Firefox 3.7 alpha 4 has been released. Changes

The fourth pre-release of Firefox 3.7 / Gecko 1.9.3 is ready. Changes from the last pre-release.

User interface

- If an already open tab falls under the criteria of your request in the address bar, then the suggestion “switch to this tab” will appear in the drop-down list.
- The dimensions of multi-line input fields (textarea) are manually changeable (now the feature is enabled by default).

Web development

- Made restrictions on the processing of CSS-selector :visited , designed to protect users from stealing the history of visited sites.
- SVG attributes having a mapping to CSS properties can be animated via SMIL . See the demo .
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Plugins

- Improvements and bug fixes in the technology of isolated execution of plug-ins on Windows and Linux platforms. (Now, almost like in Chrome: there is a firefox process and a separate mozilla-runtime process; and if a plugin crashes, the fall will not take away the whole fox.)
- In this alpha, isolated plug-in execution became available for the first time on MacOS. You will need a beta flash if you want to experiment with it.

Performance

- The process completion time is reduced by 33 times. This is not a typo.
“We continued to transfer I / O operations to a separate execution thread. These significantly accelerated the responsiveness of the interface and compared with 3.6, and compared with the previous alpha.
- Improved hardware acceleration support. Now, if from under Windows, having fresh OpenGL 2 drivers, you open the video to full screen - iron will come to the rescue. For HD video, you can notice significant changes in the frame rate, power consumption and CPU load. Linux and Makos on the queue.
- Regular improvements and bug fixes in support for Direct2D. This support is not yet enabled by default, but the performance difference with previous builds and other browsers is significant ( demo video ).

Development platform

- In JS-ctypes (API for calling native-code) added support for structures, pointers and arrays. To see how easy it is to call the native code now, read Dan Witte ’s post in a foreign language.
“Now we are introducing the practice of reliable memory allocation (infallible allocators) to Mozilla: abort instead of returning NULL is performed due to lack of memory ( throws? ) By eliminating checks of pointers to NULL, we covered a whole class of bugs that hackers could abuse. It also made it possible to simplify a lot of code in Gecko.

Confirmation image

From translator

- the drop-down list of addresses has become noticeably more responsive;
- the fox closes faster to those same 97% (I translated as “33 times”, in the original there was a “colossal 97% improvement”);
- the search in history still freezes the interface, although, in my case, the situation has improved in comparison with 3.6.