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Software Next Gen Firefox Reaches Alpha 2
Brandon Hill (Blog) - May 13, 2006 8:41 PM

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17 comment(s) - last by UNHchabo.. on May 16 at 5:00 PM

Mozilla reaches second milestone in Firefox 2 development

The developers of Mozilla Firefox 2 have reached their second milestone release on the way to the final build. Developers have made a host of changes from previous builds of Firefox 2 and encourage testers to download the latest release and provide feedback.

Some of the new features included in Bon Echo Alpha 2 include inline spell checking in text boxes, automatic browser restore in the event of a crash (currently provided to FireFox 1.5 users with the SessionSaver plugin), new search plugin manager, search suggestions for Google and Yahoo! searches and improvements to the extensions system for better security among other things.

There are builds available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but proceed with caution, it is alpha!

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and perhaps the most wanted addition

By Snuffalufagus on 5/13/2006 9:29:08 PM , Rating: 5

is releasing memory when no longer needed :)

RE: and perhaps the most wanted addition

By Nocturnal on 5/13/2006 10:33:13 PM , Rating: 2

Is it really? Has it finally been fixed? I'm going to dl.

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RE: and perhaps the most wanted addition

By BaronMatrix on 5/14/2006 12:57:10 PM , Rating: 1

No joke. That's why I went back to IE. IE 7 is pretty good. It isolates each tab so one tab crasheing doesn't affect the others. With FF I had to reboot my 2GB RAM PC almost once a day cause it would make RAM vanish. I think it was because they make global defualts for all tabs. People like me will end up at a site in 3 or 4 different tabs over the course of a day. If they fix that I'll come back. I love the extensions.

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RE: and perhaps the most wanted addition

By smitty3268 on 5/14/2006 1:57:44 PM , Rating: 2

Well, there is no reason to reboot - just close Firefox and then open it up again. Problem solved...

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RE: and perhaps the most wanted addition

By mxzrider2 on 5/14/2006 11:05:17 PM , Rating: 2

mine does the same thish it were that easy. since when it goes nuts it makes my entire computer goe nuts. and i have to restart the entire computer

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RE: and perhaps the most wanted addition

By Suomynona on 5/16/2006 2:25:12 AM , Rating: 2

If you are using the pipelining tweaks, make sure you are not opening too many connections at once.

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So long for the compact browser

By outsider on 5/14/2006 11:04:15 AM , Rating: 2

Once Firefox gets at version 4 another 2MB browser will come out that will strip away all features of Firefox ;)

Thats what men usually do. They build big stuff to see it crumble. On second thought, this is what nature does.

RE: So long for the compact browser

By Zurtex on 5/15/2006 12:57:47 AM , Rating: 2

Have you any idea how difficult it is to build a full fledged secure browser?

It's near impossible to start from scratch, I imagine any new 'slim' browser will just be built on top of pre-existing code. For example Firefox is just built on Mozilla code, so are other browsers, others yet are built on top of Internet Explorer.

I doubt some entirely new browser is going to emerge any time soon and Firefox is doing really well at keeping slim. In terms of actual features the normal end user will see will be:

Spell Check
Anti-Phishing (will be enabled in Alpha 3 later this month)

The latter will be a must have of all browsers these days, it is in IE7 and I imagine will be in a newer version of Opera soon enough. The spell checking thing doesn't get in the way at all, it's incredibly smooth and just works. The only other new feature is recovery on crash, which has been sorely missing from Firefox for some time. Other 'features' are generally just existing features but handled better, tabs improved, RSS feature improved, Extensions / Add-Ons improved etc..

I don't see Firefox being replaced with something 'slimmer' any time soon, it's part of their philosophy during development to work at being just what is needed for the user.

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RE: So long for the compact browser

By UNHchabo on 5/16/2006 5:00:18 PM , Rating: 2

Besides the fact that if you wanted to, you could take the Firefox source code, remove all of the "bloat", and compile the "slim" version yourself.

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Spell Check

By mjrpes3 on 5/14/2006 1:22:56 AM , Rating: 3

The spell check feature is very, very handy. It works like MS Word, highlighting misspelled words as you type. After using it for the past couple hours, I can't live without it.

The other feature that I'm quickly getting used to is the close button on tabs; even though I'm used to pressing the middle click button in some cases pressing the X is working more naturally.

And so far the alpha is pretty stable, no crashes or bugs that I've found yet.

However, extensions are all broken. But the extension menu itself seems to have gotten a nice update, as you can now press a button and it will search for any updates for all extensions you have installed (unsurprisingly, none are available right now).

So far, I'm liking what I see.

RE: Spell Check

By newcastlenellie on 5/14/2006 4:11:27 PM , Rating: 2

I've been using the alpha for a while now, and it is being very polite and hasn't crashed, but i don't have the X button on my tabs to kill them!
however cheers for the note on using middle button, i didnt know about that!
I'm liking it too

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*cough* *cough*

By bounds on 5/14/2006 11:04:20 AM , Rating: 5

quote:
Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Bon Echo milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

By Xorp on 5/14/2006 3:00:24 AM , Rating: 2

Aren't they working on 1.6 at the same time?

RE: ?

By bersl2 on 5/14/2006 5:04:16 AM , Rating: 2

At one time, the 1.5 branch used a version string starting with "1.6"; however, there will not be any such release. 2.0 is the continuation of the 1.5 branch, while the trunk will be used for 3.0.

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It's NOT a Beta version

By UlricT on 5/13/2006 9:04:45 PM , Rating: 2

It is an Alpha, unlike what you claim in the last line :)

No secrets

By rmaharaj on 5/13/2006 9:20:45 PM , Rating: 2

What's with the sensationalist title? Nothing has been "revealed"; the development process is totally open.

Opera

By bombledmonk on 5/14/2006 3:54:16 AM , Rating: 2

Well, as soon as this gets into beta it might warrant an attempt to tear Opera from my browsing hands. I always have both installed, but I just find that Opera is overall a much better browser at the moment.