Earlier this week I had commented that neither the Firefox 3 Status or Gecko 1.9 or even the Weekly Update meetings had any indication as to a release date for the Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 milestone. Well, Mozilla has released the Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 Alpha 3 milestone earlier today. A couple of new features (see complete release notes) for this milestone:

• Animated PNG (APNG) images are now supported.

From what I have read Animated PNG are suppose to be a lot better quality and more superior as the color pallet is not restricted to the 256 colors compared to animated GIF.

• Introduced support for <link rel="offline-resource">, which puts resources into the browser’s offline cache. This allows a web application to ensure that its resources are available in the cache when the browser goes into offline mode. See Marking Resources for Offline Use for further details on offline support.

Offline support/applications seems to be the “next big thing” for Fx 3. I am not really sure about the potential uses of this feature.

• Added a new preference, “Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page”, which notifies the user when the page specifies HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.

I am not sure if this is going to be a nice feature or more of an annoyance. Granted it should protect the user against being unknowingly redirected to a malicious site. But yet, redirects are quite commonly used legitimately so it could become a feature that many users will elect to disable. I’ll have to look into this further and see if may be there will be “white list” (approved sites) for this option.

The next Gran Paradiso/Gecko 1.9 milestone is going to be Alpha 4 which is suppose to include the return of Places. No details as of yet for a release date (as if we had any details about the Alpha 3 release).

News Source: Mozilla Developer News (beta)