This morning Mozilla has made version 4.2a1pre available on the Mozilla Nightly website, under their "Minefield" branding. In an effort to speed up their development cycle, we should see Firefox 5 by the last week of June.
Under the plan proposed by Mr Sayre, new features would start life in the nightly channel, before moving to the experimental and beta channels before either being disabled or included in a final release build. Features that take a long time to develop can stay in the nightly channel until ready or scrapped. New code would be moved from the nightly channel every six weeks during a development cycle.
This is the first Minefield release after 4.0b13pre which succeeded the release of Firefox 4.0 on March 22, below is the changelog for this release.
Fixed:
- #644139 [Toolkit:Build Config]-mozapps/preferences no longer included in omni.jar (Change Master Password dialog doesn"t work) [All]
- #644164 [Core:Build Config]-make configure depend on the various version files [Win]
- #638292 [Toolkit:Add-ons Manager]-InstallTrigger is not defined when a new page is opened by clicking a link with target="_blank" or using window.open [All]
- #639090 [Toolkit:Startup and Profile System]-Safe Mode dialog doesn"t allow the user to restart in normal mode [All]
Partial Landings/WIPs/Incoming:
- #636190 [mozilla.org:Release Engineering]-Change firefox version on mozilla-central to 4.2a1pre [All]
- #259861 [Core:XBL]-Should log errors on bindings with no id attribute [Lin]
- #457102 [Core:DOM]-kill nsIXPointer [Mac]
- #585786 [Core:XPConnect]-Get rid of slimwrapper checks in quickstubs when we can [Mac]
- #595785 [Toolkit:Download Manager]-Getting a download"s nsIChannel appears unreliable [All]
- #601332 [Core:Layout]-Sunspider 0.9.1 never paints its subframe [Win]
- #614145 [Core:XPConnect]-Fast-path null return values in quickstubs [Mac]
- [BACKOUT]#617339 [Core:HTML: Parser]-window.arguments is undefined when opening an HTML file with a long-ish comment at the start. [Mac]
- #632904 [Core:Editor]-Editor/IME/spellcheck use content states when they mean IsEditable() [All]
- #636336 [Core:DOM: Core & HTML]-img/video/audio/source.setAttribute()/getAttribute() on src trims whitespace [All]
- #637644 [Core:DOM: Core & HTML]-adding elements through javascript to Popup windows does not work. [All]
- #643429 [Core:Geolocation]-Remove IsBetterLocation functionality [Mac]
- #640201 [Core:Geolocation]-mGeolocation should NOT be set before Init() is called [All]
Regressions/Annoying/Common bugs:
None.
This build disables most add-ons, to disable extension checking go to about:config add using boolean the following: extensions.checkCompatibility.4.2a and set to false.
Be forewarned that this is Alpha software, although based on Firefox 4.0, if you can"t live without your add-ons, think twice before using it.
We also have an extensive topic about Firefox 5 in our forums, as well as member submitted custom styles and tweaks for the browser here.
Image Credit: cybernetnews.com