Mozilla releases second Firefox 4.0 preview

The Mozilla developers have released a second Firefox 4.0 preview, labelled "3.7 alpha 2", which includes out-of-process plug-in support on Windows and Linux for more reliable browsing. With out-of-process plug-ins, when a plug-in crashes, it crashes in it's own process, which is outside of the browser process, allowing the browser to gracefully handle the plug-in crash rather than crashing itself.

The out-of-process model was pioneered by Google's Chrome which has incorporated the technique from its first release; Chrome makes more extensive use of the out-of-process model by using it to isolate individual web page views.

The new Firefox preview also incorporates a number of performance improvements, adds "largely complete" support for Content Security Policy, partial support for SVG SMIL Animation, partial support of CSS transitions and support for WebGL (although this is disabled by default). The preview is intended for testing by developers and web designers and not for end users or production use. Full details and download links are available in the announcement. The Mac OS X version has been similarly updated but does not currently have out-of-process plug-in support.

(djwm)