Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation may have released the first alpha version of the open-source browser Firefox 2.0.
Key features in this “First Alpha” include a “Places dialog” that allows users to find and revisit recently accessed web pages based on the content of the page rather than the URL. Additionally, there is a system that allows for remote disabling of browser extensions.
The open-source browser development team decided to “freeze” the code—this code constitutes Firefox 2.0 First Alpha—on March 14. However, according to another announcement on the Mozilla Developer Center website, this “code freeze” may have facilitated the early release of the alpha version yesterday.
Mozilla’s “tinderbox” server will automatically compile and package the latest code snippets of Firefox as this server gets updated, naming this update package Firefox 2.0 First Alpha as of last weekend.
However, this update is still for internal testing within Mozilla. It will be officially released once the testing process is complete. If the testing concludes successfully, the alpha version will be launched; otherwise, the testing will continue.
Unlike previous beta versions that contained all features but still had bugs, alpha versions lack many of the features expected to be included in Firefox 2.0.
The “tabbed browsing” feature of Firefox is indeed very useful, allowing users to browse multiple web pages simply by clicking on tabs. This time, Mozilla plans to add an “Undo close tab” feature to help users revisit pages they accidentally closed. Unfortunately, this feature will only be included in the upcoming “Second Alpha” version set to be released next quarter.
Also included in the ‘Second Alpha” will be a spell-checking feature directly in the browser, which has faced some challenges in integrating code into the desktop email application Thunderbird.
