The early developer milestone release of Firefox 3.0a1, codenamed Gran Paradiso, has reached Alpha 1 and is available for download for web developers, testers, and folks who like to risk their browsing experience for the sake of being an early adopter. This isn’t the official Firefox 3.0 alpha, so don’t get *too* excited, but this does give an early look into the next generation of Firefox. Builds are available for Windows XP (98 and ME no longer supported!), Macintosh OS X and Linux varieties. There are no major front-end improvements, but the back-end has been torn apart with Gran Paradiso now using Cairo for all of the graphics and text renderings. Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds also! Padow!

Read more: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 available for download

I’m not only saying this because I’m on a Mac. I used to hate Firefox under OS X, but, I have to say, Firefox 2 is looking and feeling quite right. Firefox 2.0 is now available and trust me, you should be using it (in case you already aren’t). With IE 7 proving to be a royal pain in the ass (uhh, security warnings when trying to open notepad.exe? why?) and Windows Vista proving to be an ugly mess, there’s no reason to stick with Internet Explorer for browsing the internet.

Read more: Mozilla Firefox

The blogosphere is in a whirl as Mozilla approaches their 2.0 release of Firefox, which is continuing Mozilla’s focus on the individual user, web functionality and usability. So naturally there was a lot of chatter yesterday with the announcement that Firefox 2.0 beta 2 was available for public testing (see the download link below). A noticable step forward from beta 1, Some of the enhancements in beta 2 include an updated default theme, search engine manager, keyword suggestions in the search box, and major enhancements to RSS handling, extensions management, security and (supposedly) performance. Naturally this is just a beta release for testing purposes only, so don’t expect any sort of stability, usability or for your old extensions to work. Though there is a utility called the Nightly Tester Tool which will make some of your extensions 2.0 compatible. Happy testing all.

Read more: Firefox 2 project wiki | Mozilla Firefox 2.0 beta 2 download

Windows users who want to be a little more like Mac users will soon have another application to install. Swift is a new web-browser currently in an alpha state (ie. don’t expect solid performance or stability) and is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which also powers many of Mac OS X’s hottest applications, Dashboard, Safari, Shiira, Adium Messenger and BBEdit to name a few. Development is currently well underway on Swift and the codebase is open source, so you developers get on over there and contribute some code to make Windows user’s lives a better place!

Read more: Swift browser for Windows

For the Mac users who are still concious after seeing the new Mac Pro announced yesterday, I bring you the new contender in the OS browser-wars. Shiira, the Japanese browser that can, has finally made their re-designed version 2 release a downloadable beta for public consumption. After a few days usage I’m quite quite pleased. The pagedock is very cool and puts a whole new spin on tabbed browsing (page browsing now?), the performance is pretty much up there with Safari and the feature-set is quite comparable to Safari, with a few nice additions. I have to admit, if it weren’t for the web development plugins, I wouldn’t be using super-mega memory hog Deer Park (or Firefox) on my Macs at all, considering how horribly they perform (yes yes, I’ve used Camino as well). Remember this is still a beta release, so expect some instability and some sub-menus still in Japanese, but, don’t let that put you off.

Read more: Shiira 2.01beta now available for download

Mark over at Delusions of Grandeur had a quick hands-on with the tech-preview 1 version of Shiira 2.0, the Web-kit based, Cocoa browser which is slowly taking form as a major player in the world of OS X browsers. Shiira was originally started as an alternative to Safari, but has slowly morphed into a lightweight competitor to the major browsers out and about now (certainly to Firefox, which performs dismally on my Macs). The upcoming major release of Shiira looks exciting with Growl implementation (notifactions on updated RSS feeds!), Tab Exposé, native tabbed browsing (I know I know), tab thumbnails, a new version of the plugin API, and many other features.

[Shiira 2.0 tech preview | Shiira web-browser]

Opera Software has announced the latest full-version release of it’s main product, Opera 9, also known as the red-headed stepchild of browsers. While Opera doesn’t get the buzz that Firefox generates, we do see good things coming for the future of Opera. With Opera being announced for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii, we can only imagine how great the future of console gaming will be when we’re able to pause our game and switch over to Opera to look up the game’s walkthrough!

[Opera 9 download]