TechBulletin

Did Firefox 1.5 Rock you? I’m sure that most of are gonna give a blatant no to this, and though I’m a humongous firefox fan, I have to agree with you. Firefox 1.5 was not the revolutionary product, the browser which changed our world with it’s Version 1.0. But now Mozilla aims to change all that, yes as expected, development plans for 2.0 have already started and the mozilla developers have given us a sneak peek of what’s coming up.

Firefox developers aim to finish version 2.0 by mid 2006 and finish the changes by Q1. Firefox 2.0 will contain the same Gecko engine as the previous browsers, but some API’s might be added.

“From a development point of view, the idea of Firefox 2 is to deliver significant user experience enhancements on top of a relatively stable rendering engine as significant retooling is done on the main development trunk for what will become Firefox 3, and deliver them in a timely fashion.”

, is the comment from the official source.

More than this, Firefox 2.0 aims at giving users a whole slurry of new features and make the browsing experience a wholly enjoyable and satisfactory one. Some features include

• Greatly Enhance the Structure of Tabbed Browsing, and make them behave as users would expect, like windows in an operating system.
• Improve the discoverability and adaptability of the search UI within Firefox.
• Completely Improve the Bookmarks and History System to make them fast and powerful and increase their effectiveness.
• Improved Basic Content Type Handling for things like RSS/Atom feeds, mail links etc. Improve discovery and handling user interfaces.
• Completely Renovated and good-looking visual design while stile integrating it with Windows/Mac, etc
• The rise of applications like web mail, blogging etc highlight the weaknesses of HTML’s textarea widget. Thus this will increase the power of text boxes with inline spell check.
• Consolidate and simplify user interface in the browser window tying together features in meaningful ways where possible.

These are very interesting and quite innovative ideas too. Mozilla, though not commiting themselves to much has still promised a bunch of great features which would increase the use of Firefox as a social browser and enhance the user-experience without doubt.

However, What users would have liked to have seen is:
1) Faster Loading, the loading time kills me in Windows 98.
2) Web Authoring/HTML Editing Program instead of the thing in View Source
3) Less need of Extensions
4) Auto-Flash Blocking without Extension

But as always, this line-up is impressive and knowing Mozilla, we surely will enjoy the RC’s which have been tagged “Bon Echo”.

Links::
Wiki - Product Planning
Racing Towards 2.0