TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

It wasn't until very recently that I upgraded to Firefox 2.0. While I consider myself an early adopter, I must admit I'm pretty much addicted to a few neat little add-ons in Firefox that I wanted ported to version 2 before moving on. Needless to say, the Mozilla group has not been sitting duck and today they released the first alpha build of Firefox 3.0 (code named "Gran Paradiso"). As the development of the browser moves forward, it is gaining new features as expected, and dropping support for older OSes like Windows 95, 98, and ME, as well as OS X 10.2, and earlier.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is an early developer milestone for the next major version of Firefox that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla's layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Gran Paradiso Alpha 1.
On a related note, I found this information posted on Download Squad that caught my eye. Reportedly, open source browsers keep gaining ground in Europe with some interesting statistics and geographic heat maps shown. Countries like Germany, Finland, and Austria are showing over 30% penetration of Mozilla based browsers, for example.

I also thought this would be a good opportunity to check what Google Analytics stats are showing for TechSpot visitors. During the past three months about 64% of users browsed this site using some version of IE, 30% using Firefox, 3% Opera, 1% Safari, and then a smaller percent of users using Netscape, Konqueror, and others.