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Gran Paradiso Alpha 3

Posted by kdawson on from the car-insurance-not-included dept.

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."

12 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Release notes and comments by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 5, Informative

    * 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.

    --
    "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
    1. Re:Release notes and comments by mhall119 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      http://www.mhall119.com
    2. Re:Release notes and comments by bunratty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  2. Not a gecko release by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. ACID 2 Compliance by nahdude812 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    Slay a dragon... over lunch!
  4. Re:That felt weird by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just to be ironic I do not think that word means what you think that it means.
  5. Why should it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Why should it? by pipatron · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  6. What? by mboverload · · Score: 4, Funny

    WTF? Where did the cars go?

  7. Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes by Seumas · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. New word! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  9. Re:So.. by bunratty · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.