Brimming with excitement, the open source browser developer, Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5. Nicknamed the Gran Paradiso, the Alpha 5 version is an early developer milestone for Firefox 3 and the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 is being made available for testing purposes only, Mozilla says.

With its current Alpha 5 support for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, novel changes has been added which include an enabled bookmarks portion of places, new crash reporting system, Breakpad, and a new Javascript-based Password Manager.

Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 also included support for Growl notification under Mac OS X, and support for native controls on Mac OS X.

With Alpha 6 slated for release on June 29th, the current release supports Microsoft Windows 2000 or later, MacOS X 10.3.9 or later, and Linux.

Firefox 3.0 Alpha 5 download can be found here.