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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!
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.
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.
>> It sounds like something is wrong with that.
Yes. What's wrong is having users who still scream for compatibility with their old OS. XP was out in 2001. Win2000 was out in '99. That's 7 years. I really doubt much software when Win2000 was RTMd was still compatible with Windows 3.0 of 1992...
For how many years should we cripple innovation in open source projects just to support DOS 3.3 on 286 ?
Unfortuantely Opera 9 is too unstable.
I keep hearing this... don't know why, but in my Linux box, Opera 9.02 is rock solid - it haven't crashed once since i installed it. I experienced a couple of crashes back then with O8 though, but the session management (restores your session completely after a crash) rendered them relatively painless.
I must say all versions of FF i've tried were perfectly stable aswell, but the insane memory requierements (among other peeves) prevents it from being my main browser.
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!
If this means Firefox will have decent support for higher dpi displays, then I just might jump at it once it goes Beta.
As it stands, the rest of my Linux desktop is perfectly readable at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor from 10' away. The browser is the only part of the experience that gives me trouble. Sure, I can increase or decrease my font sizes to make the text readable, but that seriously borks most sites' CSS layouts, and doesn't do squat for image-based text.
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I understand the decision to go with Cairo, but like you said, I hope it's coupled with a commitment to seriously fix Cairo.!
Adding tabs was a huge change to the IE application model.
The rendering engine was updated for efficiency and standards compliance (which is much better now, if still not yet where you'd like it to be)
Things like anti-phishing, new security models, and a new plug-in interface are features that 'go down to the metal'
IE7 was very substantial. I'm writing this on FF2.0 and I have to say: The IE7 upgrade was far more successful than FF2. I still believe that Firefox is a better browser over all, but not by very much. The only reason I'm still using FF is the extensions. There are just things that aren't available as IE Plugins yet that I would miss too much to fix. Funny enough, FireFox has be in vendor lock-in.
I'd say that the FireFox 2.0 upgrade was a debacle. There are so many things that I dislike about this release. I know I could go back to 1.5 but thats a PITA, too. Some of the many flaws with 2.0 are:
1. The "quick find" menu. When I 'find as I type' it no longer opens-up the actual "find" bar that allows me to highlight/move next/move previous. Instead, it opens a USELESS quick find bar and I have to press ctrl-f to get the full find-bar. This is so idiotic it's difficult to put it into words. There is absolutely no good reason for this. The quick-find takes up as much screen real-estate and my guess is that it takes up just as much resources.
2. The absolutely HORRIBLE options menu. In addition to being visually unappealing, it's horribly convoluted. I now have to click 10 times to do what I used to do in 2 clicks. Changing proxy settings is an example.
3. Ugly graphics. IE7 is just clearly more beautiful. For that matter, FF1.5 is clearly more beautiful. I don't know who created these things (the 'home' icon in particular) but somebody really should have said 'thanks but no thanks.'
4. Why change terminology? Extensions are now Add-Ons. Will they be plug-ins in the next release? BHOs after that? It took me 3 minutes after I upgraded to find the extension control panel.
5. More in-built functionality that I don't need. Like a phishing filter. This shouldn't be in IE, either, but DEFINITELY not in firefox.
6. I dislike having close buttons on each tab. I thought I would like it, but in reality, when I want to close multiple tabs now I have to keep moving my mouse to do so. Before, I could just click, click, click and close 3 tabs. I liked that much better.
What's even worse is that they didn't actually fix the things that would really make this browser better:
1. Memory Foot print. Right now, I have 2 tabs open (one is gmail) and about a dozen extensions. Firefox is using 101MB of RAM.
2. Extensions are not in a 'protected' mode. A misbehaving extension can still leak memory and bring down my entire browser. This infuriates me to no end when it happens.
3. No ability to see what extension has crashed. The recommended solution is to disable extensions one at a time. I should not have to do that.
4. When one tab is 'busy' (opening a PDF, for example) the entire browser window freezes. This is a tough one, I understand, but not impossible.
In summary, FireFox 2.0 was a step backwards for the browser. I sincerely hope they produce better results with FF3.
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
While I wholeheartedly agree I've found that using the session saving features in Firefox 2 together with the FlashBlock extension greatly improves things. This lets me close Firefox and return to where I was, and only view the flash content I specifically decide to.
It's more of treating the symptoms than the disease, but at least I can benefit from Firefox's other great extensions this way.
.: Max Romantschuk
Personally, I'll wait for Chicago.
In some people's minds, an extensible system where you can selectively add everything and the kitchen sink by your own choosing is bloat, even if the minimal installation is extremely efficient.
I prefer to call that level of choice flexibility.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
Some people HAVE to use old windows, because the old proprietary controlling software that came with a given hardware (say a robot in bio-medical lab), only runs on old OS (I've even seen spectro-photo-meters that only run on DOS. Yeah. Thank goodness FreeDOS is our friend in such deprecated cases). The company has dropped support for newer OS for this peice of hardwre and is only doing hardware repairs. You either have to keep a deprecated OS for your machine, or you have to buy a newer model (Which most of the time is out-of-question because the prices are horribly expensive and the older one still does its job).
The good thing with open source software is, compared to proprietary software like IE7, is that users aren't necessarily stuck with this "won't support anymore situation".
In the IE7 world, whatever Microsoft decides, you'll have to accept it. They decide to drop support for everything before WinXP ? Upgrade to a newer more expensive software is your only hope.
In the opensource world, if there's a big enough userbase (and there is surely a big enough userbase in the scientific community), some users will start tweaking and hacking. As the source is open, nothing stops programmers to start a new separate fork that will support a separate platform that won't be supported anymore in the main line.
Once FireFox 3.0 official is out, be sure that you'll see separate Win9x branches : either FF3.0 with a patched Cairo support. Or FF3.0 with a retro-fitted (non cairo-based) Gecko 1.8 engine. Or a separate continued 2.0 branch that is kept up to date and security-patched for users who can't use FF3.0. Or a completly different Gecko-based browser specially tailored for Win9x users (K-maleon 9x ?)
The only drawback is that, because of registered Mozilla Foundation's trademarks, they'll surely have to call it IceWeasel. Or SnowCat. Or FrostBear. Or LavaBadger. Or whatever else.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]