I installed Firefox 2.0 beta today on my iMac. I had been having some problems with Firefox getting slow and eating up loads of memory. The Mac versions of browser haven't been all they could be and I heard that better Mac support was one of the priorities of version 2. So far it does seem to be doing much better. With six tabs open it's using 109 MB of RAM and 313 MB of virtual memory. Before the upgrade that was getting up around 500 and 1500, respectively. The interface has some minor improvements, which makes the fox more at home in this OS X habitat.

There are several new features that I should get some use out of. At this very moment I'm enjoying the built in spell checker. They've also added Xs on each tab to close them and an 'undo close tab' feature (one of the first extensions I always used to install). Built-in phishing protection, saved sessions and improved rss support also made this version. If you view an rss feed now you don't see the ugly source, but a nicely formatted version of the page with options for subscribing. All of these things were possible in extensions before, but having them built in is even better. The extension system gives the Firefox developers a great insight into what features people want. They're doing a great job of moving forward.

The new search engine manager makes it much easier to add more engines to the search window in the top right. Theme and extension management are now combined in an addon manager window.

I was nervous about upgrading because there are some extensions I can't do without, but I have Adblock, WebDev and Gmail notifier all working, so I'm pretty happy. Greasemonkey and all-in-one gestures aren't working at the moment, but I can live without them until they get updated.

The advanced bookmark system was pushed back to a later release, but I think this is going to be a very strong release with some great features and improvements. The world's best browser is about to get even better.