Just Out--Play Around with Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Release

It's not for the faint of heart or ready for prime time but Mozilla has released what they are calling a developer's preview release of Firefox 2.0, an alternative to Apple's Safari Web browser. Here's some of the new Mac-relevent goodies:

• Built in Phishing Protection.
  
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
  
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
  
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
  
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
  
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
  
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
  
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
  
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
  
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
  
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
  
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
  
• Extended search plugin format
  
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
  
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

We downloaded and installed it and it crashed the first time it opened checking for updates to the theme we use with v1.5.0.4. Afterward it worked fine for an hour or so with no crashes. Download the latest build of the beta 1 from this Mozilla Web page. [Dana Baggett]