Mozilla Already Looking Ahead to Firefox 3.0

Firefox 2.0 was released earlier this week, but that's not stopping Mozilla from forging ahead with work on version 3.0. The company recently said that they are beginning to work on version 3.0, code name "Gran Paradiso", and are hoping to have that ready for release in 2007.

One feature that will be present in 3.0 is "Places", a revamped version of bookmarks. It was originally slated to be in 2.0, but that just didn't work out. Places would be a major update to the bookmarks module, and would store both bookmarks and browsing history in a database. Users could then search the database for sites that they want to revisit.

Firefox 3.0 will also use a new rendering engine. Currently they use "Gfx" graphics infrastructure, but will be phasing that out in favor of a new one - Cairo 2D.

3.0 will also include the Gecko 1.9 codebase. Versions 1.5 and 2.0 currently utilize Gecko 1.8.

Recently Firefox asked users to submit a "wishlist" of features they would like to see in Firefox 3.0, and Mozilla is hoping to incorporate some of these ideas.

While 2.0 didn't introduce a whole lot of new feautures and functionality, I think we can expect that version 3.0 will. It's time to shake up the browser landscape a little bit.

Mozilla is expecting to have version 3.0 done by the end of next year, which should give them plenty of time to work out all the kinks and integrate the new features.