Mozilla, fresh off of their widely popular Firefox 2.0 release, has already reached a significant development milestone toward its next major browser offering, Firefox version 3.0.
The release of the first alpha version, dubbed Gran Paradiso Alpha 1, is being built on top of the Gecko 1.9 engine. With this new version, Mozilla is no longer supporting the following operating systems:
- Windows 95
- Windows 98
- Windows Millenium Edition (ME)
- Macintosh OS 10.1.x
- Macintosh OS 10.2.x
This is not altogether unexpected as many applications are beginning to drop support for these older OSes.
As with most major releases, Mozilla is looking for feedback from the web development community as well as the testing community in an effort to track down bugs and enhance features.
Download and installation instructions, system requirements, information on filing bug reports, and more can be found in the Gran Paradiso (also known as Firefox 3.0a1) section of Mozilla's site. If you are a current Firefox user who does not have any experience testing alpha or beta versions of browsers, it is important that you perform your installation and testing of Gran Paradiso somewhere other than your main computer's boot partition so that you do not corrupt your existing version of Firefox.
