It's an alpha. They don't even have all the planned features in yet.

Yes - be aware that "bleeding edge" also can mean "broken". Things that you expect to be working and in place today... in the next Alpha build might be a distant memory. From build to build, features come and go ("Places" was going to be in FF2 till they removed it - now it's back for FF3), they work fine and then mysteriously.... they don't.

Some other products I have tested, I have "fallen in love" with a "brilliant feature" (or so I thought) only for it to be dropped in Beta testing (How dare they!)

To avoid disappointment, I will probably let it mature and stabilise to a "Release Candidate" before taking a look.

Also - many AddOns/Extensions will not work until the developers update them - and rather than code to a moving target (having to revisit their addon again and again) most developers will leave testing for compatibility against FF3 until the latest possible moment (or later if possible).

The lowlights:

1. It's an Alpha, the only thing more "bleeding edge" than that is a nightly build (if they are following the same release structure, an alpha is preceded by a short period of strong checkin control (bugfixes more important than features). When they hit beta/RC, then strong checkin control remains in effect until release.

2. FF3 will drop support for Win9x/ME and Mac OSX 10.2 and earlier. They are also talking about some fairly draconian Linux distribution minimums as well.

The main highlight is the return of "places", as well as technical improvements in the gecko 1.9 html rendering engine.

It's not official yet but here's the details
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9726942-2.html?tag=cnet.sc

I'm not too sure if it's stable yet but I'll wait until it is