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,

If they are, I'll be okay with 1.7, but still not 2.0. They aren't an
immediate "Wow!" when you open the browser.

The session restore feature, I already use Session Manager and will
continue to, because the extension can be updated without the review
process and I can easily get those updates without having to download a
new build of Firefox.

The search stuff is nice, too. Using the XML format reduces the number
of files I have in searchplugins by half, and the format looks nicer
than the old one. (And importing them will make all the indentation and
stuff identical in each one. :-) )

And Places, well, at least it will be interesting. I'm back down to the
mozilla1.8.0 branch because I want to avoid it until it's fully working
and I've sorted out my duplicate bookmarks because Places'll screw 'em
up, but once I do that and have an hour or two where I can live without
being able to use Firefox while everything is imported, I'm game.

I don't know, going up a rev number is usually a big deal.  I guess if
you put all total advances from 1.0 -> 2.0 it is a big deal.  So now I
see why edging the release number from 1.1 to 1.5 last year was a wise
choice, because the step to 2.0 is not exactly earth-shattering.  Only
problem is, it's been so long since I used Firefox 1.0 that I kind of
forget the advances that Firefox 1.5 brought.

Anyway, it's not like people are not going to upgrade (especially with
the auto-upgrade functionality in 1.5)... there will just be less of a
fuss in the blogosphere (and prepare yourselves for a few
"disappointed" reviews).  Heck, Firefox 1.5 still beats IE7, from what
I've heard...

This will be one of the most underwhelming 2.0 releases in recent
software history from a consumer's point of view.

No, after thinking about it my vote is for sticking to the plan and
releasing something of high quality this year.  A high quality visual
refresh will go along way with some people.  Changes to feed and theme
management will also be something to talk about.