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

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: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.