Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 on Friday, May 16, 2008. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post on Mozilla Developer News, crossposted below.

Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download

Please note: The Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release.

The first Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone:

• Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
• Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
• Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download the Firefox 3 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 45 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Release Candidate announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

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Written by Paul Kim on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Hello, I’m Sunava Dutta and I’m the Program Manager focused on improving our AJAX scenarios in IE8. In this short post I’ll introduce you to a feature we’re implementing in the browser that enables safer mashups. The Same Origin Policy (SOP) requires that browsers prevent script from accessing the contents of another domain to prevent cross site script attacks. Web sites today, like Facebook and Live among others, allow users to drag and drop third party ‘gadgets’ or applications to their page. As the BBC News reports, there are many challenges to doing so safely. These components are usually embedded third party scripts. Unfortunately these third party scripts run with the same privileges as the parent page and can potentially access personal data, cookies and other credentials. Attempts are currently underway to secure such script based applications. Other forms of embedding applications exist such as inserting the gadget in an IFrame, however while these are secure they can’t communicate with the page and aren’t as useful.

In order to allow rich mashup scenarios where components can exchange information and permissions with the parent page, the IE team and other members of the HTML 5.0 Working Group are developing a cross document messaging feature. Communication using strings is enabled by a postMessage method. Hosting pages or gadgets are advised to check the origin domain of the content before inserting it in its DOM. For more details, please refer to our MSDN Dev Center Article on cross document messaging.

Sunava Dutta
Program Manager

Written by ieblog on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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