If you've given the newly-released Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 a spin, you've noticed that there aren't a lot of eye-popping new features. However, there are some subtle improvements that make it a nice upgrade. After the jump, screenshots of the few things I noticed.


In addition to built-in spellchecker shown above, Fx 2.0 also has close buttons on every individual tab - a much-needed feature (especially on Mac OS X.)


There's also better (but still not great) RSS integration. When you click on a site's feed icon (at the far end of the address bar), a preview page with the option to choose your feed reader appears.

You can bypass this page by permanently setting your feed reader of choice, to automatically subscribe to a feed. Set your preferred reader using this dialog (notice the Bloglines, Google Reader and My Yahoo! defaults):


Finally, the new History menu maintains a list of recently-closed tabs with the option to re-open them.


Power extension users will note that most of this functionality is available in 1.5 with a few extensions, but now that these features come by default and are supported by Mozilla, more users will benefit from them.

If you haven't yet installed the Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 because you didn't want to lose your extension functionality, reader Brad reminds us how to fake out extensions into working. I haven't tried that myself (Scrapbook et al is just too precious to me to risk it) so do proceed with caution.


Early Adopter Download of the Day: Firefox 2 Beta

Update, 7/13/2006: Just found Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 beta page, which lists two other features I missed: search suggestions as you type and automatic tab session restoration on crash, too.