Firefox 2 Reviewed
by Doug Anger, Technology Columnist

Last week, version 2 of the web browser Firefox was released to the public. This column reviews some of the new features in Firefox 2 and provides tips for getting the most out of them.
Security Features
The most significant feature of the new release is phishing protection.

Phishing is a common tactic used by criminals to steal credit card numbers, passwords, and the like. The perpetrator sends a victim an email claiming to be from a bank, online financial service, eBay, et cetera and the victim to click on a link to the website. The link actually takes the user to a copy of the website they intended to view under the control of the perpetrator. When the victim enters his/her username, password, credit card number, et cetera, it is transmitted to the criminal who can then use it to do all sorts of devious things.

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Firefox 2 offers protection against phishing that works in one of two ways. Either the browser keeps a list of known phishing sites on the local computer to compare to, or it asks Google (or potentially some other third party) to compare every page you visit to its list of known phishing sites. (Note that Google will keep a log of every page you visit if you choose the latter route.) For privacy reasons, I suggest you turn this feature on, but do not ask Google to verify pages for you.

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While either method is better than nothing, neither one comes close to cautious, intelligent Internet browsing. (Be sure to read this column next week to learn more.)
Add-on Manager
New to Firefox 2 is the Add-on manager, which can be invoked from the Tools menu. The add-on manager allows you to add, remove, and configure extensions and themes. This allows you to customize your browsing experience easily from one place.

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Search Engine Manager
The once-unwieldy search engine management of Firefox 1.5 are now gone. (In the old Firefox, you could only remove search engines with a hack.) Firefox 2 comes with a Search Engine Manager that allows you to easily add, remove, and reorder your search engines.
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For a massive list of search engines you can add to Firefox, visit http://mycroft.mozdev.org/.

New Look and Basic Functionality
Firefox 2 features a new theme and minor changes in basic functionality. Among these are close buttons in each tab, scrolling between tabs, and a menu listing all open tabs. Unfortunately, individual close boxes disappear when you have too many tabs open. Also, as tempting as it may be to open thousands of tabs at once, this may cause some computers to crash.

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Firefox also includes a spell checker that is used automatically on large text entry fields in online forms, such as webmail systems. However, the spell checker will not correct grammar, which can lead to interesting results.
 
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