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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.
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
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!
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.
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.