Firefox β

OK So 2 Beta is rolling out. One of the prime updates I've seen is the inline spell checking. Whilst when I suggested this as a boon to a colleague he correctly observed that auto spelling checking in all online fields is pretty pointless, usernames, addresses, passwords and zip codes. He's correct and the wondrous people at the Mozilla foundation are aware of this, hence spell checking is only turned on in text fields.


One of the most requested functions in the web app I designed recently is a spelling checker. Now whilst I could research server side spell checking, with all the involved overhead - surely nothing is going to match the inline Word'esque red under lining. Along with right click suggestions, I've already started using it when writing these posts instead of the Blogger.com spell checker which I forgot most of the time anyway, as I'm sure you've noticed.

As you can also see I'm a big fan of the BugMenot site, I have also installed the FF extension, or "add-on" as they have been renamed in FF 2.0


bugmenot.com is a great resource for getting free logins to the kind of sites that want you details to access, free but member content. You simply enter the url of the site you want access to and it suggests a user name and pass word to try, it is great for check train times, of hooking up with an old NYT article. The extension allows you to right click on a page that requires logins and it will attempt to populate the fields from its database.

I, whilst being a mac user, do love Firefox. It is great for developing, ColorZilla and the FF dom inspector is second to none. Whilst one is offered in Safari, it pales in comparison to Firefox. The point and click highlighting is amazingly useful for tracking down an extraneous div living in a layout.

For those of you who live off your extensions, there is new extension add on, see what I did there ?, It basically lies to your old extensions to disguise the fact that you are using a newer beta version. Whether this will fool everything I don't know, I do not live off my extensions - I have few development tools and that's pretty much it. I've not seen it in action yet, but I've read there is a crash recovery system now for restoring all those old tabs, built in, bout time!

They have diddled with the RSS support. Still backing their idea of live book marks. A mechanism that I preferred until I was persuaded to try Safari properly. Firefox still supports the use of external feed readers, google reader, yahoo, bloglines etc.. I was recently gonna try NewsHutch after hearing an interview with the developers on the "Web 2.0 show."

What I don't like is how they've moved the close tab buttons. I read about this change on their blog prior to seeing it inaction. I have posted previously, at length, about why putting this interface component in that location (on each tab, previously the single close was at the end of the row of tabs) is a BAD thing. I think the model to most users (IE Windows people), the close button is on the right hand side of a window, and in a Multiple Document Interface you would still have the close button on the top right.

Putting a close on each tab is one of the prime reasons that I find myself closing tabs instead of activating them. Bad Firefox.