Mozilla Launches Next Firefox 2.0 Alpha

Mozilla Corp. on Saturday released the third alpha version of Firefox 2.0, code-named "Bon Echo," with additions that include a built-in anti-phishing feature and suggestions for searches run in Google and Yahoo.

The anti-phishing feature in Firefox is courtesy of Google, which released the code for a Firefox extension, or plug-in, to the Mozilla Foundation for use in the browser.

As with the two earlier alphas, Mozilla stressed that the early look was intended for "Web application developers and our testing community" only.

"Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 3," the company added in the release notes to the new version.

The first beta, however, is scheduled to ship in June, Mozilla said in an updated roadmap posted to its site. The final release of Firefox 2 will land in August, according to that schedule, ahead of the third quarter target once mentioned.

The up tick in development may be due to dropping Places, a searchable history and bookmark feature that had been touted as one of Firefox 2.0's most notable additions. A month ago Mozilla yanked the feature , saying then that it needed to go if Firefox 2.0 was to meet its release deadline.

Bon Echo Alpha 3 can be downloaded from the Mozilla site in editions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.