Firefox 2 was released two days ago, and I got an upgrade in yesterday’s world update. Compared to Firefox 1.5.x, the speedup is barely noticeable, but there are some neat features I have demanded for a long time:

Built-in spell check This is quite essential for all the bloggers. It marks the typo on the fly, and you can easily add the new word to the dictionary. Unfortunately, I do not find any configuration in the Preference for the spell-check, but I believe that there would be a neat plugin ready in a few weeks to tweak: import/export custom dictionary, more language support, etc.

Search Suggest Yes, I must admit I am a bad speller. The search suggest would help to reduce the key strokes. Google, Yahoo and Answers suggests work out of the box. Other search engine add-on developers may catch on later.

Some joyful surprise:

Javascript 1.7 Javascipt 1.7 steals lots of cool features from Python, I would compare them head to head later.

And some annoyance:

Default ugly font The default font is quite ugly(left), you need to override the font and theme in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

and restart the Firefox(right).

Backspace no longer stands for “Back” The Firefox 2.0 uses a new set of Hotkeys, the Alt - left arrow is assigned to Back, while the Backspace is assigned to Page Up. Thanks for your consideration for the Laptop users, Firefox team, but I prefer to stick to my habit. Anybody knows how to override the default Hotkey settings?

Update: Thanks to ehh, the solution is in page about.config,
change browser.backspace_action to 0.

Memory leak? It is still unclear whether the core or the add-ons have memory leak problem. Is it feasible for Firefox developers to QA the add-ons listed , and issue “Designed for Mozilla Firefox” certification for qualified add-ons?