The other day I saw this eWeek article commenting on the first beta release of Firefox 2.0. The article pretty well sums up my thoughts on the beta as well. Which is that not too much has changed for the user interface except that the tab closing icon has been moved from the right side of the window and onto the right side of the tab. Which I consider a good thing (however I have long since gotten past accidentally closing the wrong tab). They have also improved the extentions and plugins interface, but I didn’t really play around with it all that much myself.

However the one user interface feature they are adding to Firefox 2.0 that I think will keep Firefox’s features ahead of Internet Explorer (even IE7) is that addtition of the inline spell checker for form inputs. It will allow you to spell check forms before you submit them; which is a great feature for a blog or other community web system. This feature has been enjoyed by other browsers (i.e. Konqueror) for some time, but I think by Firefox adding the feature it will be a huge visual thing that will help convince the average computer users to leave Internet Explorer behind. And lets face it Firefox is the forerunner in converting average computer users away from Internet Explorer, so it needs all of the niceties it can get (despite where the inspiration may have come from).

They have also done a lot of work to improve the application efficiency. To be honest with you though, I have never found Firefox to be running noticeably slow. However the computers that I use have relatively new processors and a gigabyte or more of RAM.

Security is also tightented down as well; but you really wouldn’t expect anything less considering their track record. They have had six releases in less than a year since their last major release. Microsoft definitely can’t say the same thing (IE6 released August 2001).

Firefox 1.5 - November 29, 2005
Firefox 1.5.0.6 - August 2, 2006

Unfortunately Firefox 2.0 will not pass the Acid 2 test, but its standards compliance is improved some and still far outshines Internet Explorer 6 (and I imagine IE7 as well). Hopefully by the time Firefox 3.0 rolls around they will have compliance shored up well enough to pass the test. Right now Safari 2, Opera 9 and Konqueror 3.5; as well as a few obscure browsers (iCab, maybe a few others) are the only ones that pass the test.

Here is the link to download the beta. I encourage anyone to give it a test drive.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html

Here is a link to the Firefox Roadmap. It will give you an idea of when the next release will be.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html