Firefox 2 Apha 1: unofficial
p2p news / p2pnet: With Bill Gates apologizing for long gaps between Internet Explorer beta releases, reports of a Firefox 2.0 Alpha are floating about.
"It wasn’t announced on the official Firefox site, which basically means it’s not ready for public consumption yet," says Richard MacManus on ZDNet.
"This made me hesitant about installing it. No such concerns for my mate Mike Arrington [TechCrunch], who eats alphas for breakfast. But as he rightly pointed out, ‘I don’t care if it is an alpha, it has to be more stable than v.1.5.’ Fair enough – and if the response to my post about 1.5’s memory leaks is any indication, a lot of others will feel the same."
However, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler was somewhat annoyed by the posts and, "When we make a new release, we’ll say so," he blogs.
"Please don’t report new releases because someone checks in a change to the user agent or similar. If we’re actaully [sic] doing a release, we’ll announce it.
"Thanks."
Be that as it may, " I believe the Mozilla team is shooting for a Tuesday release of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1," says Niall Kennedy on TechCrunch.
"It’s called ‘Bon Echo’ in these early stages to avoid confusion with better tested versions. Alpha 1 is frozen but enters QA testing before official release. The copy of Alpha 1 you download tonight will likely differ from the officially released Alpha 1 as the team tweaks for a developer release.
"Firefox extensions check for your current version to ensure compatibility. Some plugin developers like to test and tweak for each new version of Firefox before releasing a new version.
"You can always download the latest nightly build of Bon Echo anytime you would like and keep up with Firefox 2 planning and progress on the public wiki."
Meanwhile, Bill and the Boyz are watching.
Closely.
Also See:
long gaps – Gates: ‘We waited too long’, March 21, 2006
ZDNet – Firefox 2.0 is here!!! What, it’s not? Oh…, March 20, 2006
TechCrunch – Firefox 2.0 Alpha Released, March 20, 2006
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:28 am
Hey… dont call 1.5 unstable! XD Its the best version I’ve seen so far!
And if you have frequent crashes… just install one of them many session manager extensions that supports crash recovery! BANG no more problems! XD
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:25 am
I dont think it s unstable… but 1.5 and every previous verson was a memory hog! Think of a 512-32 MB RAM trying to run FF, currently eating 150MB, and u ll see why I HAD TO switch to Opera.