On Thursday, February 8, 2007, mozilla.org released the alpha version of Firefox 3. The next generation of the powerful browser is built on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. Gran Paradiso, the project’s code name, improves on existing features as well as introduces a few new ones.

Firefox 3 is leaving behind older operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME. Mac users will need OS X 10.3.9 or better.

Aside from not supporting legacy operating systems, Firefox 3 introduces several new features, which include the following:

• The core layout code for calculating widths, floats, positioning elements has been rewritten.
• Code handling of dynamic pages has been changed extensively.
• First from Mozilla to be totally Acid2 compliant.
• Support for the Web Apps 1.0 API for changing stylesheets.
• XML is rendered as it downloads not when it completes
• Improved Mac widget support
• Improvements to the Cairo graphics layer.

I installed the Mac version and quickly discovered that none of my existing addons/extensions was compatible. Seeing that the version was just released, this was expected. Over time, developers will catch up. In addition, the rendering of the preferences had a bad flicker when I tabbed to the next item. It is the alpha version so bugs are expected. The graphics rendered fine when I visited the Flash-heavy Eye4U site.

Firefox 3 alpha 2 can be downloaded here.