Firefox 3

Firefox logo Mozilla has announced new details of its schedule for Mozilla Firefox 3, the next major upgrade to the well-known open-source browser.

In a posting to the mozilla.dev.planning forum, Mike Schroepfer, the company’s vice president of engineering maintained that the Alpha editions of Firefox 3 browser will be released every month. He stated, “We will do date-driven alpha releases on a one-month cadence.”

The latest schedule shows three more Mozilla Firefox 3 previews - Alphas 4, 5 and 6, which will be out around the end of April, May, and June, respectively, with a feature-complete Beta 1 dropping into testers’ hands July 31. The most recent Mozilla Firefox 3 test edition, Alpha 3, was posted on March 27.

Mozilla said that Firefox 3 should appear in final form in Q4 of 2008 and will feature a completely-revamped bookmarking system, new identity management tools and support for offline Web applications. The redesigned bookmarks, called Places, will debut in Alpha 5, which is due to launch May 31.

New features in Mozilla Firefox 3 Alpha 4 browser are:
# Boomarks are now called Places, new menu structure
# Save web pages as PDF
# FUEL JavaScript library for extension developers
# Enhancements to offline app support
# Improvements to user controls over tabs
# Interface improvements
# The new Breakpad crash reporting tool (Mac OS X only)

Mozilla had planned on including support for Growl notifications with this Firefox 3 build, but didnt’ go forward with the idea and withdrew it at the last minute since it was causing crashes.

Adapted from : Techshout