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Firefox 3 Alpha 8 is out

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 07:21:30 +0000

A new alpha version, to be precise Alpha 8, of the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3 browser has been released two days ago which introduced several new features such as a build in malware protection which can be tested on a publicly available test environment on the Mozilla website.

Add-ons have to use a secure method for auto-updating from now on which means that they either have to be delivered using SSL or digital signatures. The real progress can be seen when you look at the list of bugfixes from alpha 7 to the current version. More than 1100 bugs have been fixed in that time which is quite an achievement.

Several bugs prevail on the other hand. One for instance prevents that Firefox 3 is starting in Windows Vista if parental controls are enabled. If you have been using prior alpha versions of Firefox 3 you should definitely download the new one and replace the old alpha with it.

Gran Paradiso rocks the web

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:43:23 +0000

Firefox 3 codename Gran Paradiso will most likely leave alpha phase in September. The release of Gran Paradiso alpha 7 could be the last alpha version and I decided to take a look and see what we can expect in the new version. The first thing that I noticed when starting the new Firefox release was the incredible speed.

I decided to throw some speed tests towards Firefox 2.0.0.6, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.22 and Firefox Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 since this was more of a feeling than a proof that Firefox 3 – despite being an alpha version – is the fastest browser nowadays.

The webwait website was exactly what I needed. You can enter a url on that site and define how many times you would like to load that time. Webwait is then calculating the average speed that it took to access that website. The first time is always higher of course because the other tries use the cache to speed up the loading time.

I tested all four browsers against the following urls: Google, Digg and Cnn and here are the results:

Internet Explorer 7

Google: 0.33s
Digg: 5.11s
Cnn: Error

Opera 9.22

Google: 0.40s
Digg: 3.77s
Cnn: 4.40

Firefox 2.0.0.6

Google: 0.23s
Digg: 2.63s
Cnn: 2.77s

Firefox 3 Gran Paradiso

Google: 0.20s
Digg: 2.36s
Cnn: 1.52s

Gran Paradiso rocks the web. The results are really astonishing. It beats all other browsers and is especially faster when loading complex sites it seems. I really can’t wait for the first beta version to arrive.

Firefox 3 Alpha 4 has been released

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:08:57 +0000

Early adopters take note. The Firefox 3 development team has released a new alpha version of the upcoming Firefox 3 web browser codename Gran Paradiso. The new version of Firefox 3 can be downloaded right from the webpage where the developers made the announcement. Versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux are available. It should be noted that this version is for testing purposes only and mainly intended for web developers and the testers who test the alpha version for bugs.

Although I decided to install the new version of Firefox in a separate directory it was using the same profile folder that I was using for Firefox 2. Gran Paradiso performed a check for every extension installed and non was reported to be working. It is still possible to use the nightly tester tools for instance to get those extensions working with Firefox 3.

You should take a look at the release notes to find information about installation, bugs and read the frequently asked questions. I was not able to spot odd behavior so far but I did not activate my extensions for now. Everything looks identical to Firefox 2 at this point and I would suggest to wait with the installation unless you really need to test a website for compatibility.