Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Firefox 3, alpha 8 released

Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is an early developer milestone for Firefox 3 and the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community.

Some of the changes included with Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 are:

* Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title (see Places UI Plan for more details)
* Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
* Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
* Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
* Support for web-based protocol handlers, though it doesn’t work in all situations (see bug 394483).
* A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types (see bug 377784) has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
* All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)
* Firefox now quits properly (instead of just being killed) when Windows is shut down or restarted (see bug 333907)
* Added support for document.elementFromPoint method (see bug 199692)
* DOMWillOpenModalDialog events are no longer fired by the nsIPrompt implementation (see bug 391100)
* TYPE_PLUGIN has been removed from the Extension Manager code (see bug 392140)
* You can also see the full list of all bugs fixed since Gran Paradiso Alpha 7
Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 8 contains the following notable changes:
* Basic and unpolished UI for starring and tagging pages has been added, as well as a richer Location Bar autocomplete algorithm that matches against page title (see Places UI Plan for more details)
* Prompt for remembering passwords is no longer a modal dialog
* Built in malware protection (which you can test here)
* Basic and unpolished UI for indicating richer website identity information has been added
* Support for web-based protocol handlers, though it doesn't work in all situations (see bug 394483).
* A new Applications preference panel for configuring handlers for various content types (see bug 377784) has replaced the Download Actions dialog and the Feeds preference panel
* All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)
* Firefox now quits properly (instead of just being killed) when Windows is shut down or restarted (see bug 333907)
* Added support for document.elementFromPoint method (see bug 199692)
* DOMWillOpenModalDialog events are no longer fired by the nsIPrompt implementation (see bug 391100)
* TYPE_PLUGIN has been removed from the Extension Manager code (see bug 392140)
* You can also see the full list of all bugs fixed since Gran Paradiso Alpha 7

Some of the changes in Alpha versions of Gecko 1.9 affect the web and platform compatibility of Gran Paradiso Alpha 8. For detailed information about changes in Gecko 1.9 and Gran Paradiso, please read these pages:

Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 is available for the following platforms:

Microsoft Windows 2000 or later
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Linux

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