It has been just two years since Firefox appeared on the scene, but this Mozilla browser has surely changed the rules of the game. Firefox brought back the spirit, the innovation and the crowds of followers. Firefox is not only the underdog we are routing for, it is a movement that is strong on business, community and ideas. And with the latest release the Firefox team has shown their razor-sharp focus on software quality and the understanding of what it takes to win the market.

Firefox 2.0 - focus on quality and usability
You are not going to find a lot of new features in Firefox 2.0. What you will find is cleaned up user interface, vastly improved performance and fixed memory leaks. As a technologist, I am very impressed with Firefox's ability and discipline to clean up, to make improvements and fixes that are not glorious, but rather the right thing to do. The focus on quality is a sign of experience and maturity. And when you see it, you know that this team is not going to repeat mistakes that have cost Netscape the browsing market ten years ago.

There are notable improvements in this release around usability and productivity. The first version of Firefox has popularized the concept of tabbed browsing. Two years later the team is back with small improvements that make the tabbed browsing even better. With Firefox 2.0 all new links open in a tab instead of a window. Each tab now has its own close button and there is a handy pulldown that allows the user to switch between the open tabs.

This is not a major innovation, this is an improvement that demonstrates drive to perfection and attention to details common to all great products.

Lets look at another similar example - addition of the spell checking to the forms. This is, perhaps, a subtle, but very useful feature. How many times when filling out the feedback forms you wished that there was a way to check spelling? Well now there is!

Bringing the web closer to the browser
Firefox is also known for integrating aspects of the web directly into the browser. For example, Firefox has a built in search box, which allows the users to toggle between different search engines. Thanks to the Firefox extensibility, you can now search Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Wikipedia and a lot of other sites right from the browser. Firefox 2.0 brings further improvement to the search box, by allowing the search plugins to implement search phrase suggestions.

Another new integration in Firefox 2.0 is RSS readers. When the user navigates to a site that has an RSS feed, the familiar orange icon appears. When the user clicks on the icon, she is given opportunity to subscribe to the feed using either LiveBookmarks or an online RSS reader of her choice. This is another example of an elegant, yet simple integration of a ubiquitous web concept right into the browser.

More improvements
There are a number of other interesting improvements in Firefox 2.0. Always strong on security, Firefox now has built-in phishing protection, which will warn the user of suspicious sites. Persistent sessions will allow the user to optionally restore the state of the application after a restart or crash. There are also improvements in add-on manager, which now helps the user manage both extensions and themes. Developers would be happy to find the full support for JavaScript 1.7 as well as improved security and localization for extensions. The Firefox 2.0 release notes have more details.

Keep the fire burning!
Firefox team is doing an amazing job! They have built a great platform, a great brand, a great product, which together resulted in millions of happy users. According to the chart from e-janco the Firefox share of the browser market is now an impressive 14%.

But lets be clear, Firefox is far from taking over the browser market. Internet Explorer is still dominant and strong in the mainstream. Also, the chart above shows that recent growth of Firefox has somewhat slowed down.

What Firefox needs is another inflection point and grandiose entrance into the mainstream market. This upcoming Firefox 2.0 release does a great job improving usability and stability of the product and actually prepares the browser for the battle to take over mainstream. So the lack of a lot of new is not an oversight (more new stuff is scheduled for 3.0), but rather an intentional move by Firefox team. Firefox has now the keys to open the door and enter the final battlefield.