Firefox 3.0 passes major milestone

Mozilla has met a major milestone in its march to Firefox 3.0, developers said yesterday, by adding another chunk of the new Places feature to the alpha set for release late next week.

Places -- a complete revamp of the bookmarks and history functions of the browser -- was at one point slated to debut in Firefox 2.0, but was yanked a year ago in the run up to that version's October 2006 release. Instead, it will debut in Firefox 3.0.

"If you make any changes to bookmarks.html (say, by running Firefox 2 and editing your bookmarks) you will need to manually export them and re-import them into the bookmark-on-places [Firefox 3.0 alpha] nightly," they said.

Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 will likely post to this Mozilla page when it releases. The preview, also codenamed "Gran Paradiso," has been rolled out for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in past iterations.