After a few days of speculation, rumor, and uncertainty, Mozilla has released the official alpha of the next Firefox browser. It's nickname is Bon Echo, a reference to the most beautiful provincial park in Ontario, Canada. Aside from the regular "big fixes" that we see with every new release, here are the new features (straight from the horse's mouth):
- Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
- New data storage layer for bookmarks and history (using SQLlite)
- Extended search plugin format
- Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
- Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
Check out the official release notes. As you'll see, this is not a full-featured browser, and it's not more stable or more robust than current builds of Firefox 1.x. Yes, it will eventually be Firefox 2, but it's only for developers and testers. But it is also worth getting excited about if you're following the current browser development trends. Of those new features, the improvements to extension and plugin behavior are probably the most noteworthy. Also, the addition of SQLlite databases for activity tracking should be interesting.
We'll put the browser through its paces and offer a full review in a few days!
