14 DAY TRIAL // A new build of Gran Paradiso is available for download from Mozilla. Gran Paradiso will end up as Firefox 3.0, the successor of the current version 2.0 Mozilla is providing to users. According to the initial plans, Gran Paradiso should have already passed into beta testing phase. But Mozilla had a change of plans at the beginning of July, following the availability of Gran Paradiso Alpha 6. Then Mozilla delivered Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 and indicated that the first beta was nowhere near. In this respect, a new alpha version of the open source browser is now offered.
"Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 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 8 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 8," reveal the Gran Paradiso release notes.
Gran Paradiso Milestone 8 was indeed frozen on September 5 as intended, and it stayed that way until September 20. Alpha 8 comes to the table with a few changes. Mozilla chose to emphasize the addition of a "basic and unpolished" graphical user interface for starring and tagging pages. The new UI elements come in correlation with an enhanced Location Bar autocomplete algorithm designed to be tailor fitted against the page titles.
Here are some additional modification Mozilla made to Gran Paradiso Alpha 8: "Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog; support for web-based protocol handlers, a new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types; added support for document.elementFromPoint method and TYPE_PLUGIN has been removed from the Extension Manager code."
Moreover, Mozilla informed that starting with Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 all browser add-ons will use a secure method for auto-updating. The new build of the open source browser also comes with built-in malware protection and it will quit properly on Windows shutdown or restart. The next stage for Firefox 3.0, Gran Paradiso Milestone 8 is scheduled for mid October 2007. Mozilla's efforts are a clear illustration of the direction Microsoft should also take with Internet Explorer 8. At least at the level of informing its users about the progress of IE7's successor.
Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 can be downloaded from here.