Thread: Firefox 3.7 Alpha 3 Released

A Mozilla developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3 has been released. The release comes in the form of a nightly build of Firefox 3.7 alpha 3. The new build introduces several new features including an experimental Direct 2D for the Windows builds of Firefox, JavaScript api improvements, stability and security improvements as well as additional fixes for multi-process plugins.

This comes in addition to changes that have been introduced in the alpha 1 and alpha 2 releases of Firefox 3.7. Interested users can take a look at the release notes of the new Firefox development release for a complete overview of all changes that have been made in all Firefox 3.7 alpha versions.

1. Performance An experimental Direct2D rendering backend on Windows is available, turned off by default.
2. JavaScript Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions. ctypes.jsm now supports complex types including structures, pointers, and arrays.
3. Stability Mozilla now uses an infallible allocator: if a request for memory cannot be fulfilled, the allocator aborts. This allows for simplification of the Mozilla code, as well as preventing a class of security errors with unchecked null pointers.
4. Plugins Additional fixes for multi-process plugins:
* crash and hang fixes;
* the Foxit Reader and Octoshape plugins work correctly;
* Performance improvements in the delivery of network streams.



The experimental Direct2D rendering backend is disabled by default. Firefox users need to perform the following operation to enable it in the Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 release.

1. Go to about:config
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter ‘render’ in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Double click on ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’, set the value to 6
6. Restart

More at:
Release Notes: Mozilla Developer Preview

IE 9 too may come this month.

download here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.or...0Alpha%203.exe