The new look and feel coming in Firefox 2.0 recently landed on one of the branch builds, so I downloaded one this weekend's builds and tried it out. My verdict? It has a long way to go before public consumption. In other words, it's pure crap in its current form.

A preview of the new theme is available over at the Mozilla wiki, and it looks pretty nice. Too bad the real thing looks nothing like that. Every icon looks grayed out, there are toolbar button hovering problems, widgets aren't properly aligned, etc. A catch-all bug over at Bugzilla has been filed for the new theme and, as of this writing, there are 38 dependencies (38 other bugs) written against the new theme (and only one has been fixed so far). That list has grown steadily over the past few days, and I can only imagine that it will continue to do so. I'm excited about Firefox 2.0, but if Mozilla screws up something this basic, it will certainly be a disappointment.

In somewhat happier news, a bug that's been around for some time has just been fixed in today's branch build. Bug 318793, Firefox caches extension update file, has been a minor thorn in my side for a while. I'm glad to see that this issue has received the attention it so sorely deserved.