14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has made available for download another milestone of Gran Paradiso on its track to Firefox 3.0 later this year. Firefox 3.0 Gran Paradiso Alpha 5 is a version of the future open source browser that rises out the ashes of Firefox 1.5. Mozilla has released the last update for Firefox 1.5 on May 30, 2007, informed that it will kill support for the browser version and advised users to migrate to Firefox 2.0.
Not taking the example of Microsoft, Mozilla made even the Alpha releases of Firefox 3.0 available for the general public. However, the downloads are not intended for wide use. In contrast Microsoft is only dogfooding early versions of Internet Explorer 8.0 and does not expect to make the browser available until late 2008, early 2009. As it is the case of the future builds of the Windows platform, Microsoft is not offering any public details about its plans for IE8.
Mozilla informed that with Alpha 5, Gran Paradiso comes to the table with: "enabled bookmarks portion of Places, new crash reporting system, Breakpad. It's enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux, new Javascript-based Password Manager" and additional support for Mac OS X along with a variety of bug fixes in the Mozilla's layout engine, Gecko 1.9.
Mozilla promised from mid May that it will deliver the bookmarks portion of Places in Firefox 3 Alpha 5, and the feature was indeed integrated into the release. "There are a few points we would like to make right away, to avoid any confusion, tears, and/or death threats. Backup your bookmarks data before starting. Migration from bookmarks.html -> places.sqlite will happen only once. From then on, bookmarks.html will be kept up to date with changes in the db, but not the other way around. There are rough edges; please wear your hard hat at all times. Remember that the UI is still being designed," informed the Mozilla Places Team.
Firefox 3.0 Gran Paradiso Alpha 5 was tested by Softpedia as being 100% Free and is available for download here.