The Mozilla Corporation launched the first official beta of Firefox 2.0 early Wednesday, signaling that its major upgrade to the popular alternative browser is inching ever closer to release.

New features in Firefox 2.0 include enhancements in security, tabbed browsing, performance, and extensions. For more details on the new features visit http://www.mozilla.org

Code-named Bon Echo, Firefox 2.0 includes a built-in spell checking and an anti-phishing feature, much like Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. JavaScript 1.7 and improved subscribing of RSS feeds are also among the new features.

Firefox 2 Beta 1 is a developer preview release of the next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 1 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.