Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 Arrives for Preview

News
By Marcus Yam
published

Want to be on the bleeding edge of Firefoxiness? Go alpha.

Just as we're all enjoying the newness of Firefox 3.6 along with our fancy (or gaudy) personas, Mozilla developers have dropped an early version of Firefox 3.7 that's ready for alpha status.

Of course, those keeping up with the nightly builds of Firefox will say that 3.7 has been available for some time now; but this one is alpha, making it a little bit more ready for developer consumption.

New in Firefox 3.7 is a newer Gecko 1.9.3 engine, support for WebGL, SMIL animations in SVG, and CSS transitions (partial).

Download Firefox 3.7 alpha for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

We should mention that Mozilla last month dropped Firefox 3.7 from its release schedule in favour of concentrating on Firefox 4.0, so expect the efforts made in 3.7 to eventually evolve into the next major release.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Shadow703793
    Umm... FF 3.7a1 has been out since DECEMBER! This is truly late news man.
    Been running 3.7a1 Alpha since January and with the exception of 3 adons, every thing else works fine.

    For those interested in Alpha builds keep an eye out on the Minefield dev trunk.

    Btw, those links give me a 404. Here's where you can grab pre compiled builds: http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/
    Reply
  • Shadow703793
    One more thing: The latest alpha version is a2. NOT a1 as you stated.
    Reply
  • chechak
    firefox is good but lately isn't that good i believe it will return as we all know Excellent!!!
    so now iam using Opera its great and I'll wait for new Firefox full 3.7 !!
    how about creepy IE ?
    hope they improve it soon because last one is Err...!!! :P
    Reply
  • Tomtompiper
    I suppose even though it is an interim build "3.7" Tom's will use it as a new browser, letting IE6 gain second spot on the list???????
    Reply
  • drksilenc
    Chrome FTW
    Reply
  • Shadow703793
    chechakfirefox is good but lately isn't that good i believe it will return as we all know Excellent!!! so now iam using Opera its great and I'll wait for new Firefox full 3.7 !!how about creepy IE ? hope they improve it soon because last one is Err...!!!Gotta agreed. With the exception of CAD,Photo/vid editing and games, Fire Fox uses most of my RAM. More so than Chrome, IE, Explorer, and Word ,etc. I do have 6GB+ but I do wish it was more RAM conservetive as I have a lot of tabs running at once some times and a few times, I manage to make Fire Fox eat up ~600MB of my RAM! :ouch:
    Reply
  • That's nice and all, but it's not like some of us were running that way back when the 3.6 beta was announced for download. I would *still* be running Minefield/3.7a1 pre, except that just last week it updated to 3.7a2 pre...
    Reply
  • Shadow703793
    Way to go. -1 ing for stating the truth. Well done.
    Reply
  • mayne92
    tomtompiperI suppose even though it is an interim build "3.7" Tom's will use it as a new browser, letting IE6 gain second spot on the list???????Oh hey! How much you want to bet that if FF was included with Windows that FF would be #1? And again, people would actually have a more secure browser from the start over IE...programmers won't have to find stupid work-arounds for getting ALL PRIOR VERSIONS OF IE TO FUNCTION PROPERLY...and I could go on...and on...and on...and on............
    Reply
  • Opera 10.50 Pre-Alpha for the win. Its 300 percent faster than firefox 3.6 in java based websites.
    Reply