14 DAY TRIAL // The Windows browser beta season is upon us. After Apple's Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs introduced the native Mac OS X Safari 3.0 browser as a Public Beta for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP on June 11, now it is Mozilla's turn to release another testing milestone for Firefox 3.0. Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 went live for download on July 2. The Gran Paradiso refresh comes on the heels of the Firefox 1.5.0.12 to 2.0.0.4 Update Rollout designed to streamline the transition from version 1.5 to 2.0 of the open source browser.
"Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 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 6 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 6," Mozilla revealed.
The availability of Firefox 3.0 Alpha 6 comes after two hard months for Mozilla. Firefox 1.5 has lost market share, a trajectory inherent with the end of support, and Firefox 2.0 was not able to carry all the weight alone. In this context, Internet Explorer 7 has managed to increase its hold on the browser market. Still, while both Apple and Mozilla have adopted an open development process, choosing to make the beta and alpha versions of their products available for download, Microsoft is still mute when it comes to IE8, although the company is dogfooding the browser.
"Updated SQLite engine to version 3.3.17, improved cookie performance, support for site-specific preferences - text size, a new Quit dialog box that resolves termination errors, added permanent 'Restart Firefox' button to Add-Ons Manager, miscellaneous fixes to download manager including correctly displaying large file sizes, various Places fixes and miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes," are - according to Mozilla - the changes introduced by Gran Paradiso Alpha 6.