Firefox 2 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the fourth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 2. Ongoing planning for Firefox 2 can be followed at the Firefox 2 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #bonecho.

Please note: It is not recommended that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only, normal users are encouraged to get the latest public release of Firefox.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• 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

• Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone released

I just did a quick test and brief evaluation of Cantoo WebTest - a free open source tool for automated testing of web applications. I found it pretty good and intuitive, and I think it has a rather mature feature set. Having made a similar test tool myself five years ago (based on IE proprietary methods) I felt quite at home, and found the xml format delightful. I would have liked some more features to select specific elements, especially support for unnamed elements, preferbly using XPath notation. It produces a nice report describing the test run, this uses xml/xslt so it’s pretty easy to change into your own report style, or just use the xml report directly from within an application. I am still unsure if the xml format allows for much dynamic in the script, such as if/else etc.. But there is supposedly better support for those things via the Groovy scripting interface, I will be doing more tests in near future as I attempt to build test suits while developing, I will also get to test it’s include functionality in depth, in order to facilitate fragment re-use.

• My first example test script

[/.] aykroyd writes “Students at Simon’s Rock College conducted the original test that Turing suggested in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Often misunderstood, the Turing Test has never actually been conducted as laid out in his paper. The experiment utilized a program called A.L.I.C.E.,
which is designed to hold one end of an interactive conversation. The program was provided by the ALICE Artificial Intelligence Foundation. Dr. Richard Wallace, who was on hand during the experiment to troubleshoot the AI robot, later gave a lecture about it called “The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.” and also blogged the event.”

Slashdot | Turing’s Original Test Played First Time Ever