It's been a good week in the browser world, with major new releases of IE and Firefox. The release of IE7 is a great victory for the consumer, and the Mozilla team, whose track record of innovation over the years have now succeeded in pushing next generation features like tabbed browsing onto every Windows desktop.
From a usability perspective, there are many nice enhancements to Firefox, at this point it's closer to the browser I had wanted 1.0 to be, although still lacking in enhancements to bookmarks and history. A note here, back in late '03/early '04 when I was drafting the roadmap for the releases remaining until 1.0, I had wanted to do a revamp of Bookmarks and History, but it wasn't as important as any of the other features, which were required, and was largely unscoped, so it fell off the list. More important short term things came up again for 1.5 and 2.0, but improvements to Bookmarks and History will come in time.
I contributed to a variety of pieces of 2.0, from tabbed browsing (close buttons, reselect on close) and feed handling functionality I am most proud of, through to laying the groundwork for various enhancements to the search UI (the open search back end and the query suggestion completion thing). It's hard for me to gauge how useful the feed handling functionality is to me personally, given that I haven't really grown my feed collection in a while, but I'm sure it's better than nothing. It's hard for me to switch back to an earlier build of Firefox that doesn't have the new tab close UI however.
On Tab overflow, I think what we have there is probably the best I've seen, it feels more usable than the system in Camino and Safari. The settings are biased towards making tabs readable prior to overflow, and this is tweakable via about:config, but it's not horrible. It may not be the most efficient system possible (please share your ideas if you have them in the newsgroups!) but it works well enough for now. More impressively, the code went from being very buggy to pretty decent (to my eye) in a few short weeks. Kudos to everyone who contributed to it.
A few things I think could have been done better - late changing UI had lots of polish issues in my opinion, and there never was a unification of search and bookmark keywords or an easier way to create the latter. Hopefully these will be tackled in time.
I posted a few weeks ago about Kevin Gerich's excellent new Pinstripe theme for Firefox on the Mac, which really does improve the visuals which have taken a nose dive in Firefox 2 (Windows fares a lot better). But since I've bought an iMac for home, I find myself using Camino most of the time, because it is the real deal - the performance and compatibility of Gecko with the slick visuals of a Cocoa app. Mike Pinkerton blogs about the 1.1a1 release, which you should check out if you're a Mac user, since it has many nice new enhancements (like spell checking).
Good night, and good luck.
i too feel like I'm "stuck" using Camino on my Mac. I use FF on any Windows machine I touch, but it is simply not up to par on Mac. I really miss a lot of the features and extensions in Camino, but FF/Mac is just too ugly and waaaaaaay too slow. Can you confirm any major Mac improvements in FF3, or the rumored Cocoa build?