Gran Paradiso Alpha 3

kbrosnan writes "Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 is a release of the Gecko rendering engine for testing purposes only. Here are the release notes. While this release uses the interface of Firefox, no significant interface changes have been made. These alpha releases focus on making improvements to the core elements: graphics, JavaScript, page rendering, etc."

Comments

Re:Release notes and comments

[neongrau]

i remember ppl saying the same about windows 98SE when w2k was released.
ppl like you prefer the eye-candyless w2k.
and i now hear ppl saying it about XP since vista is out (including me).
and i'm pretty sure ppl will say the same about vista once the successor is released.

so like someone earlier posted:
it's ok to live in the past

(for a while at least)
we don't want to come to a total halt in technology

Re:Changes.

[NekoXP]

Aww but I love the click in IE. Sometimes when I click in Firefox I wonder if it's actually DOING anything.. it does seem to sit there and churn a lot in the background. When I click in IE and it's locked up because of some dumb flash anim and not responding to my button press, it doesn't make any sound.

The click makes it very clear when the browser is sucking ass, and when it is not :)

Re:Release notes and comments

[shawn443]

I don't remember 2K bothering me quite as much as XP. Everytime I see that balloon telling me I have unused desktop icons I get mad. Eye candy is useless to me unless it enhances my work. Otherwise, give me TWM. That said, I am sitting down with a Vista Home Super Duper Bee's Knees Fucking Ultimate cd coupled with a Barnes and Noble style training session sometime this week. I am sure I am going to be mad.

Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes

[Anc]

The new theme for FF3 will look even less like OS X apps, and will continue to have ugly Windows 95-ish form controls. Actually, they'll be switching to Windows 3.1-ish controls.

Quite the opposite. One of the already implemented changes that will make it to Fx3 is enabling native Cocoa widgets.

Bug!

[Zarel]

I had a feeling the rendering engine improvements would break something. The Quick Contacts list of GMail with Chat has a huge space on the bottom that increases each time you hover over a user. I wonder if it's a rendering engine bug or a GMail bug.

Mac users, give it a try!

[chrysalis]

For OSX users, Gran Paradiso is a huge improvement over previous Firefox versions. It's way faster, and it feels as fast as Safari. While there are still some bugs especially with forms, this is definitely something OSX users should try.

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish fucknozzles would stop claiming the leak was from the back-forward caching, when it leaks like a sieve even with that feature turned off.

Re:Release notes and comments

[EugeneK]

50 megs per tab is not unreasonable - suppose each page is 20k (for example, this slashdot story with all the comments that I just clicked on is 26.87k). Now, you have to build an in-memory DOM for that page. Suppose each byte is a single DOM node (of course it is a tree, so there are would be more nodes than bytes, but on the other hand, several words might be in a single #text DOM node, so it kind of works out). Surely 1024 bytes is reasonable for a DOM node, when you consider all the pointers to various CSS, javascript and other kinds of things that a DOM node needs to have. So :

1024 bytes / node * 20k nodes / page = 20,2048 k bytes / page

about 20 megs per page, or 200 megs for 10 tabs. Now, of course you have overhead above and beyond the tabs, such as the UI code (which of course in Mozilla is *iteself* a DOM node and Javascript. So that's the other 300 megs.

Re:Release notes and comments

[bunratty]

Just to make my vague, general statements concrete, I picked three sites at random, each of which uses a different plugin:
The official US time clock (Java)
weatcher.com interactive map (Flash)
Panda Pang (Shockwave for Director)

With these three pages open Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP has a VM Size of 175 MB. Huge memory problem in Firefox? No, Opera 9.10 on Windows XP has a VM Size of 171 MB. After closing the tabs in Firefox, VM Size goes down to 46 MB. Doing the same in Opera, VM Size goes down to 59 MB. If anything, it looks like Opera may have a problem releasing unused memory. Keep in mind for a fair comparison that you must open only those sites after starting the browser, otherwise, you could see the built-up memory usage form hours or days of use in a browser that you've been visiting other pages in.

If you can come up with a series of steps that causes high memory usage in Firefox, and not high memory usage in other browsers, maybe you're on to something.