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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.'"
Because of the new Gecko code, this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.
One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware. Not so with this new release of Firefox. But then it's the same with other "heavyweights" like KDE, so I guess there's a trend there. That's too bad...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Glad to hear that the rendering will now get some hardware accerlation. Does anyone know how faster this will be? Will it lead to smoother scrolling as on my Linux machine 'smooth scrolling' is very jerky - especially so with flash adverts.
> face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going
> to get left behind.
I don't love my old OS, but I have to use it (sometimes) at work because it's the OS that deployed apps use. No point in retesting huge apps on different OS's just to get a new browser. It doesn't bother me - I now use Firefox on those machines anyway. It seems a little odd, though. Aren't browsers just displaying text and graphics, and running scripts? (I don't include plugins such as Flash and Qtime as the run as seperate executable code invoked by the browser).
> Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.
Hmm. You could also write "Pointlessly adopting new technology leads to the need for frequent bug fixes and faster CPUs".