Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 1.1 Preview

The Deer Park name, Mozilla has said, is meant to ward off end-users who might be tempted to download and try the early edition if it carried the Firefox moniker. The alpha is aimed at developers, particularly those who create plug-ins, called "extensions" in the Firefox world, to enhance the browser.

Several release candidates, including one posted prior to the three-day weekend in the U.S., led to the release of the alpha version.

"[Deer Park] has been made available for testing purposes only, with no end-user support," Mozilla wrote on its site. "If that sounds scary, you'd probably be better off with the latest final release [Firefox 1.0.4]."

Among the visible changes in Deer Park is a "sanitize" tool that deletes all evidence of browsing by erasing history, cookies, cache, saved form information, and even passwords. Other enhancements include image thumbnails on tabs when viewing digital pictures, and a revamped Options dialog. Deer Park also supports the fast forward and back navigation that has already appeared in various builds of Firefox itself.

Those ready to ignore Mozilla's warning can download the Windows, Linux, or Max OS X versions from the foundation's site. The release of Deer Park Alpha 1 kept the foundation on schedule, albeit only barely. According to its own roadmap, the first preview was to appear in May. The itinerary published on Mozilla's site shows the final of Firefox 1.1 debuting in July.