Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Alpha Peeking Out (Or Not)

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

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Where's the link?

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...

[urdak]

I can't believe that after Firefox actually implemented tabbed browsing *well*, people insist on ruining it in the name of "progress".

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.

[bunratty]

Unless you're fairly deeply involved in QA (i.e. you have a Bugzilla account and plan to report bugs you find), just skip alpha versions and stick with a stable release. Wait until the beta or a release candidate is out much later this year.

Re:NOT released.

[osgeek]

People are going to be idiots... you would hope to see better from the editors, though.

Editors, do your job!

[dmbtech]

You MUST wait for an official announcment before announcing all over the media (/.) than an alpha has been released when it really hasn't. I really suggest you change that announcment editors and say something like update "Not really released". You can't just go reading a blog and think that is news. People, DO YOUR RESEARCH!! Alpha 1 HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED!

Re:Looking forward to it

[wwmedia]

At least with an open source project you know they're not going to go crazy adding features to please the marketing droids.



what about google and firefox being in same bed?

doesnt mozilla bend over backwards over googles millions? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/11/053924 5 [slashdot.org]

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...

[CastrTroy]

Am I the only one that finds clicking the mousewheel to be a stupid way of middle clicking. It's right up there with pushing on the control sticks in XBox/PS2 as a button. It's hard to push these buttons without having the scroll wheel/joystick move. Most people aren't even aware you can use these as buttons. I think if you're going to have a third button on the mouse, it should be a real button.

Re:But isn't this all open source?

[Kjella]

Isn't this all a community written thing? Can't someone just take all the source-code and say "It's released"? This is my version of the released Firefox.

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?

[xx_toran_xx]

So what, is slashdot like myspace now?

You could at least bother to change "thru" to "through."

Re:I'd consider alpha if I knew new features.

[moro_666]

I think it's extremenly annoying how lightly they take the braking of backward compatibility. Please spend 1 month more on proper planning and datastructure design and get a standard out that will let the extension work for at least 2 years.

  I just finished upgrading the last extensions to 1.5, and already you're going to break it again :S

  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

[SirDaShadow]

Sir, you just made my day. I already had portable FF 1.5. All I did was copy the profile folder to the 2.0a1 one, and presto...all settings...all extensions were migrated. Of course, to make them "compatible" I had to use Nightly Tools Extension. The only one that "broke" so far was tabbrowser extensions, and I'm sure it's going to be updated pretty soon...