My personal preference is still Maxthon, now in a 2.0 beta release, with many of the goodies intact from the previous Maxthon 1.x versions, but it’s still a bit too buggy for my liking, so I’m using both IE7 and Firefox 2.0 on my Vista equipped computer.

While Firefox 3.0 alpha, codenamed ‘Gran Paradiso’, won’t be finished until at least a year, it’s already been worked on for over a year, according to Mozilla Vice President of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer.

It is only recommended for developers or testers, it’s an early milestone that shows the Firefoxers are serious about extending their market share even further. Once again, it’s important for existing Firefox 2.0 users not to upgrade – alpha releases are very early test versions.

New features are being added to modernize Firefox for the Web 2.0/Web 3.0 world, with developers hoping that support for the ‘Cairo graphics library’, with ‘Scalable Vector Graphics’ (SVG) and Canvas specifications are also set to be better supported, will ensure that web pages look identical no matter what device they’re viewed on, be it a PC running Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista, Linux, Macs and small screen devices.

It’s also hoped that Web applications will look and perform just like their desktop software counterparts, something that only Microsoft, with the Outlook Web Access 2003 edition, seems to have nailed really well so far, with companies like ThinkFree Office doing a pretty good job of creating solid web apps too and the ‘new’ Yahoo Mail looking like a pretty decent clone of an version of Outlook with tabbed email browsing, as it were. No doubt there are other examples but few in the mainstream consumer audience would truly be aware of them.

Whether that actually turns out to be true is something we’ll see as the beta version of 3.0 is released and the final version gets into people’s hands and onto the computers and portable gadgets.

Planned enhancements include better browsing, better bookmarking, better privacy features and other as-yet unannounced features, with the emphasis being on the internal plumbing so far, rather than any radical changes to the interface. Please read on to the next page...