The final alpha of Firefox 3 was released to developers today. After this Mozilla's roadmap calls for the release of beta 1 on July 31st which will be the first feature complete version of the next generation Firefox browser.

Alpha 6 doesn't add too much in the way of new features, for instance the much anticipated Places feature has not been updated from the [last release][2], though Places should be fully incorporated into the beta coming later this month.

A quick overview from the [release notes][1] reveals the following additions to Alpha 6:

>*	Updated SQLite engine to version 3.3.17
*	Support for site-specific preferences - text size
*	A new Quit dialog box that resolves termination errors
*	Added permanent 'Restart Firefox' button to Add-Ons Manager
*	Miscellaneous fixes to download manager including correctly displaying large file sizes
*	Various Places fixes
*	Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes

I just took the new version for a quick test drive and found that, as with previous alphas, it's faster than Firefox 2 but it still has a ways to go before it's stable and ready for the public.

We'll do a more detailed review of Firefox 3 when the first beta arrives. I'm particularly interested to see the revamped download manager and the rest of the Places improvements.



[1]: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a6/releasenotes/
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/first_look_fire.html