I was extremely sceptical at first to try the optimised Firefox 2.0 builds, because each time I’d used a build like this before, I’d never noticed a significant speed difference. Well, Paul Stamatiou said it was “noticeably faster”, so I thought I’d risk wasting 5 minutes giving it a try.

And? It is a ton faster! I was already impressed by the speed gain from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 with the official release, but this optimised build must seriously double the page loads for me. Also, the UI just seems more responsive as well. Give this a try for sure.

Mozilla officially released Firefox 2 this morning at 1am. Some of the new features include:

• Search Suggestions – This was something I was badly missing from Safari after installing David Wantanabe’s excellent, Inquisitor plugin. You can now see instant search suggestions directly from the Firefox search box!
• Tab Scrolling – There are now two arrows either side of the tabs when you have hundreds of them open. Tidies things up a lot.
• Session Resume – When you close Firefox, and then re-open it, it restores everything as it was. Even text in text boxes! I’ve not tried it yet and am a little scared to with this post in WordPress…
• Spell Checking – I’d still love to have the native Mac OS X spell checker in Firefox, but I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. However, the one now included in Firefox is great. Does the job.
• Individual Tab Close Buttons – Now need for TabX plugin anymore.

Bravo to the Firefox team! Worth the wait.