14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is gearing up to make available the second Alpha build of the next generation of its open source browser. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 was released to early adopters, emphasis on early adopters, in the first half of February 2010, and this week the second Alpha development milestone will also be offered to testers. Essentially, Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 is the Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2, which brings to the table a few new features which are bound to get users excited. Two of them, hardware acceleration and Out Of Process Plugins will be available in Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 / Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2.
In fact, testers that feel the need to jump the gun and get a taste of what Alpha 2 has to offer before the fully-fledged Build will be offered can now download a Candidate of the release via the company’s FTP Servers. Of course, even testers need to be aware that Firefox-3.7a2pre is nothing more than a nightly build, which has yet to graduate to full Alpha 2 stage. As far as hardware acceleration is concerned, Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 will play nice with DirectWrite & Direct2D in DirectX 11 (Windows 7 and Windows Vista).
“DirectWrite and Direct2D are Windows Vista and Windows 7 APIs for text and 2-D graphics that can be hardware accelerated,” revealed Asa Dotzler, director of Community Development, Mozilla. “This is brand new code and there are sure to be bugs. If you'd like to help us test these changes and you're on a supported platform, please download the latest nightly build and make these changes to enable the features: 1.Enter 'about:config' ; 2.Click through the warning, if necessary; 3.Enter gfx.font in the 'Filter' box; 4.Double-click on 'gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled' to set it to true; 5.Below this, right click and select New > Integer to add a pref setting; 6.Enter 'mozilla.widget.render-mode' for the preference name, 6 for the value; 7.Restart. (To disable, set gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled to false, delete mozilla.widget.render-mode, then restart.)”
Mozilla’s Benjamin Smedberg explained at the end of the past week that the last blockers for 1.9.3 Alpha 2 had been dealt with and that an initial security review for out-of-process plugins was needed. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 should have been offered last week, however, it now appears that the release was delayed by a few days.
Out Of Process Plugins (OOPPs) is a new feature currently under development designed to divorce the open source browser from its plug-ins. Starting with the upcoming version of Firefox, the plug-ins will run in different processes from the browser. Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime will all run separate from Firefox and will have no impact on the browser’s performance, stability or reliability.
As I’ve already said, just because Mozilla has labeled the release Firefox 3.7 isn’t a guarantee that version 3.7 will ever be launched. Fact is that both hardware acceleration and OOPP are features that were planned for version 4.0 in the evolution of Firefox. Mozilla has simply yet to announce officially what the next version of Firefox will be.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 for Windows is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 for Mac OS X is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1 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.