Recommending against Firefox 2.0, at least for now
At least for the time being, I would not recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 2.0, which came out a week or two ago. It has some nice improvements, but they’ve removed some of the flexibility, which has resulted in me needing to change hidden settings and (just now) code in order to get behavior that used to be default. In my opinion, the improvements don’t outweigh the drawbacks.
For instance: in FF1, clicking on a link to a PDF would either open it in an Acrobat applet or prompt you to either open the file in the Acrobat program, or save it to disk. Which of the two it offered depended on what MIME type was used (application/pdf or application/octet-stream). This was reasonable.
In FF2, it either opens the PDF in an applet (depending on how you have it configured) or prompts you to save it to disk. The “open” option is gone, because of a decision that all application/octet-streams are potentially dangerous, not just .exe files, and that the user can’t be trusted to decide for himself. From my point of view, that’s not reasonable. I can accept the .exe case, even if I don’t like it (and I hear there are extensions that let you get around that problem), but not for .pdfs.
It’s compounded by the fact that this is a task that I do literally dozens of times per day for work, and I’m certainly not about to save each of those files to disk just so I can go hunting for them, open them once, and then delete them. That would be going from one keystroke (“Enter”) to “Enter-Win-E-mouse-click-[figure out what the file was called]-scroll-mouse-click-click-Alt-Tab-Alt-F4” or “Enter-Alt-Tab-Tab-Tab-Alt-F-O-[figure out what the file was called]-[type first few letters of filename]-down-down-down-down-Enter-Enter” (and it doesn’t help that most of the files will be named something like “November letter.pdf”).
What’s worse, though, is that, unlike the other gripes I’ve had with FF2, this one isn’t configurable, even from a hidden configuration option in about:config. You just need to put up with it. Or change the code (which is the classical example of why open source is better than proprietary software, and it’s what I did, but I’m still annoyed).
I’ve yet to see what else is going to slow me down (I’ve been running FF2 for about two hours of light usage so far), but based on that find and the default minimum tab width (described in one of the recent links), I don’t think you should install FF2 at this time if you’re more than a novice user (and less than a code hacker) — wait for 2.0.1 or 2.1 and see if there are enough complaints that the developers open things back up and set the defaults to be a little more friendly to power users. Or, at least, keep a copy of 1.5.0.x handy, so that you can go back if you find that the changes aren’t to your liking.
