Mozilla releases Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 developer preview

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first alpha for version 3.7 of Firefox, a developer preview of its latest Gecko web rendering platform build. The early developer milestone is based on version 1.9.3 alpha 1 of the Gecko rendering engine – Firefox 3.6 uses Gecko 1.9.2 – and includes a number of changes and new features.

The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 drops support for Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' systems and adds support for CSS Transitions, SMIL Animation in SVG and WebGL. However, WebGL is disabled by default – it can be enabled by setting enabled_for_all_sites to true under the about:config preferences. Other notable changes include support for new Range object methods, DOM elements and new HTML5 state history methods. Additionally, on Mac OS X systems, text rendering now uses Core Text instead of ATSUI.

It's also important to note that, while the developer milestone is designated as version 3.7, it appears to be a temporary name. In mid-January, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox development, said that there would be no Firefox 3.7, but instead regular "feature updates" would be released – meaning that the developers would not necessarily wait until a major version number release to add new features.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the developer preview, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 is available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X 10.5 or later. Firefox binaries are released under the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.

See also:

• In future Firefox will drop Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger support, a report from The H.
• Mozilla officially releases Firefox 3.6, a report from The H.
• Mozilla drops Firefox 3.7, switches to "Feature Updates", a report from The H.

(crve)