After playing with it for half an hour or so, I was disappointed, no such luck. Other than clobbering the Multzilla plugin (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/multizilla) that I was testing, so far, no major problems, and a couple of minor ones. The first minor one I noticed was that the UI looked bad, a mix of the default and modern themes, the blue/grey and beige were mixed up, some lines blue, others grey. It hurt my brain. The other one was the close tab button was gone.

Going into the about:config menu and playing around did nothing, but I did find out how to move the default mail behavior of putting replies on the bottom of an e-mail back to the top (change mail.identity.default.reply_on_top from 0 to 1). If I ever find the person who thought this option was better set to bottom when going from 1.5 to 1.6, there will be blood and death. Luckily, a quick reload to see if the mail stuff stuck brought back the normal UI and the button. Beta indeed, works fine for me so far, but before you install it, beware, it could screw up your data, cause you pain and make your dog urinate on the floor. For me, no problems, you may be different. So, why would you want to install it in the first place? Well there is a list of the advances it brings, many of which are quite nice here (link: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7b/README.html). The first and most important is speed. They claim a 7/8/9% speed increase on various things, and a 5% smaller size, and this is the beta, the release without debug code should be better. The pages I read tend to be network bound, so I can't tell if it really is faster, but it sure loaded a lot faster. Noticeably faster, a very good thing.

One really cool one is the ability to prevent sites from changing your context menu with Javascript. What is this about? When you go to a site, and you want to do something, like save a picture for a background for example. The site removes the ability to do this, and gives you a helpful popup calling you a thief. Regardless of the fact that you probably are, it is annoying, and this advance removes that ability. Thank several gods all at once.

In the password arena, if you put in your master PW, it will show you your saved passwords. This can be incredibly useful for those of us with laptops and a bad memory. It is secure and useful, what a concept. In a similar vein, cookie handling dialogs have been improved.

More importantly, there is improved date handling. If I could get one, I think this is useful. No luck in testing though, any offers out there? If you are rich, I can be single.

Mail and chat have several improvements, MSN authentication, Palm sync, and encoding options. Chat adds that damn date stuff again, rub it in guys!

In the section labeled ‘under the hood', otherwise known as ‘stuff you will probably never see', there are a ton of improvements. The speed one is the key here, that you will see. There are improvements in Kerberos, XML, Liveconnect and CSS3, as well as a bunch of platform specific changes.

Overall, this is a worthy add on. The one thing I don't see that I hope made it is an improved spam filter, it might be there and not on the bullet point list. I would recommend waiting for the final release unless things like IMAP IDLE support keeps you awake at night. For the adventurous, it is a safe install, for the average user, wait for the release version. It will be a solid, but not earthshattering release. µ