Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 Drops by the End of This Week

A second Alpha version of Firefox is planned for availability by the end of this week, the evolution from Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 which was released almost two weeks ago to developers. Specifically, in the first half of February 2010, Mozilla offered the Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 1. In this regard, Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 is bound to be nothing more than Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2.

With the Alpha releases, Mozilla is exploring development directions for the next iteration of its open source browser. The Alpha 2 development milestone will bring to the table one of the key features announced for Firefox 4.0, namely Out Of Process Plugins (OOPPs).

“We are planning to do another alpha release of 1.9.3 this week with out-of-process plugins on by default. The following bugs should be resolved on February 23rd or 24th: bug 532208 - make browser->plugin streams unidirectional; bug 545734 - hide the iframe used to submit plugin crash reports; bug 547894 - topcrash with DivX passing null to a string function; and bug 544074 - topcrash at PluginModuleChild::UnregisterActorForNPObject,” stated Mozilla’s Benjamin Smedberg.

According to Smedberg, there is a single issue that blocks the Gecko 1.9.3 from advancing to Alpha 2 “a mysterious topcrash on shutdown,” he stated. Provided that the blocker is dealt with, Mozilla will produce the Alpha 2 Build of Firefox 3.7/ Gecko 1.9.3 by the end of this week.

It is critical to note, that although despite the Firefox 3.7 label, Gecko 1.9.3 might not end up as Firefox 3.7. After all, Out Of Process Plugins (OOPPs) is a feature that was planned for Firefox 4.0, the next major version of the open source browser. With OOPPs, Firefox will have plug-ins running in their own processes, separate than the browser’s. This means that Flash, Java, Silverlight, and Quicktime can crash, or run with poor performance without crashing Firefox or impacting its speed.

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.

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