The Mozilla Developer Preview Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3

Mar 18, 2010 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has made available for download a fresh development milestone of the next iteration of Firefox. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3, also referred to as the Mozilla Developer Preview Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3, is now available for download, just days after the first Candidate build of the release was offered to early adopters. The third Alpha Build of Firefox 3.7 continues to be mainly focused on the evolution of the underlying Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine. In this regard, the latest Developer Preview of Firefox comes in the same week as the first Platform Preview release of Internet Explorer 9.

Mozilla chose to emphasize the following changes for Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3: “On Windows and Linux, plugins (such as Flash and Silverlight) are now isolated from Firefox. Plugin crashes will not kill Firefox itself, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. The SSL security system has been changed to fix a renegotiation flaw. Crash reports from plugin processes are now submitted automatically. Crash report submission can be disabled in Firefox preferences (Advanced / General / Submit crash reports).”

It’s critical to note that the Mozilla Developer Preview Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3 is still a very early release of Firefox, and, in this context, should not be deployed into production. Early adopters and developers can download and test-drive the release, but end users should better stick to Firefox 3.6. Mozilla even warns users that, because of the extensive modification in all Alpha versions of Gecko 1.9.3, both web and platform incompatibility could be experienced by end users. The conclusion is, of course, that only testers familiar with the risks and problems associated with pre-release software should in fact use Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 / Mozilla Developer Preview Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3.

Here are additional aspects of the Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3 evolution emphasized by Mozilla:

“- Performance - An experimental Direct2D rendering backend on Windows is available, turned off by default.

“- JavaScript - Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions. ctypes.jsm now supports complex types including structures, pointers, and arrays.

“- Stability - Mozilla now uses an infallible allocator: if a request for memory cannot be fulfilled, the allocator aborts. This allows for simplification of the Mozilla code, as well as preventing a class of security errors with unchecked null pointers.

“- Plugins - Additional fixes for multi-process plugins: crash and hang fixes; the Foxit Reader and Octoshape plugins work correctly; Performance improvements in the delivery of network streams.”

Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 / Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3 for Windows is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 / Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3 for Mac OS X is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 / Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 3 for Linux is available here.

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.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.