This comes in addition to changes that have been introduced in the alpha 1 and alpha 2 releases of Firefox 3.7. Interested users can take a look at the release notes of the new Firefox development release for a complete overview of all changes that have been made in all Firefox 3.7 alpha versions.

• Performance An experimental Direct2D rendering backend on Windows is available, turned off by default.
• JavaScript Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions. ctypes.jsm now supports complex types including structures, pointers, and arrays.
• Stability Mozilla now uses an infallible allocator: if a request for memory cannot be fulfilled, the allocator aborts. This allows for simplification of the Mozilla code, as well as preventing a class of security errors with unchecked null pointers.
• Plugins Additional fixes for multi-process plugins:

  * crash and hang fixes;
  * the Foxit Reader and Octoshape plugins work correctly;
  * Performance improvements in the delivery of network streams.

The experimental Direct2D rendering backend is disabled by default. Firefox users need to perform the following operation to enable it in the Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 release.

1. Go to about:config
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter ‘render’ in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Double click on ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’, set the value to 6
6. Restart

The Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 download is listed directly in the release notes.

Bon Echo Alpha 1 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 1.