Firefox 3 alpha 7 has officially been released and is now available for download. The original tentative release schedule initially stated that the first beta would be released in late July, but the beta was delayed because of performance regressions. The alpha 7 release, which coincides with the Gecko 1.9 freeze, mostly includes backend improvements.

The alpha 7 release also includes support for SVG lighting and tile filters, redesigned XUL menus and tooltips, long-awaited color management support (still disabled by default), and support for cross-site XMLHttpRequest.