First look: Firefox 3 alpha 5
 

*Source: Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...aradiso.html)*
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The fifth public alpha build of Firefox 3 has been officially released. The new alpha build, which is codenamed Gran Paradiso, features early components of the revamped Places system (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places), a cohesive storage framework that will unify bookmark and history storage. An earlier prototype of the Places system was tested in early Firefox 2 alpha (Bon Echo) builds but was removed (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060430-6701.html) because it couldn't be completed within the Firefox 2 release timeframe.

The current implementation of the Places system is still a work in progress, but the final version will support features like bookmark tagging, full-text indexing, extended metadata search, built-in syncing functionality, and support for exporting bookmarks in a broader number of formats. The Places user interface (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places:User_Interface) hasn't been developed yet, so there really aren't any aspects of the Places system that are visually apparent in the alpha 5 build. This alpha release primarily incorporates infrastructure elements of the Places system. In particular, alpha 5 migrates bookmark storage (http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews...fox-3-alpha-5/) from the current XML data format to the SQLite-based MozStorage system. Bookmarks can now be found in the places.sqlite file in Firefox profile directories.

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