Firefox 2.0 ‘Bon Echo’ Takes Its Baby Step

It’s just an early alpha release at this point, but Mozilla Firefox 2.0 “Bon
Echo” is an early showcase for the next round of the modern browser wars.

The first browser war was a blow-by-blow, feature-for-feature battle between
every Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer release. The new browser war
isn’t going to be much different, as both Mozilla and Microsoft ramp up their
next major version upgrades.

The first alpha in the Bon Echo release cycle is different from previous
Firefox alphas, such as the 1.5 “Deer Park” release.

Bon Echo is far from stable or complete, though Firefox 2
is on a very aggressive schedule, with a stable final release
expected in August of this year.

The new version is expected to offer an updated user interface,
new history and bookmark system, search, extension, RSS and security
enhancements over the current stable version of Firefox.

Mike
Beltzner, user experience lead at Mozilla, recently said on his blog that the first Deer Park alpha code was known to be “really stable.”

Bon Echo, in contrast, introduces more new end-user features that have not yet been fully tested, making the release more of a real alpha.

“We’re purposefully pushing this alpha out as a real alpha, which means that
the code is shaky, so it’s meant for testing purposes. I’m not saying that
it’s unusable or unstable; we don’t know of any data loss bugs at this
point,” Beltzner wrote.

“I am saying that it’s not going to provide the same
level of polish and shine as our previous ‘alpha’ releases.”

The alpha 1 release includes initial attempts at a revised
extension manager. One of the aspects of the new extension manager is
something called “extension blocklisting,” which will block “bad” extensions
from running.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.