The Mozilla Firefox Alpha 3 developer preview was released on the 17th of March. The developer preview 1.9.3 Alpha which is available for testing has the latest Gecko layout engine. It is an early release in the development cycle. The changes seen in the developer preview are:

• A Direct2D rendering on Windows is available and turned off by default.
• Significant API improvements have been made.
• Stability has been improved by using a mechanism to abort memory allocation if it does not get fulfilled in time.

To turn on Direct2D rendering, got to type in about:config in the address bar. Now, look for the key gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled and set it’s value to true. Next, set the value of the mozilla.widget.render-mode key to 6.

See The thoughts and ideas of Bas ^[1] for more help.

Additionally crashes and bugs have been fixed and improved upon.

A complete list of changes and information related to download on different platforms is available at the Release notes ^[2].

Firefox 3.7 will boast significant improvements in terms of an overall browsing experience and these developer previews are there to prove just that.