Firefox 2.0 alpha

PC Pro reported An alpha version of Firefox 2.0 should be released as a public beta next month. Although part of the long standing roadmap for the open source browser, the timetable was confirmed by the publication of the minutes of the Mozilla.org staff meeting held earlier this month. While the team say that the alpha will not be feature complete, among the improvements slated to appear are better access to History and Bookmark pages, improvements to the tabbed browsing and other user interface enhancements.

I hope they have come up with a solution to the near 100% CPU utilization that the product has when it is refreshing RSS feeds.

The team also hopes to fully integrate RSS functionality so that adding feeds is a smoother process than the current rather hit or miss method. There also plans for enhanced security, blacklisting and anti-phishing measures to be fitted to the new version. However, no details of what they might be have been released yet.

The minutes note that this will be a 'big year' for Firefox with both version 2.0 due for release and version 3.0 already on the drawing board. They also know that Windows Vista is due later this year with Microsoft planning to release Internet Explorer 7.0 alongside it. Little is known about IE 7.0. It is known, however, to feature tabbed browsing and enhanced security, which have been the two biggest selling points for Firefox.

So I.E. will catch up on some features that have been available for a long time in Firefox. I wonder how many years it will take before I.E. implements the features Firefox will be including in 2.0 (much less 3.0)