Mozilla to release beta of Firefox 2.0

The first beta of Firefox 2.0 is due on Tuesday that is July 11th and Internet Explorer version 7.0 is now on it's third beta release.

Firefox fans and browser junkies have an opportunity to get a jump on Tuesday's beta, as a public "release candidate" has been posted on the Mozilla FTP site.

Reports from early testers mention two of the significant new features: an integrated spell checker, and an anti-phishing tool. The spell-checker promises to make blog and forum postings more lucid. The phishing filter works with locally stored lists of bad sites, along with Google's site listing, and possibly others down the road.

The rest of the interface stays mostly the same, unlike the more radical changes in IE 7.0. Firefox 2.0 does include a horizontal scrolling capability for tabs, and an ability to close a tab directly from within the tab itself. The Options dialog has been reworked to include a horizontal, tabbed based interface, and numerous changes have been made under the hood.

This new version of Firefox will also offer relief for early adopters of intel-based macintosh hardware. One tester on Digg was overjoyed, saying "Oh thank you lord, Firefox finally work correctly on my Mac Mini!"

The Windows release candidate of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 can be downloaded directly, along with Mac and Linux versions. But it will overwrite your existing themes, and render existing extensions unusable. A "portable" version of Firefox 2.0 that will let you try without affecting your existing Firefox setup has also been made available.