Only a few weeks since Firefox 2.0 was launched for the public, Mozilla organization has released the first alpha build of what is to be known as Firefox 3.0 in a years time. NOTE: This is not for public use, and should only be used in development for testing cutting edge technology features.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1, an early developer milestone based on the Gecko 1.9 branch, has been released. Gran Paradiso, a mountain group located in Italy, is also the project codename for Firefox 3. There are no significant user interface changes. Core layout and rendering changes include use of Cairo as the default graphics library, use of Cocoa Widgets for MAC OSX builds and new SVG elements.

For more details, refer to Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 Release Notes.

• MozillaZine: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 Released
  

mozillaZine: Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is now available for download. Also known as the 1.8 Beta 4 milestone, this is the first beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers. The final release of Firefox 1.5, which will be widely promoted to end-users, is scheduled for later this year.

Please note that this is NOT for normal users, it will replace the current Firefox and will disable most extensions. However for developers it’s great! Looking forward to doing more E4X stuff, as well as SVG demos!

Release Notes for Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

Ok! Why did I not know about Inkscape before today??! It looks amazing and it’s said that the new version is a major feature update, and although I haven’t tried it out yet, from the screenshots it’s pretty easy to see that this tool is also for the big boys, it works with SVG which makes even more happy, since I was about to begin some SVG experimenting anyways soon, and it’s soo boring to draw complex vector drawings by handcoding, believe you me!!

Here’s the intro text from the Inkscape Website:

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to
Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully W3C compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional planned work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and the establishment of a friendly, open, community-oriented development process.

* Inkscape.org - Draw Freely

* Slashdot | Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer

MozillaZine reports “There were several Mozilla-related talks at the XTech 2005 Conference, which took place in Amsterdam in the last week of May. All the Mozilla XTech presentations can now be viewed online and papers for most of the other XTech talks are also available. The notes from the W3C’s XHTML2 talk and Ian ‘Hixie’ Hickson’s WHATWG slides may be of particular interest to our readers.”

Robert “roc” O’Callahan has written a weblog post about his SVG/Canvas presentation, including a screenshot of an impressive demo he gave (Chase Phillips took a photograph of roc’s demo in action). See more links and stories from XTech 2005 at the link below:

* Mozilla at XTech 2005 - MozillaZine Talkback

* Planet XTech