| Firefox 3 alpha available |
Dec. 13, 2006
 It's not that long since Firefox 2 appeared, but the Mozilla Foundation is already hard at work on Firefox 3. The first alpha release of Firefox 3, code name "Gran Paradiso," is already out.
But, before you go rushing off to download it, you should know a few things. First, as eWEEK Labs's Jim Rapoza reports in his early look at the browser, you're not going to see much that's different. In fact, the only visible differences are that the top browser title bar and the "About" screens use the codename, instead of Firefox.
Under the hood, it's a different story. Firefox 3 uses the new, and also alpha, Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. The new Gecko uses Cairo as its default graphics library. Cairo, formerly known as "Xr," is a vector graphics library that's designed to produce identical output on any display or printer while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration.
On the Macintosh, Gecko is switching over to the use of Cocoa widgets. When that happens, Carbon widgets will be deprecated. Mac-heads can see where this is going. Starting with Firefox 3, OS X 10.2 will no longer be supported. Mozilla is recommending that Firefox 3 users run it on OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
Windows users who've stuck by older versions of Windows are also going to find that Firefox 2 is the end of the line for them. With Firefox 3, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME will no longer be supported.
With Linux, however, only the oldest systems will be unable to run Firefox 3. The minimum requirements are a 233MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM for hardware, and a 2.2.14 Linux kernel, glibc 2.3.2, XFree86-3.3.6, gtk+2.0, fontconfig/xft, and libstdc++5 on the software side.
Want to give it a try? You can download the latest alpha via ftp from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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