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Mozilla has reached another milestone in the development of Firefox 3, releasing version alpha 4 . As with the previous alpha releases, Gran Paradiso Alpha 4 is intended primarily for the developer community and is not yet ready for prime-time use.

Alpha 4 brings a number of new enhancements to Firefox 3.it is the fastest version of Firefox yet, though how much of that is a result of running the browser with no extensions, versus actual speed increase is open to debate.

Behind the scenes the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine does bring speed boosts in page load time and disabling the extensions in Firefox 2 still didn't match the speed of Gran Paradiso. In my testing (done using a Macbook 2 GHz, 1 G RAM, running OS X and Windows with cable internet connection) pages snapped up with almost no lag at all.

Mac users will probably see the biggest speed gains in the coming Firefox 3 since all the interface elements in next version will use Cocoa widgets. However, there seems to be some confusion as to what this means.

For the record, "native Cocoa widgets" refers to things like scrollbars, buttons in the various panels, and other browser UI elements. It does not mean that form elements on the page will use OS X-style buttons and lists.

In fact the newly native Cocoa widgets look no different than the Carbon widgets (see screenshots below) used in Firefox 2; the difference is they render faster, providing Mac users with a much needed speed boost.

Other than speed gains, the most noticeable new feature is a completely redesigned Page Info panel. The Page Info panel has been condensed and re-organized, as well as adding some new features like the ability to set cookie and security permissions on a per page basis (which is possible in Firefox 2, but only via add-ons).

Previous the Get Info panel was subdivided into "forms," "links," and "media" tabs, but those three have now been condensed into one tab, "media" which allows quick and easy access to all the image assets on a page.

Interestingly, external stylesheets, Javascript and other files previously listed in the "links" tab appear to no longer be available.

Alpha 4 also introduces a new crash reporting mechanism named Breakpad that should help Firefox developers get better feedback. On the Mac side, it's also worth noting that Breakpad can peacefully co-exist with OS X's built in crash reporter.

Two new features we were really looking forward to, didn't end up making the final build of Alpha 4. Growl notifications were disabled at the last minute since they still have too many bugs, and Places, a new History and Bookmarks manager, is only partially included.

For the daring, the Mozilla wiki has instructions on how to create a build of Alpha 4 with Places fully enabled.

As with any alpha build there are still a number of known issues and Gran Paradiso is not recommended for daily use. Still, the new milestone shows Firefox 3 is making steady progress toward a final release.

source:blog.wired.com