Firefox 3 Alpha 7 released

As expected, a seventh alpha version of Firefox 3 has been released and while it brings some visible changes, most of the improvements are still happening in the background, just like in previous alphas.

Let’s start.

Perhaps the most visible enhancement is that the location bar autocomplete menu displays the favicons for each listed web address which helps to more quickly identify a previously entered address. Also, now the ten most recent addresses are listed instead of the previous six.

History now remembers sites visited during the past 180 days instead of the previous 9. The main reason for this is Places. With its powerful search and organization capabilities 180 days of history will be a manageable task while providing a more complete personal web, one of Places’ promises. For users who may find it excessive, they can always modify a preference to limit the number of days.

As previously announced, full page zoom capabilities are now available. However until a user interface is added, the Full Page Zoom extension provides necessary buttons to zoom web pages at will.

Support for Camellia, a powerful royalty free cipher initially developed by NTT and Mitsubishi. Camellia can now be used to encrypt connections with secure servers just like other encryption methods including AES.

Alpha 7 features a new protocol handling dialog that is prompted when you click on a link that uses a registered protocol that Firefox can’t handle and requires a third party application to access it. For example, when clicking on an iTunes popular video link (which uses the itms:// pseudo-protocol), Firefox prompts for confirmation to open iTunes to handle the link.

Which is a big improvement compared to the scary message Firefox 2 shows in the same situation:

Among many other improvements, the updated Google anti-phishing protocol is now supported and JavaScript in web pages can now access local files for local use. Previously, you were able to select a file (for example, a picture) to be uploaded to a web site. Now, a JavaScript can also use the file without having to upload it to a remote location. This will improve rich internet applications’ possibilities while accelerating some processing for developers and end users alike.

Next development milestone is scheduled for mid September and loosely labeled M8 (milestone 8 ) as whether it becomes Beta 1 or Alpha 8 will depend on the quality of the code at that moment and not the schedule by itself.

For more details check Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 release notes.