July 23rd, 2010
We’re happy to announce the release of the fifth developer preview of the Mozilla 1.9.3 platform:
You can download it for Mac, Windows and Linux. Also, for the first time, we have 64 bit builds available for Mac and Linux, however these builds do not have support for 32 bit plugins and are considered highly experimental.
This build contains a number of changes since the previous Mozilla Developer Preview release. Here’s the list of changes available in this release, also available in the release notes:
User-facing changes
- Aero Glass is now enabled for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
- More parts of the new Windows theme have landed including new main button icons. Many more changes are coming in later releases.
- The new Add-ons manager has landed. The UI for the new Add-ons manager is not yet complete.
- You can now put tabs on top (View -> Toolbars -> Tabs on Top) although without most of the final UI this isn’t as useful as it could be.
Web-facing changes
- Support for WebM is included with this build. (Try an example video on Youtube.)
- When viewing HTML5 videos in full screen, we now use hardware acceleration for Windows (DX9) and Macs (OpenGL).
- This is the first release of any browser that has proper support for parsing HTML5 according to the specification.
- This build has early support for some HTML5 forms.
- We now support the FormData interface, part of XHR level 2 spec.
- We now support a Mozilla-specific CSS selector: -moz-any. Please see the post for examples, but this will be very useful in HTML5 contexts.
- We now do Lazy Frame Construction which can vastly improve the performance of complex pages that add large numbers of elements to a page.
- Lots of new JavaScript performance improvements have been made.
Platform Changes
- An updated
about:memorypage shows you how memory is being consumed in the browser. This will improve with later updates to give even more useful data and cover more internal memory pools. - On the Mac we now support the Cocoa event model for NPAPI plugins. This is used by Flash 10.1 and the new Java plugin from Apple.
- ChromeWorkers with jscytpes is now supported.
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