Mozilla recently released Bow Echo Alpha 2 for developers and testers to try out. Bow Echo is the "code name" being used for the upcoming Firefox 2. This release is only for testing purposes and should not be used for everyday Web browsing. If you have never heard about nightlies, alphas, and betas, we recommend you wait to download this browser until a more stable version is ready. Firefox release candidates (RC) are expected to be available sometime in August 2006 and are probably the earliest software releases general users should use to test out Firefox 2.

The following are some new features in the current alpha release that will likely make their way into Firefox 2.

• Links default to opening in new tabs, not new windows
• Close buttons now appear on every tab, and the close behaviour is slightly different
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• Search suggestions now appear in the search box autocomplete for Google and Yahoo!
• New search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• Improved support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• New Add-Ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• New search service that supports Sherlock and OpenSearch engines
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

With our focus on content management systems, we're especially interested to see how well the inline spell checking for text boxes on Web pages work. As most of our readers have already noted, here at CMS Report, we don't do too well without the spell checker. CMS users will likely also be interested in how well automatic restoration of your browsing session works.

This should be an interesting year with not only a new version of Firefox expected to be released, but also a new version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 is currently available as a beta.