Mozilla’s original roadmap for Firefox 3 called for a beta release this month, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened.
There is, however, a new alpha available for testing.
As with previous alpha releases, Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 runs on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine and offers a host of new features, though it remains a developer release and isn’t ready for general users.
Among the noticeable changes in alpha 8 are the beginnings of a UI for starring and tagging your bookmarked pages.
At the moment the tag features seems limited to a column for displaying tags. I couldn’t find any way to actually add them. The option to star pages shows up on the right-hand side of the location bar.
The location bar features a much improved auto-complete algorithm that can match against page titles as well as URLs, which is handy for when you know the name of an article, but not what site you saw it on.
The location bar also features a new UI element for quicker and easier site identity access. Mozilla calls the UI “unpolished” and it does take up a bit too much room in the bar, but otherwise it looks quite nice.
The built-in malware protector is also present in alpha 8, as is the new downloads panel which first appeared in alpha 6.
Alpha 8 definitely has issues and I can’t recommend using it for anything more than testing at this point.
That being said, every revision is looking better and Firefox 3 is going to be a very nice upgrade. The speed alone never ceases to amaze me every time I test a new alpha.
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