It looks like we can expect Alpha 2 of Firefox 2.0 by the end of April. Reading through the meeting notes makes it sound like we should see it in the next 15 – 22 days.
There is also some mentions of new features they might decide to add to Firefox 2.0. They appear to be focusing on how they can let users manage data in the most efficient way possible. One thing they talked about was incorporating the ability to take notes on a page or about a page. Opera currently has a similar feature and I would expect it to operate in a similar fashion: highlight some text, right click, and store the highlighted text for later. This would be a nice feature to have so that later on you could possibly insert that note somewhere. Many people would probably like to use this to insert their signature into text boxes and such.
They also talk about what they want their “One Killer Feature” to be for Firefox 2. One person recommended the ability to “extract search results for specific data and display them more usefully in the product chrome”. As you can tell they are actively working on making users as efficient as possible. This may be the way they need to go so that they can get businesses to start using their software.
I have been keeping a watch on some of the Nightly builds to see if there is anything exciting in them, but there has been nothing yet. I think everyone was expecting to see a ‘visual refresh’ in Alpha 1 and people were disappointed when it didn’t make the release. Hopefully we will see this refresh in the upcoming Alpha 2, but don’t be shocked if it’s not there yet!
News Source: Mozilla Firefox 2 Meeting Notes (4/4/2006)
The Mozilla1.8 Branch(2.0a1) nightlies are still nothing special really other then a few annoying to get used to changes and the places part still being in early stage, and are still a long ways from being usable by general public.
I use the Linux builds and while the last couple weeks work ok, they for some strange reason sometimes take several attempst to start the builds as they would run in background and have to be killed then try again, and this is clean installs with new profiles. Have yet to narrow things down enough to file a bug.
Just so you know with the way the versioning in nightlies, like for example the unstable Trunk nightlies behind Firefox 3.0 (has to actually branch from the Trunk first) was just changed from 1.6a1 to 3.0.a1 but this does not all mean there will be a Firefox 3.0 alpha 1 build anytime soon, in the Q3 perhaps maybe, though it did not get the generic “Minefield” name yet, though the “Bon Echo” is the codename for 2.0. Bug#330528