Firefox 3.0a3 has just been released: [mozilla.org]

Changes in this Development Milestone
Gecko 1.9 Alpha 3 introduces several new features which can be tested by using Gran Paradiso Alpha 3:
* Animated PNG (APNG) images are now supported.
* The DOM clientLeft and clientTop attributes are now supported.
* Introduced support for , 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.
* Improved precision of layout and scaling across a wide range of screen and printer resolutions.
* Implemented cycle collection in XPCOM, which detects cases where two released objects hold one another, but neither is held by anyone else. In this scenario, both objects can safely be purged. Previously, the holds each has on the other would have prevented them from being purged.
* Added support for the HttpOnly cookie attribute, which marks a cookie as readable only by the server and not by client-side scripts.
* 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.
Some of the changes in Alpha versions of Gecko 1.9 affect the web and platform compatibiltity of Gran Paradiso Alpha 3:
* Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME are not supported for Gecko 1.9.
* OS X 10.2 is no longer supported, and OS X 10.3.9 or better is required.
* The non-standard JavaScript Script object is no longer supported.
* Moving DOM nodes between documents now requires a call to importNode or adoptNode as per the DOM specification.

It’s pretty stable, though I have run into some form-fields issues tonight (as well as the most recent Minefield nightly build) where I went to type in text in a login field and no input was created/displayed/entered. Doesn’t happen on every website, just a few.

I like playing with Minefield (nightlies) when I am just joy-surfing…I pick at Gran Paradiso just to see where it’s at, but I must confess to still rely on the latest release version of Firefox (now at 2. 0.0.3) for all my daily Web surfing/banking/shopping/etc. for stability and security reasons.

More good and detailed nuggets of info on what’s going on with the Add-on switcheroo as well as a more “formal” presentation of the Sandbox concepts:

[blog.mozilla.com] -via Mozilla Webdev blog.

AMO was updated on Thursday, March 22nd around 8pm. Overnight, we watched the web infrastructure to ensure that AMO could withstand peak load times, but this morning near peak time cluster load levels became too high and we were forced to rollback yet again to prevent affecting other critical applications.

[blog.mozilla.com] -via Mozilla Webdev blog.

The goals of the sandbox system, distilled down to the shortest version I can manage, are:
1. Assist developers and site administrators in making sure that the users of AMO have great experiences with great add-ons.
2. Expand the review system to allow participation from a much wider cross-section of the Mozilla community.

(snip)

So we now have the sandbox, and as you’ve already read it’s where add-ons start their lives. We chose a threshold to start with to seed the public site, and we expect and hope that users of add-ons that they feel belong in the public side of AMO will write informative reviews and help the AMO editors find those gems that we — I, if you want to point a finger more closely — didn’t have in the public site on day 1.

Over time, I expect that we will make the sandbox more visible to new users, as we learn more about how to balance the need to protect unwitting users from add-ons that have not been tested with the desire to match more users up with “niche” add-ons or up-and-coming experiments. We’re already looking, based on just the pre-release feedback, at making direct links to non-public add-ons work with appropriate caveats and warnings. (They would still be hidden from search and browsing.)

I guess this helps explain why it was so difficult to find out how to get into the Sandbox area to begin with during the final/not-so-fast/revert-back-quick! Add-ons rollout period Thurs/Fri.

Finally, the new Add-on/Sandbox concept and processes are well described in a detailed [preview.addons.mozilla.org]

Hopefully most Add-ons developers already know this stuff by now but if not it would be good for them to review….as well as those of us baser-souls who hunt Add-ons.

I’m not quite what’s going on with Firefox 3 but I haven’t heard any info regarding Alpha 3. It was already supposed to be released but I’m thinking that they are going to start falling behind already.

I disagree with many of Mozilla’s choices for inclusion on the main addons site. For example, Myfirefox which (although oddly named) is an excellent theme that almost perfectly emulates IE7/vista, and is constantly updated with support all the way thru Fx3.0a3 somehow got stuck in the sandbox. On the other hand, Firefox vista does a far worse job of emulating IE7, has been discontinued, and only supports thru Fx1.5 made the public site. This is why there must be a way to search both public and sandbox simultaneously.

Also, what the heck is going on with Fx3???

I’m guessing that they are fixing the problem that I noticed where the links to Sandboxed extensions are broken. That is a huge problem and I’m sure several people (like myself) tried to notify them of it.

I think they’ve reverted to the old site temporarily. You can still get the new site at [preview.addons.mozilla.org]

you r right according [blog.mozilla.com]
but no official word yet.