Firefox 4.0 pre-Alpha Developer Preview – Get a Taste

Mozilla has started building the next major iteration of its open source browser, and an early preview version of Firefox 4.0 is already available for download and testing. Earlier this week, Softpedia readers were able to find out that Mozilla was cooking a Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0 ahead of the first Beta build, which is planned for delivery next month, June 2010. A pre-Alpha version of Firefox 4.0 can be downloaded from the browser maker’s FTP servers, allowing early adopters to get a taste of what the successor of Firefox 3.6 will bring to the table.

The release offered by Mozilla is not the fully fledged Alpha / Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0. Instead, the bits are only a nightly Build, indicating that there is still work to be done until the browser hits the Alpha milestone. In fact, testers will be able to see that the download is labeled Firefox 3.7 Alpha 5. Obviously, this is not the fifth Alpha of Firefox 3.7.

Earlier this week, when Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, made public the plans around Firefox 4.0, he also indicated that an Alpha preview would be offered ahead of the coming Beta. At the same time, he underlined that Firefox 3.7 had been folded into Firefox 3.6.4, an upcoming update for version 3.6, which was supposed to have been already released, but was postponed due to severe bugs in affecting the new Out of Process Plugins feature.

Mozilla is planning to offer a Beta of Firefox 4.0 in June, with the Release Candidate set for October, and the RTM in November. While the deadlines are by no means set in stone, fact is that Firefox 4.0 could become available to users by the end of 2010.

When it does, Firefox 4.0 will offer a completely overhauled graphical user interface, which was inspired from Microsoft’s Ribbon/Fluent, with the tabs on top of the Address Bar and an Office 2010 like Menu style. In addition, version 4.0 will feature a range of enhancements, such as Personas (Firefox GUI themes), Jetpacks (new extensions), boosted performance, increased stability, a new HTML parser, etc.

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 3.6.3 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.3 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.3 for Linux is available for download here.

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