Gadgetopia

Mozilla Bon Echo Alpha 1 Release Notes: The first alpha release of Firefox 2.0 is out. Some thoughts on it —

1. There are not a lot of new customer-facing features. There are two reasons for this, in my mind:

   1. Open-source projects are often more developer-friendly than customer/user-friendly. Spolsky has talked about this in detail. A lot of the changes in this release are very cool from a developer standpoint, but none of them are going to thrill my mother.

   2. Perhaps in rebuttal to the above point, Firefox depends a lot on extension developers to deliver the “wow” stuff. We’ve talked about this before too — the simple fact is that by making extension development easier, you have really made a lot of progress into indirectly making users happy.

2. I love the idea of a desktop app using SQLite to store data. There’s not nearly enough of this going around these days. It’s a great little storage platform with a public domain license that instantly makes your data available to other apps (and, come to think of it, maybe that’s exactly why it’s not used much…).

3. Just what does “Bon Echo” mean?