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.
FF3 Alpha 4 Page Info General
FF3 Alpha 4 Page Info Security
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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