the world, or part of it

This past week was one in which Mozilla launched some new things on their web site. If you remember back before Firefox 1.5 came out, they had the Deer Park alpha and beta tests, something like that is coming back. Their developer precursor to Firefox 2, nicknamed Bon Echo has its Alpha 1 release out. Bon Echo was released on the 21st of this month and is geared mainly towards the developers who want to work on the code and fix some of the bugs. The new features and modifications are:
1. Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
2. New data storage layer for bookmarks and history (using SQLlite)
3. Extended search plugin format
4. Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
5. Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
6. List of bug fixes

Bon Echo isnt the only thing around the Mozilla these days. Their new calendar program, Lightning, had its 0.1 release on the 20th. It is not a standalone like Sunbird, but has the same features on it. It is designed to be integrated with the Thunderbird e-mail problem. It is the first release, like Bon Echo, so dont expect the best from it now, but it is still pretty cool. If you want a calendar program that doesnt require you to have Thunderbird or Firefox, download Sunbird, Mozilla’s current standard for calendar excellence.

Mozilla has been rather quiet recently, so it is nice to see them come in with a strong week, full of new things for us to enjoy. The Mozilla organization still remains on the forefront of the open source community an is an example to other coders and groups set to give us our software free.