Firefox 2.0 ‘Bon Echo’ Alpha 1
The alpha version of Firefox 2.0 is now available. Not to be relied on (it is an alpha), and apparently wont run while another firefox is open. Nevertheless, it could be interesting to check out. Firefox 2.0 Alpha.
Brief Review (Mac Universal Binary version)
Bon Echo is fast! Some people in class have heard me raving about Camino because of it’s speed, and Caminio feels rather sluggish by comparison. I wont be using the Firefox 2.0 alpha as my main browser at this point though, tonight I’ve found my bookmarks vanishing from the interface, and no doubt there are more crippling bugs. Disappointingly, there seems to be few improvements to the User Interface, but there are more planned improvements, such as “undo close tab” (yay!).
Cool! I’ll download it and give it a whirl on linux here
I was hoping they’d have much more SVG support built in (like the animation stuff we were doing in class)…
Taa Adam!
Hi Adam, thanks for your helping hand when I ask you, much appreciated.
I found that I had two versions of Firefox and now using the new one with all the plug ins that I was rying to download before. I thought a new version wold just override the old one.
I won’t try this new one until it has been de-bugged. I am not a very experienced Mac user yet but I do love my little macmini.
When I get some $$$$$ i would like a max mac
I’m looking forward to when Camino incorporates what’s new in Firefox 2.0. Considering how fast Bon Echo runs, to have the core put in the even lighter weight and MacOSX optimised Camino will be nice.
The new SVG stuff that has been included sounds more useful to me than animation. The ability to have text follow a SVG path, to make it curve or whatever but still be text. Animation is nice, but can’t really be used on ‘normal’ pages.
True… i didn’t read the full spec for the SVG text… does sound useful!
So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows.
Knowing you’r an Opera user I thought this article might be of interest to you.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#testresults
I’m not an Opera user – I use Camino, a MacOSX optimised Gecko-based brower (Gecko is the rendering engine used by Mozilla and Firefox), with ‘pipelining’ activated to speed it up further.