Software Update: Mozilla Developer Preview 1.9.3 alpha 2

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The Mozilla Foundation is releasing a glimpse of the new Gecko engine and accompanying Firefox 3.7 with Mozilla Developer Preview 1.9.3 Alpha 2. This alpha release is primarily aimed at developers so that they can try out the new capabilities of both the engine and browser and test current creations to see if they work correctly. New is, among other things, that plugins, such as Flash and Silverlight, are isolated from the browser, so that a stuck or crashing plugin no longer kills Firefox. The announcement of this alpha release looks like this:

Mozilla Developer Preview (1.9.3 alpha 2)

The Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 alpha 2 is an early developer milestone containing new features of the Gecko layout engine. It is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use this Mozilla Developer Preview.

New Features and Changes

Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 introduces new features which can be tested by using this Mozilla Developer Preview. Many of these features are still in development, and while they will likely appear in some future version of Mozilla Firefox, some may be in earlier releases than others.

Plugins:
On Windows and Linux, plugins (such as Flash and Silverlight) are now isolated from Firefox. Plugin crashes will not kill Firefox itself, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted.

Security:
The SSL security system has been changed to fix a renegotiation flaw. For technical details, see the newsgroup posting announcing the change.

Performance:
Link history lookup is now performed asynchronously on a thread. This results in less I/O during page load and improves overall browser responsiveness.
Loading the HTML5 specification no longer causes very long browser pauses. See bug 526394 for details.
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.
Repainting HTML in SVG is faster. See bug 541188 for details.

javascript:
The JavaScript engine has many improvements: string handling is improved, faster closures, and some support for fast tracing and JIT of recursive functions.

HTML:
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