Mozilla releases Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 developer preview

Following the second alpha earlier this month, Mozilla has announced the availability of the third Firefox 4.0 preview, labelled "3.7 Alpha 3", a developer preview of its latest Gecko web rendering platform build. The developer milestone is based on version 1.9.3 alpha 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 Firefox 4.0 and the latest alpha for version 1.9.3 of the Gecko layout engine now features experimental Direct2D support for Windows 7 and Vista-based systems and several JavaScript API improvements. More details on Direct2D support and instructions for enabling it, as it's disabled by default, can be found in a blog post by developer Bas Shouten. Other changes include improved stability through the use of an infallible allocator (which aborts if a request for memory cannot be fulfilled) and a number of fixes for multi-process plugins.

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 release can be found in the release notes. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 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. The latest stable releases of Firefox are version 3.0.18 and 3.5.8 from mid-February and Firefox 3.6 from January.

See also:

• Firefox 3.0 approaches end-of-life, 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)