Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 8 contains the following notable changes:
Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title (see Places UI Plan for more details)
Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types (see bug 377784) has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
Some of the changes in Alpha versions of Gecko 1.9 affect the web and platform compatibility of Gran Paradiso Alpha 8. For detailed information about changes in Gecko 1.9 and Gran Paradiso, please read these pages: