Deer Park Alpha 2/ Firefox 1.6a1

Firefox seems to be finally getting it's act together with the next version of it's browser - codenamed "Deer Park". I am a content user of the now free (!) Opera browser, and have always look down my proboscis at anyone claiming that FF is a better/more user friendly browser. But now, it appears I will be hard pressed to do so :P

The notable improvements (that have taken care of some of my pet peeves) that I've noticed are:

• Page based error messages : All error messages are displayed in the browser page rather than with a popup dialog.
• URLs displayed in address bar immediately: Previously, this used to happen only once the website had actually responded (and resulted in increased hair loss all around the vurld)..
• Tab re-ordering: Allows drag-n-drop reordering of tabs (which was previously possible only with the use of the miniT extension)
• Updates in the form of patches: No more downloading the entire program for an update!
• Auto updates & auto installs - yay!
• A *much* improved options window.
• Force "_blank" links to open in a new tab rather than a new window: A very satisfying patch :P

All in all, a vaaaaaaaaaaaaast improvement. A few of these features were probably possible using extensions, but I absolutely *loathe* them unless they offer a completely new functionality - for e.g. the webdev toolbar ..

I should probably also note that this is not the Deer Park 1 Beta (or firefox 1.5 beta 1).. This is Deer Park 2 Alpha/Firefox 1.6 Alpha 1 (as the title suggests), a nightly build that I downloaded a week ago. But I'm told that the above mentioned improvements are present in both versions.. I haven't checked the release notes..

I still prefer Opera for most things, but I find myself using 1.6a1 on a regular basis without any of the yelling, cussing and throwing fits that were common place a few months back with earlier avatars of Firefox..

-K