It looks like it is going to be an exciting year for one of the most popular browsers out there, Firefox.

According to the Mozilla Blog, the main changes in Firefox 2 will be:

New Bookmarks and History - Improve the browser’s Bookmarks and History systems to improve their effectiveness as renavigation aids while at the same time improving the back end for speed and extensibility.

Tabbed Browsing Enhancements – Make tabs behave more like windows in the operating system environment, making them behave more as users would expect.

Improved Basic Content Type Handling – For things like RSS/Atom feeds, mail links etc. Improve discovery and handling user interfaces.

Web Search – Improve the discoverability and adaptability of the search UI within Firefox.

Bug Fixing – Bug fixing at all levels where risk is low and yield high, e.g. the blank tab download bug, platform stability, etc.

Other features that are a possibility, but are not yet deffinite, are:

Visual Uplift – A freshen of the visual design of Firefox while maintaining high levels of system integration.

Inline Spell Check -The rise of applications like web mail, blogging etc highlight the weaknesses of HTML’s textarea widget. We should at the very least offer people the ability to spell check their submissions.

Exit Survey – We’d like to know why people leave Firefox. A survey on uninstall would help us find ways to make the software better in future versions.

UI Consolidation and Simplification – Consolidate and simplify user interface in the browser window tying together features in meaningful ways where possible.

I personally think that although there are some good future features there, they should be working more on fixing the memory leaks, as that’s what’s most likely to make people uninstall! As for an exit survey, that has to be the most annoying thing anyone can do.. The last thing you want to have to do when uninstalling somthing is fill out some survey saying why!

The inline spell check would of course be a great idea, (if only searching with ctrl+F would allow you to search text input areas too!) especially for forums and the like.

The expected release date for Firefox 2 is around the middle of this year, with alpha/beta testing starting as early as Ferbruary.

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