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

When not being swallowed by a lesser species, extraterrestrials have taken to spreading their love for the Firefox web browser throughout the United States. A recent Google Maps find going all over the internet appears to show the famous browser’s logo, crop-circled into a row of corn in what looks to be like the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest. Ignore the plane, cars and people forming the ‘FX’ just below the field, this was done by real live aliens, man. Aliens!

See more: Mozilla Firefox crop-circle | Mozilla

Eudora, the venerable email client for Windows and Mac OS X, will be partnering with Mozilla and going open source according to an announcement by parent company Qualcomm. The new Eudora will be based on the Thunderbird platform keeping all of it’s features and of course, will be free to the public. Along with the announcement today, Eudora also released it’s final commercial version, available for a discounted price, though I don’t know who would want to buy now, nor who would still use Eudora over Thunderbird anyways.

Read more: Ars Technica

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