Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Alpha Peeking Out (Or Not) 216
anadgouda writes "Mozilla Firefox 2.0 alpha is released. The links for download were not available directly on Mozilla.com website. Being Alpha, all features might not work and most of the plugins might not be compatible." Reading thru the comments, it appears there's some disparity as to whether or not this is actually just a naming scheme that they use; but let me reiterate that there has been no official announcement from Mozilla, so take with a giant grain of salt. Some good screenshots at OSdir.
Linux is a Minix clone (Score:2, Insightful)
Where would we be today if Linus came along and said, "Well guys, I'm working on a Minix clone and it's going to be totally k-rad, and I'll keep the development open to anyone who wants to help out, but you can't download it anywhere. Sry, kthxbye!" ?
Not that the Firefox team is all that willing to let anyone just start developing the core stuff, but note the nick and try not to concentrate on that.
Please don't ruin tabbed browsing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that firefox has just one "x" button that closes the current tab, rather then a close button per tab, is a *feature*, not a bug. Users of Lotus Notes, like myself, are all too familiar with what happens when each tab has a close button: you often click on the wrong one, and destroy the wrong tab! With Firefox 1.5's single tab close button, you can never accidentally close any tab: you can only close the tab you are now seeing.
So I hope that if the "improvement" of having many close buttons makes it to FireFox 2, it will at least be configurable, so that users made miserable by the new feature could at least disable it.
Re:I'd consider alpha if I knew new features. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NOT released. (Score:5, Insightful)
Editors, do your job! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Looking forward to it (Score:2, Insightful)
what about google and firefox being in same bed?
doesnt mozilla bend over backwards over googles millions? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/11/05392
oh and last i checked google are making billions from marketing
so to put the 2 together
THEY ARE going crazy adding features to please the marketing droids
Re:Please don't ruin tabbed browsing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But isn't this all open source? (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, the source code is there. But claiming it is a release (as in Mozilla.org's) when it is not is just misinformation. A minimum of honesty in advertising would say you've made your own fork of Firefox.
Secondly, you don't need to give out source unless you give out binaries. So you could (though this is only realistic on smaller projects or those controlled by one company) say "When we make a new release, we'll release the source". I think Apple did that with their Safari browser.
Third, the GPL doesn't change trademark law. You can take the code, but you can't release under the same trademarked name. You can make a clone like CentOS is of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but you can't release under the name itself.
So when YOU make a release YOU'LL say so (presumably under another name, since Firefox is trademarked). It only gets stupid when other people is making release statements on behalf of someone else.
Thru? (Score:1, Insightful)
You could at least bother to change "thru" to "through."
Re:I'd consider alpha if I knew new features. (Score:3, Insightful)
I just finished upgrading the last extensions to 1.5, and already you're going to break it again
If the new datastructure design doesn't really flex along the old model, make a freaking sandbox that runs the old extensions in an emulated mode which is on-the-run translated to the new calls.
Sure new features are insteresting and new possibilites tempting, but it's hard to keep track all the time. If backward compatibility can't be done, do the sandboxing and emulation. I don't care how slow it gets, i want it to work.
Re:Portable Firefox 2.0 Alpha (Score:3, Insightful)