The Mozilla Foundation released Deer Park Alpha 2 10 days ago. It is a significant update because it is what will become Firefox 1.1. I’ve been looking at the OSX version to see how much has changed over Firefox 1.0.6.

Unfortunately for some, there aren’t many drastic changes. But that doesn’t mean that this isn’t going to be a worth while update. One of the biggest new features that’s been added is the ability to rearrange tabs. It’s a very well implemented feature, but it is rather sluggish. Though this should change by the time the final release comes out

Another pretty big feature, for mac users at least, is the claim that it has better aqua support, as well as a Safari profile migrator. The profile migrator is pretty easy to use and let’s you import your bookmarks, history, cookies and preferences from safari. The improved aqua support isn’t really all that visible, as it still uses non aqua interface elements for forms on websites and also uses Jaguar style tabs. If you’re looking for an OSX native gecko based browser then it looks like Camino will still be your best bet, unless things change between now and the release.

It also claims to have a better pop up blocker. The major problem with this is that it still doesn’t manage to block pop unders, which are becoming increasingly popular. Another downfall is that the browser doesn’t see any faster than the current version of Firefox. Rendering is still as fast as usual but the actual application is still slow. Whether this will change before the final release is yet to be see but I hope that it gets fixed before then.

It’s best to remember that this is still alpha software and as such isn’t feature complete. Many of the problems I’ve outlined may be fixed before the final version is released. Unless you want to have the absolute latest version then steer clear of Deer Park for now and keep using the latest 1.0.x build of Firefox. Though if this is a sign of what is to come for Firefox 1.1 then it’s shaping up to be a good release. The only flaw will be that there will still be better browsers on the Mac.