Firefox 3 takes shape with Alpha 5

Mozilla released Firefox Alpha 5 and the browser that will be know

Here's what's new with Firefox 3, also known as Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5. As noted in Mozilla's release notes the following changes are evident in the latest crack at Firefox 3:

• The bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled. Webware's Robert Vamosi notes that Places is a big deal:

What's truly exciting about this alpha release is a feature called Places. As first seen in Firefox 2 Alpha 1, then temporarily tabled, Places returns in Firefox 3 Alpha 5--kind of. The functionality exists in this release for a new side panel that allows you to control your bookmarks, RSS subscriptions, and browser history in one convenient space. Places uses the open-source SQLite database giving it greater extensibility and the ability to backup and restore bookmarks, however, this also means it's incompatible with earlier Firefox bookmarks.

While all that's nice--I'd like to keep my bookmarks thank you. I'm sure this issue will be worked out.

• Gran Paradiso now includes a new crash reporting system called Breakpad. The crash reports indicate that we're dealing with an alpha product. Worth a search or two for giggles.
• New password manager.
• Support for native controls and Growl notification for Mac OS X.
• Bug fixes for Gecko 1.9.

What's missing in the latest take of Firefox is much mention of the social features that were surfaced in April.