As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9 it has become
increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an
implementation of places that lives up to our standards of user
experience and quality.   Places is a complex and exciting feature which
changes the way people use bookmarks, history, and navigate through
their private space of the web.   Rather than rush it to market - we'd
prefer to spend the time it takes to get it right.

Thus, we are going to disable Places on the 1.8 branch and continue work
on the feature on the trunk for inclusion on a future release.   This is
a difficult decision - but doing it this early in the release cycle
gives us the time to focus on delivering an extremely high quality FF2
in Q3 and gives Places the room it needs to develop into a truly
innovative feature.

To be clear - we're still focused on delivering Places as a truly
compelling end user feature in a future release.  We're also confident
that the other features and enhancements slated for FF2 will provide a
great upgrade for 1.5 users and continue to be a compelling browser
choice for new users.  Firefox 2 will improve security, tabbed browsing,
search, RSS/structured content discovery, performance, and extension
support.  In order words, all the reasons people love Firefox will get
demonstrably better in this release.

At the Bon Echo meeting Tuesday at 11am we'll do a more in-depth review
of status of every feature area to figure out what else is at risk and
make sure we have all available effort focused on the critical areas.
So come prepared to talk about your feature area and plan for a longer
meeting than normal.

Cheers,

Schrep