The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1

Feb 9, 2010 15:25 GMT  ·  By

With Firefox 3.6 Final made available for download in the second half of January 2010, Mozilla has moved onward and is offering a taste of the evolution of its open source browser. And ‘a taste’ is just the way to describe the pre-Alpha version of Firefox 3.7 that is currently up for grabs for early adopters via the company’s FTP servers. In fact, Mozilla is offering the Candidate build of a developer release of Firefox 3.7, and not the full Alpha version. Testers are essentially downloading and running the Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 build.

“The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 build you are using is NOT A FINAL VERSION of Firefox, it has been made available for testing purposes only, with no end-user support,” reads the description of the release. Gecko is the underlying rendering engine which powers Mozilla’s open source browser.

In fact, Mozilla recommends that end users stay away from the Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 altogether. The release is designed for developers and early adopters that are aware and comfortable with the risks of testing pre-release software. Users that want a stable and reliable copy of Firefox should stick with Firefox 3.6.

“Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 introduces several new features which can be tested by using this Mozilla Developer Preview. Many of these features are still in development, and while they will likely appear in some future version of Mozilla Firefox, some may be in earlier versions than others,” the company added.

It is critical to note that the evolution of the Gecko rendering engine to version 1.9.3 Alpha has brought with it changes that impact directly web and platform compatibility. In this context, testers will be able to notice that some websites as well as add-ons no longer function properly.

Mozilla presented a list with all the additions in the Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 (Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 Candidate):

"- Support for CSS Transitions. This support is not quite complete: support for animation of transforms and gradients has not yet been implemented. - Support for SMIL Animation in SVG. Support for animating some SVG attributes is still under development. - Support for WebGL, which is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing a preference. - Support for the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods on Range objects. - Support for the mozMatchesSelector API. - Support for the setCapture and releaseCapture methods on DOM elements. - Support for the HTML5 History.pushState() and History.replaceState() methods. - Support for the -moz-image-rect() value for background-image."

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Linux is available for download here.