As planned Firefox Alpha 3 (code name Bon Echo) has been released to achieve the goal of having a feature complete build at the alpha level. Since this alpha is incremental compared to Alpha 2, I will focus on what’s new only. For a complete Alpha 2 review, check my previous post.

With Alpha 3, a new installer is now available for Windows versions. It is now based on open source NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Installing System).

This is the how the new Firefox installer looks:.

Yes, no big deal. However it adds at least a couple of advantages over in-house developed Mozilla installer. First, it is a whole project dedicated to installing software so it delivers a higher level of flexibility and compatibility, including the option to download optional components/patches from the web at setup time, multiple languages in a single installer, patching and automated installation. Plus, NSIS is widely used by a number of other software makers so the interface may be already familiar for users. The installer is also a tad smaller (around 100KB).

A new Complete option has been added. This will install the Developer Tools (DOM Inspector) and the Quality Feedback Agent (Talkback) application for providing details on Firefox crashes. Custom allows to select specific components.

As announced, anti phishing protection has been added to alert when you visit a known fake site. An alert pops up with options to ignore it, report the site or go to somewhere else.

Anti-Phishing is activated in the Options/Advanced/Anti-Phishing tab. There are options to check web sites against a local black list that you build as you encounter these scam sites or a remote provider (like the default Google). Note that currently, the phishing filter runs with a limited list of fake sites so some may not be reported as phishing. This will change to the full featured list as final release approaches.

In my past Alpha 2 review I forgot to mention an interesting new feature courtesy of the newsly added OpenSearch support. Firefox now recognizes search engines available from a site and let you add them to the search engine list. When a search engine is detected, the search button is lighted and an option to add it is offered.

In Alpha 3, support for search engine suggests has been improved and now previously searched terms are shown before actual suggestions.

So, there it is the feature complete review. For more details check the Mozilla Development announcement. I must also add that I am impressed how stable this alphas are. I’ve been using nightlies only for the last three weeks and it already feels better than Firefox 1.5.0.3. And the final version should get rid of more annoying memory leaks and bugs.