I have been testing Firefox 3 for a bit now, and I have found a very pleasant improvement of the Remember Password feature.

In the current Firefox 2.X, the Remember password feature acts as a popup dialog.  The problem with that is that I often doubted to click on ‘Remember’ because I wasn’t sure this was the right User/Password combination for certain sites, so I often clicked on ‘Not Now’ when I thought I might have got that Password wrong.

Now on the Release Candidate, you actually login, and instead of a popup, it actually opens the dialog as a bar right below the tabbing area.

This allows you to wait a little bit and see if the password actually worked.  If you were able to login to the protected area, then you can click on ‘Remember’ from the new dialog.

That is great!

I don’t know if you ever noticed that if you held the button of your mouse (on a Mac) within a webpage for a few seconds, it would activate the context menu.

This was a bit annoying… Especially if you were trying to copy some text, and before you started dragging your cursor to highlight the text you paused for a few seconds, then the menu would come up.

This behavior was common on previous Firefox versions, but not anymore. =)

I haven’t seen any comments about this, but I think it is a great usability improvement. Now, to get the context menu, you have to do the usual… <ctrl + *click*>.

Update: No doubt: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… Some people really hated the idea of losing such ‘feature’.

Update: Well, I guess it is a configurable option. Enter about:config in your address bar, and search for ui.click_hold_context_menus, then set it to ‘true’ (or ‘false’) by double clicking on the property… and voila!

I found this list of things to do before you start using Firefox 2.0.

Some of them are useful, but I guess it depends on how you prefer to use it, and how used to 1.5 you are. But it is a good list indeed.

However, these tweaks to Firefox goes beyond changing the settings found through the ‘Preferences’ menu, so it may not be for the faint of heart.

Via Kottke.

It’s official.

Firefox 2.0 has been released and it is available for download at:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

GO GET SOME! =)

You can also read the Release Notes

This week I downloaded Firefox 2.0 - Release Candidate.

The browser now comes with built-in spell check, and I think that it is one of the best (and most useful) improvements. I love it!

You are there, typing away posting stuff on your blog or emailing through your favorite web based tool, and then you get underlined words that have failed the spell check, just as if you were working on a word processor.

Not only that, it also provides you with alternatives on what you probably meant to type, just like in a word processor. And with this you also give it the ability to ‘learn’ new words, like a name, or stuff like that.

I haven’t tested yet how to add dictionaries from other languages, because they are installed as extensions (or so-called add-ons within the new version).

Note: I am not encouraging anyone to go and download this version, it is not a final release and it is for testing purposes, so wait a bit more.