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Firefox 3 In Alpha
illeism writes to note that, a mere six weeks after the launch of Firefox 2, Firefox 3 is now available in alpha. CNet reports that it is currently recommended only for software developers and testers. The big change is the upgraded Gecko rendering engine (the UI is unchanged from version 2). From the CNet article: "Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine — which itself hasn't been released yet but which includes the Cairo graphics layer. Gecko 1.9 has been in development since before the release of Firefox 2, and it provides vector-based rendering on all platforms. As the Gecko 1.9 road map explains, Cairo will 'bring modern, hardware-accelerated 2D-graphics capabilities to the whole of the Web without requiring proprietary plug-ins or rendering obsolete the broad and rich set of Web-authoring techniques developed over the past decade.'"
Development has been going on the trunk since the Gecko 1.8 was branched (sometime in 2005) - Gecko 1.8 was the basis of Firefox 2 and 1.5. So there's a lot of backend work been going on that's not been tested by a wider audience. While lots of frontend changes were made on the branch for Firefox 2, most of the backend work was restricted to the trunk.
Future alphas and betas will have more UI changes in them so can more accurately be called Firefox alphas.
> this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.
That's nothing. IE7 doesn't even work on Windows 2000!
It's because cairo is not compatible with win9x they decided that it wasn't worth the effort to support this platform any more (they still support Win2k - they only dropped support because supporting win9x was holding them back). If anyone is able to contibute coding skills to make it work they have no problem accepting it. It's a technical rather than a political decision.
Before someone else brings it up, no, this doesn't pass acid2. Purposefully, as the build from two days later does. This Gecko alpha (not Firefox alpha) was released so there'd be a good reference for people to test with before several rather major changes were landed on trunk, one of which was the reflow branch that made Gecko pass the acid2 test.
Yes, I guess you're right. There was a time when OSS software was the solution of choice for those who didn't want to throw away semi-obsolete hardware in working order to dance the Microsoft forced upgrading dance. I suppose this means OSS solutions have gained enough traction and have become credible enough that they justify requiring newer hardware to run them, which is good.
I'm aware of xfce and blackbox and the likes, they are nice, but if you want to run mainstream software that require KDE libraries, you're still hosed.
But in the case of FF for Windows, the problem is that Win9x users (and there are many left) will find themselves in the same situation they were with IE: they'll have to keep running the latest older version of the browser that works with their OS, which will quickly become out of date. I'm sure the FF/Gecko guys have perfectly good technical reasons to leave the old platform behind, but in a sense I hope someone will fork off a Win9x tree of FF and keep developing it, otherwise it would mean OSS is no better than Microsoft with regard to software obsolescence.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
My understanding is that this alpha won't, but the next alpha should. The reflow refactoring branch was merged back onto trunk recently -- this is a rationalisation of the layout code that fixes a lot of bugs, which also gets Acid 2 rendering properly.
Also, the recently released Firefox 3 Alpha 1 does not pass the test
This version is much faster and resource friendly - opening a test google spreadsheet page went from 52 MB of RSS to 43, and almost 4 seconds less to render it.
Lots of javascript benchmarks are faster too (depending on the benchmark - other parts are slower)
Gecko 1.9 has been being developed for a long time (the "reflow branch" is 2 years old it has been said!) so I guess it's expected that it improves things so much!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/20 06-December/msg00006.html
I didn't see anything about FF3 not running on older hardware, only older OS's. I have a laptop that shipped with Win98 on it, and it will run FF3 with no problem I am sure, since it is now running a very modern version of Linux. If you want FF3 and you are running ME, just drink the koolaid and install Linux.
No one here gets out alive
How do you reach that conclusion? Win9x isn't any more virus prone than WinXP (in fact, you could argue it is less so since it's no longer the main target). As far as bugs, it has it's share, but again, so does WinXP (I just did an fresh install of XP on my wife's computer that didn't take, and is causing all sorts of minor headaches like disabling the sound server every-other time the comp is started).
What 9x has that XP does not is full Dos support. No biggie if you only want to do the latest of the late, but some members of my family have been buying and using software for decades, and would rather keep using what they know and understand rather than buying the latest, less-useful bit.
Geez, stop being a software bigot
--Jimmy
Until there's a good technical reason not too? It's not your responsibility to give people incentives to upgrade. In a lot of cases it makes more sense to continue using an already working system than to upgrade for upgrading's sake. And if viruses were a concern, they wouldn't be using any version Windows.
As another poster said, there's a good technical reason for Firefox no longer supporting older Windows. But when there's not, with a little care while programming, software for Win XP will usually run on Windows 9x without modification, so why not support it?
Maybe not
They still do security updates for Firefox 1.5. Support is not dropped instantly.
Sorry, you are mistaken. Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 aka Firefox 3 Alpha 1 was released on December 8th.
Trunk/Nightly builds have long had the "alpha1" mark as a sign that they will lead to "alpha1" in the future.
Go into your FF preferences. Select the 'Content' preferences and look at the advanced font settings. You'll see a minimum font size setting. Change this to be however big you need the font to be and behold, your problem is solved.
You're very welcome.
*sigh* back to work...
Some "real world" stats:
According to the stats we collect at www.jstor.org, Win98 accounts for 1.4% of our hits (appx 2.1 million out of 151 million so far this month), but they account for only 0.6% of the Firefox users. Both Win95 and WinME are below 0.1%.
Mac OS X (all versions) is about 9% (the user-agent string, which is what we use for this analysis, doesn't distinguish versions of OS X, so I don't know how many of these are 10.2 or earlier).
Recent nightly builds for Mac OS X feel much snappier than Firefox 2.0. One of the obvious culprits is that Cocoa widgets are now used on Mac OS X builds. I don't know if there are other changes affecting the performance on Mac OS X, but the difference is fairly dramatic.
I love Firefox on Windows, but I have stuck with Safari on the Mac because Firefox has always felt porky and slow compared to Safari on the same hardware. The newer builds of Firefox 3 for the Mac are much better: windows, tabs, menus and other user interface elements have a nice immediate feel to them. And the page rendering is more performant than Safari on certain Web 2.0 type sites like digg and Slashdot's new discussion system. It's buggy alpha code, but early indications seem to be good for a nice improvement on the Mac when Firefox 3 comes out.
You should try the 1.3.x preview release series on cairographics.org. There are a whole bunch of performance improvements, including a new tessellator. Also, cairo's performance on linux is heavily dictated by how well your video card driver supports XRender. I have found that r200 radeons with the new EXA driver acceleration mechanism accelerates cairo, among other things, quite nicely. If you can't use a driver that supports EXA, you can try rendering to a image backend first(which forces software fallbacks) and then drawing that onto your xlib surface, which is usually many times faster than drawing directly to the screen if you don't have decent xrender support.
thisnukes4u.net
You can configure Firefox 2 to have a single tab close button, like in 1.5.
Go into about:config, change browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3.
Thats the "middle mouse button" for those few left who speak english.
The fact that they made the wheel also be the middle mouse button is clever, but in no way required. There are mice available that seperate the functions.
Put the following in your userChrome.css to revert to the old Find Bar:-
/* Use the old-style / and ' QuickFind Bar behaviour */
#FindToolbar > * {display:-moz-box}
I have no sig yet I must scream.