Ghacks is reporting that the first beta of Firefox 2.0 is now available on the Mozilla FTP site. Firefox 2.0 (codenamed Bon Echo) has already been through three alpha releases, and promises lots of new features, including (from Wikipedia):

• 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 auto-complete 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
• Combining the extensions and themes managers into an “Add-ons” manager
• 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
• Searching in input fields
• A History of recently closed tabs
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
• Client-side session and persistent storage
• New anti-phishing features

I have previously had a look at the alpha releases and have been impressed with the new features. However, I’m not using BEa3 full time because it automatically disables extensions which do not specifically specify that they are compatible with it. Given my reliability on extensions, I had to roll back to 1.5 . According to Ghacks, this release also breaks extensions, so I probably won’t install it. It is likely, however, to be very stable for a beta, given the fact that I don’t think that any of the alpha releases crashed when I was using them.