Firefox 3 has Alpha Release

THE MOZZERELLA Foundation has released an alpha of Firefox 3, with the big idea of having a full version released at the end of next year.

According to PCWorld, Firebadger 3, has the codename Gran Paradiso. Th alpha code has been released just six weeks after version 2 was released.

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, says the beast has been bouncing around the Foundation's developers for nearly a year.

Philosophically, Paradiso aims to be a step toward making Web applications indistinguishable from programs that are installed on the desktop.

Practically it will feature better support for a number of graphics standards, such as the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) language and the Canvas specification.

To do this that there would have to be fairly major architectural changes to improve performance.

The Alpha supports the Cairo graphics library, which can make Web pages look the same whether they are being printed or viewed on a big or small screen.

The big cheeses at the Mozzarella Foundation want browsing, bookmarking, and privacy enhancements to be built into the browser, but say so far it is too early to ponder user-facing features as the designers are still working out what should be put under the bonnet.

INQblot Hotel Paradiso is a French farce set in 1910. It tells the story of respectable Monsieur Boniface who elopes with his best friend's wife to a seedy hotel in Paris, hoping for some fun. It is a favourite of Am-dram societies world wide.