Easy Firefox

Mozilla Developer Preview Now Available With Out-of-Process Plugins

March 3rd, 2010

A Mozilla Developer Preview is now available for download. This is the second pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform, which forms the core of Firefox and other Mozilla projects.

Out-of-Process Plugins

The main feature of this release is out-of-process plugins: on Windows and Linux, plugins such as Flash and Silverlight run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. (Note that we are working on this for Macs as well, but is not part of this preview release.) We are making this preview release available so that it can get wider testing and generate feedback.

You can help test this release by visiting sites that make heavy use of plugins.

Performance Improvements

We’ve removed link history lookup from the main thread and made it asynchronous. This results in less I/O during page loads and improves overall browser responsiveness.
Loading the HTML5 spec no longer causes very long browser pauses.
A large number of layout performance improvements have been made, including work around DOM access times, color management performance, text area improvements and many other hot spots in the layout engine.
The JavaScript engine has many improvements: String handling is improved, faster closures, some support for recursion in TraceMonkey to name a few.
Improvements to the performance of repainting HTML in <foreignObject>.
Strings are not copied between the main DOM code and web workers, improving performance for threaded JavaScript which moves large pieces of data between threads.

Web Developer Features

Support for Content Security Policy. This is largely complete, minus the ability to disable eval().
The placeholder attribute for <input/> and <textarea> is now supported.
Support for SMIL Animation in SVG. Support for animating some SVG attributes is still under development and the animateMotion element isn’t supported yet.
Support for CSS Transitions. This support is not quite complete: support for animation of transforms and gradients has not yet been implemented.
Support for WebGL, which is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing a preference. See this blog post and this blog post for more details.
Support for the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods on Range objects. See bug 396392 for details.
Support for the setCapture and releaseCapture methods on DOM elements. See bug 503943 for details.
Support for the HTML5 History.pushState() and History.replaceState() methods and the popstate event. See bug 500328 for details.
Support for the -moz-image-rect() value for background-image. See bug 113577 for more details.

For the full list of new web developer features please visit our page on Upcoming Features for Web Developers.

Release Information

Please note that this release intended for developers and testers. Mozilla encourages web developers to test this developer preview against their web sites and file bugs on any problems.

For more information, including a complete list of new features, see the release notes, as well as the “Upcoming Firefox feature for developers” article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Download

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