Mozilla Slaps Apple with New Firefox 3.0 Alpha 7

With approximately two months until Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP turns one year old, Mozilla is pushing fresh alpha releases of Firefox 3.0 and Safari 3 right on track to be made available in October simultaneously with Mac OS X Leopard. However, Microsoft is not breathing a world related to the status of Internet Explorer 8. The company confirmed that is dogfooding alpha versions of the browser, but outside of this anodyne detail, and a few general plans for IE8, Microsoft offered absolutely nothing. IE8 is currently expected at the end of a two-year timeframe. This could of course mean late 2008 or early 2009. Otherwise, IE8 completely dropped out of sight.

In the meantime, Mozilla made yet another step closer to Firefox 3.0 with the release of Gran Paradiso Alpha 7. At the end of July, Mozilla initially planned the release of the first beta for Gran Paradiso. The corporation's plans changed following the availability of Gran Paradiso Alpha 6. "Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 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 7 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 7," Mozilla stated in the Gran Paradiso release notes.

With milestone 7 of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla has cut support for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). According to the release notes, after Firefox 3.o Alpha 7, Gecko 1.9 will no longer either build or run on the Mac OS X operating systems older than the Tiger release. The announcement comes after Apple transitioned Safari 3.0 from Mac OS X to 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP, taking a swing at both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

With Alpha 7, Gran Paradiso also brings to the table a collection of changes compared with the previous version: "Default visited pages history size 9 to 180 days; full page zoom of images, layout and text; many fixes for context menus, clipboard, and drag services on Mac OS X; reworking of XUL menus and popups; cross site XMLHttpRequest specification implemented; many fixes to CSS font property bugs," are among the modifications introduced in milestone 7.

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Alpha 7 was tested by Softpedia as being 100% Free and is available for download here.