With this beta release everything should be shaping up nicely, and (theoretically) the work from this point onwards should be bug-fixing and polish. Let’s find out how the release is shaping up. More here

In his announcement of the 9.04 release, Mark Shuttleworth only laid down two demands that were of interest as far as end-users were concerned: faster booting and integration with web apps. The first nail has been squarely hit on the head, but the second seems to have been entirely ignored. Firefox doesn’t have Google Gears installed, for example, and the interesting Prism project, that “wraps” online applications to make them appear like local apps, hasn’t been integrated.