Product Reviews

The 2.0 release of everyone's favourite 'alternative' web browser, Firefox, is all about features. We say alternative but, frankly, these days Firefox is nearly as mainstream as its competitors, Internet Explorer and Safari. It has become a well-established and recognised brand, and has gained a respectable chunk of the market.

The first and most welcome of the new features is Session Restore, which is designed to save your open windows and tabs in the event that Firefox crashes or has to restart. This is very handy indeed, and has been a long time coming (similar functionality has been available in rivals such as Opera for years).

You can use this same feature to ensure you pick up where you left off. To switch it on, go to the Main preferences panel and select 'Show my windows and tabs from last time' in the drop-down next to 'When Firefox starts'. This feature could do with being a little more accessible via a menu command, but it's great to see it nonetheless.

Another nice new addition is suggestions in the Search Bar. Start typing a word or phrase into a Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search and you'll be presented with a drop-down list of helpful suggested

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terms.

The list of available search engines (which also includes Amazon.com, Creative Commons and eBay) is enhanced by a 'Manage search engines' panel that automatically alerts you When Firefox loads a page that might contain additional search engines you could add.

Spell checking is now included inside web form fields, which is another enormously useful feature for anyone using web applications such as shared workspaces, wikis or weblogging software.

Support for RSS feeds is much improved, and now includes Safari-style live bookmarks that can be viewed directly in Firefox. If you prefer to browse feeds using online services such as Bloglines, My Yahoo! and Google Reader, there's excellent built-in links with those as well.

Phishing, a common scam whereby web users are taken to a fake page that purports to be that of a big company such as eBay or an online bank, is the target of another new feature. If Firefox suspects that a page you've opened isn't legitimate, it will flash up a large and impossible-to-ignore warning message, giving you the chance to think twice before going any further.

The interface has been tidied up, too, with some subtle changes to the icon set and to various controls and widgets - so subtle, in fact, that most users probably won't notice.

Many of these new features were available before, but only as extensions to Firefox. Building them straight into the browser is a smart move that will help broaden Firefox's reach in the long run. We encountered a handful of bugs and one or two visual glitches, but all of them were minor and didn't affect the day-to-day performance of the application.

Despite the bugs, the expanded feature set and cosmetic touch-up make Firefox 2.0 a worthwhile upgrade.