally drop Safari as my browser of choice for Mac OS. I will also be using it exclusively on my Windows machines, and I can only hope for the speed enhancements to follow over. All ready in development is Firefox 3.0, known currently as Minefield. I have used it, however without Universal support for Mac OS X, usage was just painfully slow. Once Firefox 2 is out, I'll start playing with that one more.