14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is currently cooking a new Alpha development milestone of Firefox 3.7, the label it is using for the very early builds of the next iteration of its open source browser. In fact, as it was the case with the previous Alpha release of Firefox 3.7, early adopters will in fact be getting a new Build of the Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3. So far, developers have already received no less than three Alpha releases of Firefox vNext, and it looks like the first Beta is still far in the distance.
But not the Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 4, at least not according to the browser maker. Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 is scheduled for code-freeze this Friday. This could mean that the fully fledged Alpha 4 could drop as early as the coming week. All the while, development milestones are never really set in stone, and Mozilla is no exception to this rule, and the release of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 could slip into April 2010.
“Known improvements include: resizable text areas by default; more asynchronous I/O (cookies); faster x86-Linux builds with -fomit-frame-pointer (pending); and download progress shown in Windows 7 taskbar,” Mozilla explained.
The company also made public information related to the number of early adopters already testing Firefox 3.7 Alpha, which was released earlier this month, and continues to be available for download even at this point in time. The early preview version of Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 4 is currently run by almost 13,500 people. Almost 13,700 are running Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3, with 20,024 testing the precursor of Firefox 3.6.3. “Thanks to some releng work, the bulk of stranded 3.7a1 & 3.7a2 testers have been moved up to Alpha 3,” Mozilla explained.
The company recently released Firefox 3.6.2, the first stability and security update for version 3.6 and is working on delivering Firefox 3.0.19 and Firefox 3.5.9 on March 30th, 2010.
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 3.6.2 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.2 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.2 for Linux is available for download here.