Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0 alpha 8

Mozilla has a new alpha version of Firefox 3.0 ‘Gran Paradiso’ put online. The web browser has now arrived at alpha 8, which is available from this ftp folder can be downloaded for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Gran Paradiso is the codename of the new Firefox branch, which uses Gecko 1.9 to render web pages and includes a host of new features and tools, such as Places. In addition, Firefox 3.0 is equipped with the usual features, including tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker and extending the functionality of the browser via add-ons. Below you can read which changes have been made compared to the previous alpha version:

Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 8 contains the following notable changes:

• Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title (see Places UI Plan for more details)
• Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
• Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
• Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
• Support for web based protocol handlersthough it doesn’t work in all situations (see bug 394483).
• A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types (see bug 377784) has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
• All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-update (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)
• Firefox now quits properly (instead of just being killed) when Windows is shut down or restarted (see bug 333907)
• Added support for document.elementFromPoint method (see bug 199692)
• DOMWillOpenModalDialog events are no longer fired by the nsIPrompt implementation (see bug 391100)
• TYPE_PLUGIN has been removed from the Extension Manager code (see bug 392140)
• You can also see the full list of all bugs fixed since Gran Paradiso Alpha 7

Some of the changes in Alpha versions of Gecko 1.9 affect the web and platform compatibility of Gran Paradiso Alpha 8. For detailed information about changes in Gecko 1.9 and Gran Paradiso, please read these pages:

• Gecko 1.9 Changes affecting websites
• Firefox 3 for developers

Also be sure to read the known issues for this release.