Mozila Firefox 3 alpha launched

The superstructure of Firefox 3 alpha is built around Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser, tentatively scheduled for delivery in May 2007, is also due to include features held back from Firefox 2, such as the revamped Places system for storing bookmarks and a re-jigged history function.

As the Gecko 1.9 road map explains, Cairo will "bring modern, hardware-accelerated 2D-graphics capabilities to the whole of the Web without requiring proprietary plug-ins or rendering obsolete the broad and rich set of Web-authoring techniques developed over the past decade."

Although Gran Paradiso uses the latest version of Gecko, the user interface is unchanged from Firefox 2 at this stage.

The move to Gecko 1.9 also means that Firefox 3 will not work on the 95, 98 or ME versions of Microsoft Windows, nor will it work on Mac OS X 10.2.

Other new features include an updated threading model. Later in the development cycle, there may be changes to the user interface, as well as to browsing, bookmarking and privacy features.

According to reports, Mozilla predicts that the full version of Firefox 3 could be released before the end of 2007. Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 works on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Mozilla has warned that it should be used only by software developers and testers at this stage.

Release of the code for Firefox 3 (nicknamed Gran Paradiso after a mountain region of Italy) comes just six weeks after the release of Firefox version 2.0. The software is orientated towards making web applications behave in the same way as programs installed on user's desktops. Core layout and rendering changes include use of Cairo as the default graphics library, use of Cocoa Widgets for MAC OS X version and the inclusion of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) languages.

There are no significant user interface changes to the browser as yet. These will come later after developers sort out what ought to go under the browser's bonnet, the current focus of their development efforts. The release is designed for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and Mozilla's testing community.