Mozilla have just released Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 (codenamed Gran Paradiso).

The Alpha release is only for testing purposes, although it seemed fairly stable when I ran it for a while. Featuring in Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 are mostly under-the-bonnet changes at the moment:

• Firefox now uses the Cairo text and graphic rendering engine
• The Gecko HTML rendering engine is now updated to version 1.9
• Better support for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format
• Updates to the internal engine, including rendering changes and some small tweaks
• Now uses native Cocoa graphical elements on Mac OS X.

Some bad news for users of old operating systems, though, is that Firefox 3.0 will no longer support Windows 98, ME or Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2).

What astounds me is how quickly the Mozilla team can do this sort of work. Firefox 2.0 hasn’t even been out for two months, and Mozilla have already pushed out an Alpha release of 3.0. Being quite honest, I’d be very surprised if the IE team within Microsoft have already put out an alpha release of Internet Explorer 8. Arguably Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 wasn’t as big a leap as IE6 to 7, but still the pace set by Mozilla is quick.

This pace of innovation may prove to be quite crucial to Firefox’s success. As I’m sure you’re aware, Firefox has almost literally taken the browser market by storm; in its very short lifetime so far it has already conquered 10% of the world-wide browser market share and is set to continue eroding Internet Explorer’s dominance.

Will Firefox continue? Well, IE7’s bundling with Vista will no doubt be quite a hurdle to overcome for Firefox. IE7 finally supports some modern browser features like tabbed browsing, and people might not be so convinced to switch if the gap in functionality between IE and Firefox is less.

Only time will really tell us if this Mozilla golden age will continue.

[via Lifehacker]