The major new features in Beta 2 are:
Firefox support:
We now support Firefox. Sweet. If you use Firefox to visit an HD View site, for example our Gigapixel page, you will now be prompted to install a Firefox plugin. The install page is also available directly here for Firefox and the new IE plugin here. I've worked with most of our partner's to have them make the necessary changes to support Firefox.
Auto Tone Adjust:
The basic idea is that HD View now acts a bit like the auto-gain of your camera. So as you zoom into dark regions you should see additional shadow details. It actually is more sophisticated than auto-gain and generally produces better looking images. For example in regions of the big images that are flat due to haze, the auto tone-adjust feature increases the contrast.
Other features:
The Beta 1 XP download was 1.5MB. Beta2 is now much smaller. There is now a single 500KB download for all supported versions of Windows. We've also fixed several bugs, like 'perspective' images being clipped when zoomed in, international permalinks, tool-tips not showing up and +/-/arrow short-cut keys not working sometimes.