Development [LWN.net]

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

The Bon Echo Alpha 2 release of the Firefox 2 web browser was announced this week. We looked at the alpha 1 release in March.

Bon Echo Alpha 2 is the second developer milestone on the path to Firefox 2. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many of or new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 2.

New features in this version, which include some of the alpha 1 additions, are:

The default new window behavior opens a new tab, not a new window.
Each tab now has its own close button.
Text boxes now feature inline spell checking, errors are underlined in red.
The browsing session is automatically restored in the event of a crash.
The Google and Yahoo search boxes have automatic search suggestions.
Support for the Sherlock and OpenSearch engines has been added.
There is a new search plugin manager for configuring search engines.
Previewing and subscribing to web feeds has been improved.
There is a new Microsummaries feature for adding real-time information to bookmarks.
A new Add-Ons manager is available for managing extensions and themes.
Extension system updates improve security and extension localization.
SVG text on a path support has been added.

More details on this version are available in the release notes.

Your editor decided to give Bon Echo Alpha 2 a test drive in a real-world situation, working on this week's LWN edition.

Installing the browser involved downloading, uncompressing and extracting a tar file, then running ./firefox in the resulting Firefox directory. The older version of Firefox had to be shut down before Bon Echo A2 would start.

The first impression was that the default fonts were somewhat ugly. Font selection is a personal choice, and it was easy to use the usual Edit/Preferences window to select the more pleasing Bitstream Vera Sans font.

Editing an LWN article (see the screen shot) involves using several HTML text boxes, this activated the inline spell checking feature. The red underlining is not terribly hard on the eyes, and it shows up words that are suspect. Surprisingly, Firefox is not in the spelling dictionary. Many, but not all, html tags also show up as spelling errors. A useful addition would be the underlining of html code in another color.

An odd behavior was observed when typing characters into the smaller text box that is shown in the example screen shot. Using the left arrow key to move the cursor worked as expected, but pushing the right arrow key, or the up and down arrow keys caused the window to refresh, and focus was moved to the lower and larger text box. Sometimes, but not always, clicking the mouse in one box would also cause a similar refocus. Clearly, there is still a bug in the code, one should expect that with early releases.

On the other hand, earlier versions of Firefox have had problems involving the loss of text that was yanked into the mouse buffer, that behavior seems to have been improved.

The new search engine features seem to be handy on the first try, typing a word in the search engine field at the top right side of the screen causes a pop-up window with related search topics to show up. The search engine window also has a new arrow that activates the search engine configuration tool.

Despite a few odd behaviors, Bon Echo Alpha 2 was able to handle the exercise of editing and writing LWN articles for several hours without crashing. There are a few known issues with this release, and probably a few more which will show up now that the software is available for general testing. Nonetheless, some useful new capabilities are being added to Firefox. Firefox should hold its position as the default Linux browser for some time.

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