The Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 1 web browser [LWN.net]

The first developer preview release of the Firefox 2 browser has been announced: "Bon Echo Alpha 1 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 1."

[Firefox] Not being an active member of the Firefox testing community, your editor ignored the warnings and downloaded a copy. The download and installation instructions are fairly routine, involving the usual download, gunzip, and tar operations. The browser did not start on the first try due to an older version of Firefox (Version 1.0.7) that was running on the Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" system. Shutting off the older browser solved that problem, and some quick tests showed no problem going back to the old browser after Bon Echo was shut down.

The release notes are somewhat preliminary, changes include:

Changes to the tabbed browsing behavior.
A New SQLite-based data storage layer for bookmarks and history.
An Extended search plugin format.
Security and localization updates to the extension system.
New SVG text support using svg:textPath.
Bug fixes (which are currently not listed).

The browser tabs have one obvious change, each tab now has its own red "X" kill button instead of one kill button on the right that deletes the active tab. There is a new button in the third row of the browser control buttons at the top, this brings up a list of history, bookmarks and subscription information and is presumably related to the new SQLite system. There are no other obvious changes to the user interface, users of older versions of Firefox will be able to easily find their way around the browser.

There have been some changes to the Firefox extensions and themes that may cause some compatibility problems with older additions, this is an area of active development. There are a few known Issues involving user interface changes and the history and bookmarks manager that are known to cause problems.

This release is by definition, not ready for widespread use. Your editor will not be using it for production work until it is a bit closer to stable status. That notwithstanding, this new release appears to function well when visiting a variety of web sites, and seems to work as a browser should.

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