Firefox 2 installed – love the spellchecking! – level 100
There's a lot of talk about IE7 vs. FF2. It's all pretty boring for me.
Browsers are boring. They are glorified terminals. Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic
Programmers fame) puts it in an interesting way: (paraphrasing) -We have the same
client-server terminal we had years ago, but now the terminal can show porn.-
That drew quite a few laughs at the NoFluffJustStuff conference in Austin this
past summer.
In short, displaying web pages isn't all
that exciting. What all the browsers have turned to for added value is
add-ins. Add-ins for ad-blocking, popup blocking, anti-phishing, etc. While
some browsers develop all add-ins in-house, I believe the main factor behind
Firefox's success is the large number of add-ins available for free that have
been contributed by the developer community. The other browsers don't have
this. If it weren't for all the FF add-ins, FF wouldn't have much of a leg to
stand on.
Back to my main reason for this post: I
have installed Firefox 2, and I love the spell checking. Anywhere I write text
in a web-page, I get in-line spell checking. Write emails with Gmail, Forum
posts, anything – instant spell-checking. Brilliant!
It is a great feature, previously you had to use an addin to support it.
One change I would recommend is to type ‘about:config’ into the address bar, then type spell into the filter. Then change the ‘layout.spellcheckDefault’ option to a 2.
This will enable it for ALL fields on a form.
Spell checking is great.
The find feature is also great (although it’s been in FF forever).
The little things…