Mozilla releases Firefox 3.7 Alpha 5 developer preview

Mozilla has released the fifth Firefox 4.0 preview, labelled "3.7 Alpha 5", 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 – the Firefox 3.6 branch uses Gecko 1.9.2 – and includes a number of changes and new features.

The Mozilla Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0 features several user interface changes, such as an updated Add-ons manager and Aero Glass support on Vista and Windows 7 systems, and adds support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Platform changes include an updated about:memory page that shows the amount of memory being consumed, Mac support for Cocoa event model for NPAPI plug-ins used by Flash 10.1 and the latest Apple Java plug-in, and support for ChromeWorkers with jscytupes.

For the first time, 64-bit builds are now available for Mac OS X and Linux. However, they do not support 32-bit plug-ins and the developers consider them to be "highly experimental". Other changes include support for hardware acceleration via DirectX9 on Windows and OpenGL on Mac when viewing HTML5 videos in full screen, early support for HTML5 forms and a number of JavaScript performance improvements.

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 official announcement and release notes. The fifth developer preview of the Mozilla 1.9.3 platform is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X (32, 64-bit) and Linux (32, 64-bit) (all 5 direct downloads).

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 release of Firefox is version 3.6.3 from the beginning of April.

See also:

• Mozilla delays Firefox 3.6.4, a report from The H.
• Mozilla's Beltzner announces Firefox 4 plans, a report from The H.
• Firefox and the open web, a feature from The H.

(crve)