The Road to Firefox 3: Gecko 1.9 alpha 1 coming soon
Mozilla Developer News is reporting that the tree has been closed for 1.9a1. Gecko 1.9 will power the back end for Firefox 3 and other Gecko based products such as Thunderbird and Camino. New alpha builds will be produced approximately every 6 weeks. This alpha is concentrating on the Gecko backend so will have no differences to the Firefox frontend over version 2.0.
Firefox is the main utiliser of Gecko technology but is not the only one, so it’s important to note that this alpha release is not a Firefox alpha but any Gecko alphas you download will be using the Firefox frontend as a means of testing the underlying Gecko technology. This release is not intended for general consumption and should be avoided unless you’re a Mozilla developer or tester (or interested in getting involved), or a web developer interesting in how their sites display under this rendering engine.
In the coming weeks we’ll be looking at what’s expected of Gecko 1.9 and how that’s expected to relate to Firefox 3. Please note that project Tamarin that was mentioned previously is not planned for Gecko 1.9, it is planned for 2.0 (aka Mozilla 2) which will be a major overhaul of the Gecko engine.