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

Changes.

[Seumas]

no significant interface changes have been made. These alpha releases focus on making improvements to the core elements: graphics, JavaScript, page rendering, etc." In other words, there have been no changes to anything that MSIE users care about, like 3d buttons, blocky, chunky, weird, chunky tabs and nifty "click" noises every time you click something, load something, go back a page, go forward a page, scroll down a page, select something, delete something, type something, submit something or refresh something?

Re:Changes.

[gerrysteele]

Perhaps someday soon they might invent some innovative technology to update you of these events.

I would call it "The Status Bar".

Release notes and comments

[FishWithAHammer]

* Animated PNG (APNG) images are now supported.
* The DOM clientLeft and clientTop attributes are now supported.
* Introduced support for , which puts resources into the browser's offline cache. This allows a web application to ensure that its resources are available in the cache when the browser goes into offline mode. See * * * Marking Resources for Offline Use for further details on offline support.
* Improved precision of layout and scaling across a wide range of screen and printer resolutions.
* Implemented cycle collection in XPCOM, which detects cases where two released objects hold one another, but neither is held by anyone else. In this scenario, both objects can safely be purged. Previously, the holds each has on the other would have prevented them from being purged.
* Added support for the HttpOnly cookie attribute, which marks a cookie as readable only by the server and not by client-side scripts.
* Added a new preference, "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page", which notifies the user when the page specifies HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.
* Windows 95, Windows NT 4, Windows 98, and Windows ME are not supported for Gecko 1.9.
* OS X 10.2 is no longer supported, and OS X 10.3.9 or better is required.
* The non-standard JavaScript Script object is no longer supported.
* Moving DOM nodes between documents now requires a call to importNode or adoptNode as per the DOM specification.

It's kind of sketchy that they're not supporting older Windows or OS X versions, but I don't think that's a huge deal. I wish they'd reintroduced MNG instead of APNG (purely a personal preference; APNG is probably actually a better way of doing it), and any fixes to JavaScript are nice to have.

Re:Release notes and comments

[mhall119]

It doesn't support older Windows because it uses Cairo for faster rendering, which I've read doesn't support older Windows versions. I'm not sure if it's the same reason older versions of OS X are not supported.

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.

Re:Release notes and comments

[atamido]

Cairo is not a speed demon, but it has been getting noticeably faster with ever release that they've made. It may be slower than what Firefox is currently using, but it's also a lot more useful. Their current Gecko rendering engine doesn't have the capability to do the things that they want to do, without a significant rewrite. So in this sense Cairo will add a ton of ability, fix a lot of memory leaks, and probably be at least as fast in a few releases. They will also gain time from all of the developers working on the current engine to have them work to improve some other part of Firefox.

Not a gecko release

[El_Muerte_TDS]

It's an alpha release of Firefox 3, it uses the Gecko 1.9 engine.

ACID 2 Compliance

[nahdude812]

Yes, it does completely pass the Acid 2 CSS compliance test.

Re:ACID 2 Compliance

[jesser]

It's ok if the nose is a pixel offset from the reference-rendering position. IIRC, it depends on the order in which borders are drawn, which isn't specified by CSS. It's even ok, and considered ideal by some, if the nose is anti-aliased to be "half a pixel offset" from the reference-rendering position.

Re:That felt weird

[Seumas]

Just to be ironic I do not think that word means what you think that it means.

Why should it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider it a feature if a browser prevents people from visiting MySpace.

Re:Why should it?

[pipatron]

I knew the MySpace-crowd were young, but 5 months, wtf?

What?

[mboverload]

WTF? Where did the cars go?

Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes

[Seumas]

That's a feature, dude. The white screen in between page loads is where the government flashes the subliminal commands, instructing you to consume, worship and be content.

Re:So..

[Jeffrey Baker]

If they "fixed" this "leak", the other bunch of fucknozzles would come back asking "Why are back and forward so slow?!??". I think for the time being you people are slightly less annoying, so the "leak" stays.

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.

New word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucknozzles! That's a new one. I suppose if you've already got an asshat, you need some matching fucknozzles to go with it.

Even Mozilla guys ignore non-x86 Linux

[cyba]

There's only single "Linux" download link that refers to Linux/x86 binary. If leading Free Software project doesn't treat non-x86 platforms seriously, how can we expect something different from e.g. hardware manufacturers?

Re:So..

[bunratty]

Nice rant, but Firefox does not seem to use more memory than other browsers. See my above posts and the following links:
Radically New IE 7 or Updated Mozilla Firefox 2--Which Browser Is Better?
IE 7 vs IE 6
Firefox 2 - the lean, mean browser

If you can give a set of steps that causes Firefox to use "up to a gig of memory" and does not cause other browsers to use nearly as much memory, let's have it. Then whatever problem you're seeing can be reported and fixed.