While various blogs and media outlets have been reporting since Monday or even earlier that the first beta release of Firefox 2.0 was out, we knew better. Those were just candidate releases, but today the browser shed its Bon Echo moniker and the real, Mozilla-sanctioned, Firefox 2 Beta 1 was released. What's new in Firefox 2? Here's the list form the official site:

• Built in Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on NullSoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

As usual, Firefox is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other platforms. As with all beta releases, you're installing it at your own risk, and it would be wise to back up your old settings and bookmarks with a tool like MozBackup or BackupFox. You'll also find that once you install Firefox 2, most of your extensions will cease to work. There are couple at least partial remedies to this, including an about:config tweak and the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

[Thanks, X Budd!]