SillyDog701

[beanboy89]

The Mozilla Corporation has made the second preview of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 available, Bon Echo Alpha 2.

Here's the changelog:

What's New in this Milestone?

There is a lot in Bon Echo Alpha 2 that we need you to play with and give us feedback on:

* Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
* Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behaviour is slightly different
* Inline spell checking in text boxes
* Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
* Search suggestions now appear in the search box autocomplete for Google and Yahoo!
* New search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
* Improved support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
* New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
* New Add-Ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes
* Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
* New search service that supports Sherlock and OpenSearch engines
* Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
The Burning Edge has a more complete list of notable bug fixes for this milestone.

Release Notes

Downloads:
Windows Installer
Mac OS X Disk Image
Linux tar.gz File

FTP Directory

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20060324 SeaMonkey/1.1a

[Andrew T.]

I'm trying it out. I'm slightly more impressed by this release than the first alpha out the door, in spite of the "Places" feature being absent (R.I.P.).

* Close buttons now appear on every tab

That said, I still fail to see how anyone could conceive this development as an improvement. All this does is add clutter and decrease efficiency. I may need to get used to this if it isn't axed by the final release, though.

Speaking of clutter, the search engine droplist has been divorced from the search provider's icon and moved to the other end of the bar. I don't mind this, however, since the resulting button is linked to the respective search engine's website, and the tool itself now contains a handy "Manage Search Engines" feature.

* Inline spell checking in text boxes
* Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash

Now these are some good new features! I like them already.

Surprisingly, the browser still runs well on Windows 95 no matter what anyone says. I've heard that the newest "trunk" nightly builds have been using MSVC80 DLLs that break compatibility, however.

(Does anyone find the clipboard capabilities to be unreliable, though? For me it's taking three tries before I've successfully selected and copied text within the browser window.)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8.1a2) Gecko/20060512 BonEcho/2.0a2

[Fulvio]

I feel that this may be more like a 1.5 and 1/2, but I really love the spell checker. Now Extentions are Add-ons in the Tools drop down.
I doubt that Bon Echo will go anywhere, though, since they are working on the Minefield (FF3.0), out of which I managed to get out alive. And that one is more like FF1.6 and 1/2.
If they keep up that way, they will have Firefox 8.x, in no time.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060414 K-Ninja/1.0.2 (Samurai)

[Mandrake]

Surprisingly, the browser still runs well on Windows 95 no matter what anyone says. I've heard that the newest "trunk" nightly builds have been using MSVC80 DLLs that break compatibility, however.

The trunk builds (what will eventually become Firefox 3) require Windows 2000 or higher to run, along with current versions of Mac OS X and Linux.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firedolphin Firefox/1.5.0.3

[Antony]

Bon Echo Alpha 2 has a built-in spell check That will be very useful for people like me who don't speak English. (I did not try Bon Echo Alpha 1.)

However, I've searched around the Preferences, I can't find the place to turn it off. (Except under the context menu.)

screenshot of the Spell Check under Bon Echo,

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1a2) Gecko/20060512 BonEcho/2.0a2

[J-M]

It appears that the Burning Edge changelog URL attached doesn't work yet.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; fi; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3