When I asked Computerworld readers (in last week's ) what they liked and disliked most about Firefox 2.0, the answers were a little surprising.

The most thumbs-up feature was inline spell checking. Spell checking for a browser? Anyone who writes blogs, forum posts, blog comments, or works in Web forms on social networking sites, for example, will find Firefox's spelling checker a boon.

It works almost exactly the same as Microsoft Word's built-in spell checker, underscoring an apparently misspelled word with a red line. By right-clicking the underscore, you can opt to change the spelling to any of the suggested spellings, or choose to add it to your local dictionary, to be remembered -- and ignored -- from then on. While it's not exactly a major feature, Firefox's spell checker is one of the few features that Microsoft didn't match in Internet Explorer 7.

The most thumbs-down change according to Computerworld readers --perhaps even more surprisingly -- is the loss of the Firefox Mail toolbar button, which under the previous versions of the browser gave you a shortcut to reading or composing e-mail.

Most readers were indifferent to the mild update of the default Firefox theme, which amounts to little more than revised toolbar buttons and some very minor tweaks here and there. There was also little praise for the new Windows installer, provided by Nullsoft, which Mozilla promises will do away with several longstanding Firefox installation problems.