We've been promised that Mozilla Firefox 3.0 will be more of a jump from the current Firefox 2.0 than the previous v1.5 release. For instance, Firefox 2.0 contained new features based around the current web engine. Sure, features like inline form spell-checking are useful, but they don't add much to the overall web experience.

With Mozilla Firefox 3.0 alpha 1, you're going to get an improved rendering engine, built on the Gecko 1.9 engine. In addition to that, the new Cairo web image 'painting' system will improve how images appear on your browser, whatever computer you're using to browse the web. Note that this is the first public preview of Firefox 3.0, dubbed “Gran Paradiso”. It should only be used within a virtual environment and not alongside an existing Firefox 2.x setup.

11 Dec 2006