Christmas Comes Early for Developers with Firefox 3 Alpha Version

Still giddy from the high that is the full release of Firefox 2 - which just came out this fall - Mozilla fans and W3C supporters alike are getting a holiday gift early this season at the announcement of the release of the alpha version of Firefox 3. While there's nothing "in hand" to play with at the moment, unless you are a Web application developer or part of the Mozilla testing community, just the knowledge that Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 - which it has been dubbed - is enough to get any Firefox-phile's excitement levels up off the charts!As one might expect, Firefox 3 will include many significant changes - not the least of which is the inclusion of Gecko 1.9 which itself has not been released. The Gecko rendering engine has been in development since long before the release of Firefox 2 and provides vector-based rendering on all platforms and includes the Cairo graphics layer. Cairo (wiki.mozilla.org/Cairo), as described in detail in the plans for Gecko 1.9, is said to "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."Unfortunately, with such improvements come a few downfalls. As technology grows, older versions and programs tend to be left behind. At this point in development it has been determined 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 improvements include an updated threading model, updates to the browsing, book-marking and privacy features as well as potential slight changes to layout as needed in order to retain usability. The overall user interface will likely remain the same as the Firefox 2 layout which has been met with high approval from a large majority of users.Reports released this week by Mozilla predict that the first full version of Firefox 3 could become available by the end of 2007.

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