Now that we've shown you how to test out Mozilla's latest nightly builds of Firefox without destroying all of your current settings, you can safely check out the just-released Firefox 3 Alpha 7 release.

Most of the changes include bug fixes and under the hood tweaks. But here are a few things you might notice:

• The location bar autocomplete menu shows favicons for previously entered addresses.
• Firefox will retain a history of recently visited sites for 180 days instead of 9.
• Support for Mac OS X 10.3 has been removed.
• There's support for full page zoom of images, text, and layout, but you'll need to install an extension to take advantage of Firefox's new zoom options, as there's no controls built into the program yet.

As you can tell from the Alpha label, the latest release is still far from ready for prime time. We wouldn't recommend using the latest build as your primary browser yet, but if you want to see what Firefox 3 might look like, go ahead and compile a portable build.

[via Mozilla Links]