First Look at Firefox 3 Alpha 5

The good folks at Ars Technica have taken a hard look at the latest alpha for Firefox 3.0, which seems to be shaping up quite nicely. I will admit that I didn’t notice much difference between Firefox 1 and 2, but 3.0 has a lot in the gameplan. This includes a revamped password manager, bookmarks manager and an all new crash reporting system. I wish I had that now, as my Firefox crashes at least twice a day.

Despite all that sounds good, don’t run out to pick up a copy if you plan on using your 2.0 extensions, as they will be deemed unusable.

One of the most significant features in Firefox 3 is Gecko 1.9, a vastly improved Cairo-based HTML rendering engine. As we reported in our early review of the first Firefox 3 alpha, Gecko 1.9 can pass the Acid 2 test, a CSS test case developed by the Web Standards Project to illuminate flaws in HTML/CSS rendering engines. Support for Cairo-based rendering in Gecko 1.9 also ensures higher quality SVG rendering.

Source: Ars Technica