The Mozilla community is proud to announce that Firefox 4 Beta 2 is now available for download on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Firefox 4 Beta 2 includes several major features and improvements – by testing them early we’ll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions of Firefox. The included Feedback Add-On that helps you let us know what you think about the new features and technologies in the beta. You can read more about this release on the Mozilla Blog, or at any of the following links:

• Read more about some of the major features in this beta
• Take a look at our big chart o’ technology that’s included in this beta
• Read the release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 1

We want to thank the Mozilla community of nightly testers for the amazing feedback that helped shaped Firefox 4 Beta 2. We appreciate your assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox!

Firefox 3.6.8 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from www.firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

This release fixes a stability problem that affected some pages with embedded plugins. For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.6.8 release notes.

Note: All Firefox 3 and 3.5 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 by downloading it from www.firefox.com or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu and clicking on “Get the New Version”, then checking for updates again once Firefox 3.6 is installed.

Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.

Firefox 3.6.7: http://firefox.com
Firefox 3.5.11: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This updates can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox release notes:

• Firefox 3.6.7 release notes
• Firefox 3.5.11 release notes

Note: All Firefox 3 and 3.5 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 by downloading it from http://firefox.com or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu and clicking on “Get the New Version”, then checking for updates again once Firefox 3.6 is installed.

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing security and stability update process, Thunderbird 3.1.1 and Thunderbird 3.0.6 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://getthunderbird.com/. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Thunderbird.

• Thunderbird 3.1.1: http://getthunderbird.com/
• Thunderbird 3.0.6: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to these latest releases. If you already have Thunderbird, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. You can also manually fetch this update by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird release notes:

• Thunderbird 3.1.1 release notes
• Thunderbird 3.0.6 release notes

The Mozilla community is proud to announce that Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for download on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 includes dozens of major features and improvements – by testing them early we’ll be able to respond to your feedback for future versions of Firefox. Once you download Firefox 4 Beta 1, you’re part of our beta program and will receive regular updates as more features launch. We’ve included a Feedback Add-On that helps you let us know what you think about the new features and technologies in the beta. You can read more about this release on the Mozilla Blog, or at any of the following links:

• Read more about some of the major features in this beta
• Take a look at our big chart o’ technology that’s included in this beta
• Read the release notes for Firefox 4 Beta 1

We want to thank the Mozilla community of nightly testers for the amazing feedback that helped shaped Firefox 4 Beta 1. We appreciate your assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox!

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.6.6 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://www.firefox.com. This release makes a small change to the crash protection feature introduced in Firefox 3.6.4, increasing the amount of time that Firefox will allow a plugin to remain frozen before terminating it. For more information, see the Mozilla Blog announcement about the release.

We recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.6 you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.6.6 Release Notes.

All Firefox 3 and 3.5 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu and clicking on “Get the New Version”, then checking for updates again once Firefox 3.6 is installed.

Mozilla Messaging is proud to announce that Thunderbird 3.1 is now available for download. Thunderbird 3.1, based on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, was built by a community of passionate contributors, experienced developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and thousands of active testers.

Some of the new features:

• New Quick Filter toolbar
• New Migration Assistant
• Saved Files Manager
• Several fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2
• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface
• Stability, memory, and password handling improvements

As always Thunderbird 3.1 is available as a free download. Thunderbird 3.1 is also available in 46 languages – get your local version.

We encourage developers to read the Thunderbird 3.1 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.

Results from our beta testing show Firefox 3.6.4 will significantly reduce the number of Firefox crashes experienced by users who are watching online videos or playing games. When a plugin crashes or freezes while using Firefox, users can enjoy uninterrupted browsing by simply refreshing the page.

Mozilla recognizes that third-party plugins provide important functionality in many of today’s websites. At the same time, plugins can lead to problems for users as they browse. With the ability to automatically alert users when they have out of date plugins, and now crash protection, Firefox 3.6.4 allows users to experience all the content they love without any of the hassles. (If you’re not running Firefox, Mozilla recommends that you make a habit of visiting the Plugin Check page to keep your plugins up to date.)

At this time Firefox offers crash protection for Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight on Windows and Linux computers. Support for other plugins and operating systems will become available in a future Firefox release.

All Firefox users are encouraged to upgrade for free by using the “Check for Updates” function in the Help menu, or by visiting www.firefox.com. For more information, please visit:

• Crash Protection FAQ
• Firefox 3.6.4 Release Notes
• Plugin Check

Thunderbird 3.0.5 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download.  We recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and security updates of Thunderbird, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Thunderbird 3.0.5.

Thunderbird 3.0.5: http://www.GetThunderbird.com

If you already have Thunderbird, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours.

We’re happy to announce the release of the fifth developer preview of the Mozilla 1.9.3 platform:

You can download it for Mac, Windows and Linux. Also, for the first time, we have 64 bit builds available for Mac and Linux, however these builds do not have support for 32 bit plugins and are considered highly experimental.

This build contains a number of changes since the previous Mozilla Developer Preview release. Here’s the list of changes available in this release, also available in the release notes:

User-facing changes

• Aero Glass is now enabled for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
• More parts of the new Windows theme have landed including new main button icons. Many more changes are coming in later releases.
• The new Add-ons manager has landed. The UI for the new Add-ons manager is not yet complete.
• You can now put tabs on top (View -> Toolbars -> Tabs on Top) although without most of the final UI this isn’t as useful as it could be.

Web-facing changes

• Support for WebM is included with this build. (Try an example video on Youtube.)
• When viewing HTML5 videos in full screen, we now use hardware acceleration for Windows (DX9) and Macs (OpenGL).
• This is the first release of any browser that has proper support for parsing HTML5 according to the specification.
• This build has early support for some HTML5 forms.
• We now support the FormData interface, part of XHR level 2 spec.
• We now support a Mozilla-specific CSS selector: -moz-any. Please see the post for examples, but this will be very useful in HTML5 contexts.
• We now do Lazy Frame Construction which can vastly improve the performance of complex pages that add large numbers of elements to a page.
• Lots of new JavaScript performance improvements have been made.

Platform Changes

• An updated about:memory page shows you how memory is being consumed in the browser. This will improve with later updates to give even more useful data and cover more internal memory pools.
• On the Mac we now support the Cocoa event model for NPAPI plugins. This is used by Flash 10.1 and the new Java plugin from Apple.
• ChromeWorkers with jscytpes is now supported.

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes several new features as well as improvements to performance, memory, password handling, and the upgrade process. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.1.

New features in Thunderbird 3.1 that require feedback include:

• New Quick Filter toolbar
• New Migration Assistant
• Saved Files Manager
• Several fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2
• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface
• Stability, memory, and password handling improvements

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 46 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.1 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 Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 milestone 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.

The release candidate build of Firefox 3.6.4 is now available for download and public testing. This version fixes issues found in the previous beta of Firefox 3.6.4. If no issues are found during testing this build will be officially released as Firefox 3.6.4 final in the coming weeks.

Users who have already downloaded or opted in to previous betas should receive the latest beta as an automatic update. If you did not download the previous beta and would like to help us test this release, please download the latest Firefox 3.6.4 beta from mozilla.com.

For general information about Firefox 3.6.4 and the uninterrupted browsing feature, please see the previous beta announcement.

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes several new features as well as improvements to performance, memory, password handling, and the upgrade process. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.1.

New features in Thunderbird 3.1 that require feedback include:

• New Quick Filter toolbar
• New Migration Assistant
• Saved Files Manager
• Several fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2
• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface
• Stability, memory, and password handling improvements

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 44 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.1 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 Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate milestone 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.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 2 is now available now for download and public testing. This latest preview version of Thunderbird includes a new quick filter toolbar, a new migration assistant for users upgrading from Thunderbird 2, and improved support for Personas.

The main goals of this release are to test the new features introduced in this milestone and to find out about possible problems as users upgrade.  Notable changes include:

• Several fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2.
• Several fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager.
• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface.
• Stability and memory improvements.

Users of this latest preview version of Thunderbird should not expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this milestone.

For a more detailed list of bug fixes, see the the full bug list.

Downloading

Please read the release notes before downloading for more information about this release including known issues.

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 2 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Community chat about Thunderbird 3.1 can be followed at GetSatisfaction and on irc.mozilla.org in #thunderbird.

An updated beta of Firefox 3.6.4 is now available for download and public testing. This version fixes issues found in the previous beta of Firefox 3.6.4.

Users who have already downloaded or opted in to the previous Firefox 3.6.4 beta should receive the latest beta as an automatic update.  An additional opt-in upgrade offer will be made to users on the beta channel later this week.  If you did not download the previous beta and would like to help us test this release, please download the latest Firefox 3.6.4 beta from mozilla.com.

For general information about Firefox 3.6.4 and the uninterrupted browsing feature, please see the previous beta announcement.

A beta of Firefox 3.6.4 is now available for download and public testing. This version of Firefox will offer uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. If a crash in one of these plugins happens, Firefox will continue to run and users will be able to submit a crash report before reloading the page to try again:

We encourage users to test this Firefox 3.6.4 beta on their favorite websites, and give us feedback by submitting their crash reports. If users find websites that repeatedly cause plugin crashes, we ask that they file a bug or fill out this feedback form. As always, we appreciate the help we get from the community in evaluating these beta releases.

Users who had installed the Firefox “Lorentz” beta release will be automatically updated to this beta release of Firefox 3.6.4, or can manually “Check for Updates” in the Help menu.

As part of our ongoing platform development work, we’re happy to announce the fourth pre-release of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform. Gecko 1.9.3 will form the core of Firefox and other Mozilla project releases.

It’s available for download on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Mozilla expects to release a Developer Preview every 2-3 weeks. If you’ve been running a previous release, you will be automatically updated to the latest version when it is released.

This preview release contains a lot of interesting stuff that’s worth pointing out, and contains many things that were also in previous releases. Here are the things of note in this release:

User Interface Changes

• Open tabs that match searches in the Awesomebar now show up as “Switch to Tab.”
• This is the first preview release to contain resizable text areas by default.

Web Developer Changes

• This is the first preview release to contain changes to CSS :visited that prevent a large class of history sniffing attacks. You can find more information about the details of why this change is important over on the hacks post on the topic and on the Mozilla Security Weblog. Note that this change is likely to break some web sites and requires early testing – please test if you can.
• SVG Attributes which are mapped to CSS properties can now be animated with SMIL. See the bug or a demo.

Plugins

• Out of process plugins support for Windows and Linux continues to improve. This release contains many bug fixes vs. our previous developer preview releases. (In fact, it’s good enough that we’ve ported this code back to the 3.6 branch and have pushed that to beta for a later 3.6.x release.)
• This is the first release that contains support for out of process plugins for the Mac. If you are running OSX 10.6 and you’re running the latest Flash beta, Flash should run out of process

Performance

• One area where people complained about performance was restart performance when applying an update. It turns out that a lot of what made that experience poor wasn’t startup time, it was browser shutdown time. We’ve made a fix since the last preview release that made a whopping 97% improvement in shutdown time. (That’s not a typo, it’s basically free now.)
• Our work to reduce the amount of I/O on the main thread continues unabated. This preview release will feel much snappier than previous snapshots, and feel much faster than Firefox 3.6.
• We continue to add hardware acceleration support. If you’re on Windows and you’ve got decent OpenGL 2 drivers, open video will use hardware to scale the video when you’re in full screen mode. For large HD videos this can make a huge difference in the smoothness of the experience and how much power + CPU are used. We’ll be adding OSX and Linux support at some point in the future as well, but we’re starting with Windows.
• We continue to make improvements and bug fixes to our support for Direct2D. (Not enabled by default. If you want to turn it on see Bas’ post.) If you’re running Alpha 4 on Windows Vista or Windows 7, and you’ve turned on D2D, try running this stress test example in Alpha 4 vs. Firefox 3.6. The difference is pretty amazing. You can also see what this looks like compared to other browsers in this this video. (Thanks to Hans Schmucker for the video and demo.)

Platform

• JS-ctypes, our new easy-to-use system for extension authors who want to call into native code now has support for complex types: structures, pointers, and arrays. For more information on this, and how easy it can make calling into native code from JavaScript, see Dan Witte’s post.
• Mozilla is now sporting an infallible allocator. What is this odd-sounding thing, you ask? It’s basically an allocator that when memory can’t be allocated it aborts instead of returning NULL. This reduces the surface area for an entire class of security bugs related to checking NULL pointers, and also allows us to vastly simplify a huge amount of Gecko’s source code.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download.  We recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Thunderbird, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Thunderbird 3.0.4 or Thunderbird 2.0.0.24.

Thunderbird 3.0.4: http://www.GetThunderbird.com
Thunderbird 2.0.0.24: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Thunderbird users upgrade to these releases. If you already have Thunderbird, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours.

Please note: This is the last planned security and stability release for Thunderbird 2.0.0.24.

A beta of the Firefox “Lorentz” project is now available for download and public testing. Firefox “Lorentz” takes the out of process plugins work from Mozilla Developer Previews and builds it on top of Firefox 3.6.3. This beta offers uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when a problem causes a crash in any Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugin instance. If a plugin crashes or freezes when using Firefox “Lorentz”, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. Users can submit a plugin crash report, and then reload the page to restart the plugin and try again.

We encourage users to test Firefox “Lorentz” on their favorite websites, and give us feedback by filing a bug or filling out this form. As always, we appreciate the help we get from the community in evaluating these beta releases. Users who install Firefox “Lorentz” will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included.