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.'"

Comments

It's not really a Firefox alpha

[davidmcg]

It's more of an alpha of Gecko than of Firefox. There's no front end changes in this release, all the changes are to the backend which are shared with all Gecko browsers (Camino, Seamonkey and other Gecko apps like Thunderbird).

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.

Re:It's not really a Firefox alpha

[MemoryDragon]

This is more than ie7 was, ie7 was a frontend change with only a handful of bugfixes in the backend, and even the top 10 list of worst bugs was not fully fixed.

Re:It's not really a Firefox alpha

[CubicleView]

OK, the fact that all the "new" features in IE7 were implemented in the front end was news to me, thanks for the info. However would it not be better to argue how this release fits in the generally accepted definition of an alpha release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release rather than flogging a dead horse, just because it happened to be in the same field?

Too bad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Re:Too bad

[linuxci]

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.

Re:Too bad

[makapuf]

Why ? To each program its own target.
KDE has never been "for older hardware". However, perfectly nice & actively developed Desktop Environment exist for older hw (xfce by ex.).
Same here, OpenSource is about making use of older codebase, so nothing prevents anybody to patch FF2.x !

Re:Too bad

[MountainMan101]

One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware.

This doesn't happen automagically when you license something by GPL (or similar). It takes work. The strength of OSS is that no one is stopping you from making it work on older hardware. All the code for older firefox versions, and the code for gecko 1.9 is available. Just because Mozilla team is dropping support doesn't mean they won't add patches to fix this if someone else does it. Now compare that with say Windows Vista - you have no way of patching that to run on an old 386.

Moral of the story... don't be so quick to bitch about stuff.

Re:Too bad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Too bad

[ari wins]

While I understand your gripe, let me introduce you to Firefox 2.0. It was just released, and likely going to be around for a long enough time to outlast your computer with the P200 chip w/MMX technology that still has windows 98 installed.

Re:Too bad

[aussie_a]

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.
  So how long are they suppose to be supporting the Win9x OSes? 2 more years? 5? 10? 20? Until there aren't any more Win9x users? But if all of the Win9x users have their OSS software continue to support Win9x, what incentive do they have to upgrade? They obviously don't care about bugs or viruses if they're still using Win9x software after all these years.

Re:Too bad

[Dr. Spork]

I have a feeling that the 2.x.x branch of Firefox will live on for a very long time, and will continue having bugfix and security updates. If you're running Win98, it will certainly not be the weak point in your system in terms of security or stability! My point is that if by your standards you consider Win98 good enough to use, there will always be a version of Firefox that far exceeds your standards. And I mean, by many miles.

Re:Too bad

[swthomas55]

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).

Cairo

[astralbat]

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.

Re:Cairo

[jcupitt65]

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/20 06-December/msg00006.html

Acid2

[savala]

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.

Re:Acid 2

[matlhDam]

But will it pass Acid 2?

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.

Re:will not run..

[Threni]

> 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".

What does this mean?

[aussie_a]

Sorry, I left my marketspeak chip in the other bot. Can anyone translate this to English:

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. Without my marketspeak chip I translate that to say "We'll be doing things faster and still supporting HTML." Please tell me I got that wrong. Do they really need to specify "We support HTML" in a browser engine? And even if they did, why did they need to translate it to marketspeak? Do they have a brand new marketing droid they just couldn't wait to use?

performance improvements

[diegocgteleline.es]

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!

Re:will not run..

[Captain Splendid]

Shame really, 2000 is a decent OS (and I'm still going to have it around for a bit.)

But I guess it's time to start getting on the horse with Linux, because it's also the last MS OS I'll be using.

Front End? Hardly

[shaneh0]

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.

Re:Front End? Hardly

[Andrewkov]

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.

Re:Front End? Hardly

[somersault]

They could have the phishing philter and spell checker as addons which are installed by default - with the option to not install in a 'custom' install, like you can do with the DOM inspector. Then you can remove them if you don't want them. Customisation is always fun :)

Re:If it means decent Zoom...

[Dan Ost]

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.

Quick Find

[Robmonster]

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}