Loading ...Firefox 3 Alpha 4 released
It seems everything went better than expected in today’s Gran Paradiso Test Day and Mozilla decided to release Alpha 4 today. It wasn’t expected until next week.
Among the most notable improvement in this release is the first iteration of FUEL (Firefox User Extension Library), a JavaScript library designed to ease extension development. This should allow and even faster growth of the Firefox extensions library which already counts thousands.
It also features the new Page Info dialog released a few weeks ago. It has kept improving with easier wording specially in the security and general pages, so here are some updated screen shots.
Mac users will be glad to know that Firefox now supports Growl, the popular global notifications system. Downloads completion notifications will be served through it if detected in the computer. If you just can’t wait, Growl support is already available as an extension.
Work has started for per site preferences, as Myk Melez has released the third version (0.3) of Content Preferences, currently available at Mozilla Add-ons sandbox. The rework of the password manager has also started and it is being ported from C language to JavaScript for stronger security and code simplicity.
Finally, support for offline web applications support is slowly getting its pieces in place. Better Mac OS X Cocoa support is also included.
Places, the integrated history and bookmarks interface didn’t make it for this release. Neither did enabling Breakpad, the new open source crash reporting tool, by default, however the server application to receive the reports is setup and Alpha 4 can submit reports to mozilla.com and Mac OS X builds now have Breakpad as well.
As announced earlier, Alpha 5 is expected by the end of May. You can read more about future development and releases here.
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April 28th, 2007 at 2:46 am
The ‘Page info’ improvements look very useful. Being able to see quickly what cookies and passwords are connected to a site is great.
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April 28th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I have know idea how you find the time to release new Mozilla content and news daily but I really enjoy Mozilla Links.
Great work
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/27421
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April 29th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
apparently it wasn’t so unexpected because the Firefox calendar said it was to be released on the 27th, as it was.
ref:http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=pdighgf028nmbjbrno8oed8vsg%40group.calendar.google.com
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April 29th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I hope the over-sized View Cookies and View Saved Passwords buttons are just a bug and they don’t end up in the final release.
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April 29th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
i believe growl support was removed from gran paradiso alpha 4 at the last minute because it caused a crash on computers with growl installed (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=376124)
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