Firefox 2.0 Scheduled For Release on Tuesday

The Mozilla Foundation will release the Firefox 2.0 browser on Tuesday, according to a posting on the Mozillazine message boards over the weekend

The new release promises several new features, as well as a solution to a annoying memory leak that has troubled earlier versions, according to Mozilla.

At press time, a leaked and/or mirrored version of the browser was available on Oregon State University's FTP server. (U.S. Windows 32-bit version; all other versions). At press time, that release had not been confirmed as official, however.

Mozilla representatives did not return an emailed request for comment at press time. The Mozilla Foundation refers users to the Mozillazine site as an open-source repository for support questions; a moderator for the forum posted the notice on Saturday.

Other features of the new browser revision include phishing protection, which reports if a web site may be malicious; session saving, which restores windows or Firefox tabs if the browser crashes; improved access to Web feeds; spell checking; and search suggestions.

The browser will still run on Windows 98, according to Mozilla. The Mozillazine moderator also added a final tip to "solve" one of the browser's new features: a "close" button that has been added to each tab. Since the button can take up valuable space in a browser full of tabs, users can force the browser into reducing the number of "close" buttons to just one by typing "about:config" (no quotes) in the address bar, pressing enter, and setting the "browser.tabs.closeButtons" option to "3".