Though not much has changed on the surface in more than month, the latest
Mozilla Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 2 (FF2 RC2) continues to fix issues
under the hood.
FF RC2 follows the RC1 release by nearly two weeks and is primarily a bug fix that improves the stability of the browser ahead of its full general availability release.
Mozilla has not added any new feature of substance to Firefox 2.0 since the end of August when it released Beta 2.
One of the key areas of improvement in FF RC2 is extension compatibility.
Firefox 1.5.x has a long list of extensions, but not all of them work with FF 2. Developers continue to make changes that will make more of them compatible with FF2.
Mozilla has designated bug#353206 as its tracking bug for the extension compatibility issue.
At press time, it is still showing at least 60 popular extensions that do not
yet work on Firefox 2.0. Though that number may seem high, Mozilla
developers now claim that over 680 extensions currently are compatible with
Firefox 2.0.
But Firefox 2.0 still isn’t quite ready for public consumption.
“There are a handful of security and stability bugs we’d like to see get
in before the final FF2 release,” Mozilla developer Mike Schroepfer
wrote on a Firefox developer mailing list. “Thus we’ll be doing a third release candidate.”
Code freeze for FF2 RC3 is set for tomorrow. The final release of
Firefox 2.0 is expected by the end of October.
