Percy Cabello on Mozilla Links has posted about the recent Gran Paradiso developers meeting where they discussed the new features in Firefox 3.  They came up with a list of features, separated into mandatory, highly desirable & ‘nice to have’. 

The mandatory features were:

• Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.
• Support for remote bookmarks, bookmarks and history annotation.
• Files could be handled by web services. If I am reading this correctly, this could mean you would be able to click on an attached document and open it with something like Writely or Google Documents. Or perhaps, as I asked Santa, the ability to redirect mailto: links to web email services.
• A much needed print support to prevent cut paragraphs and true WYSIWYG.
• The much requested MSI installer which will be a much welcomed improvement for IT administrators as it will ease deployment and updating of Firefox across a company.
• In the security front: support for Microsoft CardSpace and OpenID (check tomorrow’s article for more coverage on this). Smarter credentials handling.
• Airbag, the Google backed open source crash reporting tool will replace currently licensed TalkBack.

These would all be cool, but the two best features I saw were on the ‘highly desirable’ list:

• Save web pages as PDF files, plus integrated with history. That would be just awesome.
• Support pause/resume downloads across sessions.

Both of those would indeed be just awsome.  You can see the full list with details plus other info on the Firefox 3 requirements doc.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 was released in December and according to the Mozilla Release Roadmap, final release is due November 2007 (est.). Another alpha is due in the next couple of months.