Somehow I’ve managed to get firefox beta 2 installed on the parents in law computer. I’m not quite sure how it managed to get installed as I was on 1.5.0.6 with automatic updates turned on. As usual it was prompting me that a new version was available to download and then all of a sudden 2.0 was active! All of the extensions apart from tabmixplus were gone, but I’m not really sure how many were installed on this computer in the first place so it’s not that much of a problem. TabMixPlus was there, but disabled as it is incompatible with Firefox 2, probably because a lot of the functionality (but not all) has been duplicated into firefox2.
With ff2, the active tab is in bold with all the other tabs inactive – a great improvement over previous versions as it was often hard to tell which was the active tab when there were many (20+) open . However, it manages to do this by only opening up a certain number of tabs across the screen, any more tabs get added to a drop down list to the right of the screen which actually displays all of the tabs, not just the ones that don’t fit on the screen.
You can’t middle or right click on the drop down list to close the tabs though.
The other thing that is different is that using the mouse scroll wheel when hovering over the tab row scrolls the tab row, but the active tab does not change until you click on it – this is different to how tabmixplus behaves. I’m not quite sure which behaviour method I like – it would be nice to get a choice between the two.

One of the addons (they’re not labeled extensions anymore) that I will need to add is mouse gestures as I am so used to right-left clicking to go back and left-right clicking to go forward – I really miss that on pc’s/internet explorer that don’t have this option enabled or installed.

Microsummaries are a neat bookmark extension which means that if you bookmark a site that has a microsummary, the name field has a dropdown arrow next to it. By selecting the Live Titles information, the bookmark data will change as the web page is updated. Great for having a mini ticker like functionality, but not much use if you are used to using certain keys to navigate to a site in your bookmarks, or just trying to find the site (ie Absoblogginlutely! stands out a lot better than Firefox2 or Google Analytics or Event 1030) as it will no longer be called the same – see woot for a good example with the deal of the day where this would work.

Oh – spell checking is now available within the browser – this post has 11 “mistakes” in it – www is a spelling mistake apparently!