Playing with Deer Park Alpha 2

I read today on Mozilla.org that they released Deer Park Alpha 2, which will be the next version of Firefox. I didn't want to screw around with it on Linux, since I have enough Firefox problems with it (that's why I use Konqueror ;-) ). So, what better to play around with it than Windows? I rebooted into Windows, and ten minutes after I logged in it was ready to go (and I don't have a slow computer, either).

On first glance, it looked identical to Firefox, since it had all of my Bookmarks, extensions, etc. The only immediately noticable difference was the icon, which is the Firefox icon on Debian.

I looked around in the settings, and it installed two new extensions called, "Reporter" and "Talkback". Reporter can be used to report broken website, and Talkback is used to submit crash reports.

One other thing I noticed after a bit of looking is that the Prefrences portion of Firefox has been renamed to Options, and has been moved from the Edit menu to the Tools menu. I think this makes a little more sense. The Options portion has also been redone. Instead of the choices on the left, they are now on the top. The menu items are mostly the same, except the Privacy menu, instead of having different drop down menus, has seperate tabs for everything in it. The only other noticeable change is the addition of a Tabs menu, which looks nice.

Another nice feature that isn't currently in Firefox is a feature called Sanatize (again, under the tools menu). This is a way to easilly delete history, cookies, passwords, etc.

So far so good. I haven't used it a lot, so I can't say how stable it is. It seems safe for standard web browsing, but I wouldn't reccomend this for everyone until it is beta. If you want to see some of the upcoming fearutes in Firefox, check it out. If you want to make sure that your browser remains completely stable, then don't (hey, it's alpha)

(I'm using it now to post this, by the way)