14 DAY TRIAL // The second Alpha development milestone of the next iteration of Firefox is now available for download, offering early adopters the chance to test a range of new features. Earlier this week, users were able to read right here on Softpedia about the availability of a preview release of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2, and also to grab the bits and start testing. The successor of Alpha 1, this Build of Firefox is essentially a test version of the Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine. This is why the official label for the latest development milestone of Firefox Next is the Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2.
“The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 alpha 2 is an early developer milestone containing new features of the Gecko layout engine. It is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use this Mozilla Developer Preview,” Mozilla stated.
At the bottom of this article, I included a comprehensive list of all the new features that Mozilla is testing for the next version of Firefox. Some of them were already highlighted in the past, and were even included in the preview for Alpha 2 released at the start of this week.
The most notable new features are Out Of Process Plugins. Starting with the Alpha 2 Build of Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3, Firefox’s process has been separated from that of the browser’s plugins. Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime, but also additional plugins will run in parallel with the browser, with the hope that they won’t impact Firefox’s performance, stability and reliability any longer.
The Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2 Candidates also introduce hardware acceleration in concert with DirectX 11 on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 takes advantage of the DirectWrite and Direct2D APIs in Windows 7 and Vista for text and 2-D graphics that can be hardware accelerated.
Mozilla notes that, “Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 introduces new features which can be tested by using this Mozilla Developer Preview. Many of these features are still in development, and while they will likely appear in some future version of Mozilla Firefox, some may be in earlier releases than others.
“Plugins - 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.
“Security - The SSL security system has been changed to fix a renegotiation flaw. For technical details, see the newsgroup posting announcing the change.
“HTML -The placeholder attribute for <input> and <textarea> is now supported. User Interface - The stop and reload buttons have been merged when they are adjacent on the toolbar.
“SVG - Support for SMIL Animation in SVG. Support for animating some SVG attributes is still under development and the animateMotion element isn't supported yet.
“Stability - Crash reports from plugin processes are now submitted automatically. Crash report submission can be disabled in Firefox preferences (Advanced / General / Submit crash reports).
“CSS - Support for CSS Transitions. This support is not quite complete: support for animation of transforms and gradients has not yet been implemented.
“WebGL - Support for WebGL, which is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing a preference.
“DOM -Support for the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods on Range objects.
“DOM - Support for the setCapture and releaseCapture methods on DOM elements.
“HTML - Support for the HTML5 History.pushState() and History.replaceState() methods and the popstate event.
“CSS - Support for the -moz-image-rect() value for background-image.”
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 for Windows is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 for Mac OS X is available here.
Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 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