Internet Explorer 8.0 is nowhere to be found but in the meanwhile Mozilla continues to advance with the development of Firefox 3.0. In this regard, Mozilla has announced reaching yet another milestone for its open source browser.

"Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is an early developer milestone for the next major version of Firefox that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla's layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Gran Paradiso Alpha 3," revealed Mozilla.

Currently, Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is available for Microsoft Windows 2000 and later, MacOS X 10.3.9 and later and Linux. The latest release of Gecko 1.9 brings to the table a set of new features, and Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is designed to offer the testing grounds for the added functionality.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 now delivers support for animated PNG (APNG) images but also for the DOM "clientLeft" and "clientTop" attributes. Additionally, Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 also provides support for designed to transfer resources into Firefox's offline cache. In this manner, a web application will still be available to the users via the browser's cache even if Firefox is taken offline. Mozilla has also informed about the improvements of layout precision for resolution scaling.
Mozilla also informed that Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 delivers the following changes:

- Implemented cycle collection in XPCOM, which detects cases where two released objects hold one another, but neither is held by anyone else. In this scenario, both objects can safely be purged. Previously, the holds each has on the other would have prevented them from being purged.
- Added support for the HttpOnly cookie attribute, which marks a cookie as readable only by the server and not by client-side scripts.
- Added a new preference, "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page", which notifies the user when the page specifies HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is available for download here.