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Gran Paradiso Alpha 3

Posted by kdawson on Sun Mar 25, 2007 02:56 PM
from the car-insurance-not-included dept.
Mozilla The Internet Upgrades
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."
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[+] Firefox 3 In Alpha 366 comments
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). Because of the new Gecko code, this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier. 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.'"
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  • Changes. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Seumas (6865) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:01PM (#18480803)

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by -Neko- (67564)
      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gerrysteele (927030)
        Perhaps someday soon they might invent some innovative technology to update you of these events.

        I would call it "The Status Bar".

    • IE users don't go for Alpha Software, do they? When you use MS Windows you expect fully functional software that always works as expected. I'll recommend to wait for Firefox 3 Final.

  • Release notes and comments (Score:5, Informative)

    by FishWithAHammer (957772) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:01PM (#18480809)
    * 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.

    • It's kind of sketchy that they're not supporting older Windows or OS X versions

      At a certain point, this sort of decision has to be made: Move forward, or live in the past. The technical issues that surround supporting old systems verses moving forward with more elegant solutions for modern systems.

      But what I don't understand is why they continue to insist that there are no memory usage issues when there is a lot of practical evidence that there are?

        • As for the memory usage, it seems that the answer is always "it's not a memory problem - that's just the result of how Firefox uses it's page caching features to provide fast recall!". I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense to me, because it strikes me as odd that any kind of browser "feature" would possibly consume 500mb or more memory on a regular basis.

          But if a large number of people us FF in a way that causes problems, it is a design flaw. Either that, or they just don't care what their users want.

          • ...they just don't care what their users want.

            Don't you think users want the lesser of two evils?

            • Don't you think users want the lesser of two evils?

              I think users want Mozilla to build a browser that takes into account common usage patterns, and not respond with flip comments that it's being used wrong.

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by CRCulver (715279)
                This is the common usage pattern. Uptime on desktop or notebook computers is generally low, and so Joe Average is not too likely to keep Firefox open for days or weeks and notice problematic memory usage. However, Joe Average would certainly notice sluggishness in the workings of the Back button.
          • Uh, brainfart. 2000 still supported.
          • If you're happy with win2k you'll be happy with Firefox 2. Simple concept.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by neongrau (1032968)
            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: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by shawn443 (882648)
              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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
            • browser.cache.memory.enable

              • Re:Release notes and comments (Score:5, Interesting)

                by bunratty (545641) on Sunday March 25 2007, @09:10PM (#18483261)

                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 [time.gov] (Java)
                weatcher.com interactive map [weather.com] (Flash)
                Panda Pang [zeronews-fr.com] (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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by mhall119 (1035984) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:24PM (#18480961) Homepage Journal
      It doesn't support older Windows because it uses Cairo [cairographics.org] 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: (Score:3, Informative)

          by atamido (1020905)
          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 developer

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by mhall119 (1035984)
            Right, I think Cairo is being used specifically because it would allow Firefox to finally add features like full page zoom (no just text resizing) that has been available in other browsers for a while now. It should also improve page printing.
    • > It's kind of sketchy that they're not supporting older Windows or OS X versions

      There is a reason for this. The changes they have made to the core won't work with older versions of Windows as easily as they do with more modern versions. This means that a lot of work would be need to add support for them. But it has been said that if anyone is interested doing the job, he/she is quite welcome to do it.

    • Bug! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zarel (900479) on Sunday March 25 2007, @04:49PM (#18481539)
      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.
  • It's an alpha release of Firefox 3, it uses the Gecko 1.9 engine.

  • ACID 2 Compliance (Score:5, Informative)

    by nahdude812 (88157) * on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:11PM (#18480855) Homepage
    Yes, it does completely pass the Acid 2 [webstandards.org] CSS compliance test.

      • Re:ACID 2 Compliance (Score:4, Informative)

        by jesser (77961) on Sunday March 25 2007, @05:06PM (#18481659) Homepage Journal
        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.

  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mboverload (657893) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:23PM (#18480957) Journal
    WTF? Where did the cars go?

  • On OSX, Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 had an annoying habit of flashing a white screen before redrawing a page. To test this, just go to http://www.mozilla.org/products/ [mozilla.org] and click from tab to tab.

    One can only hope that this won't occur in the release versions, because it is really quite annoying.

    • Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes (Score:4, Funny)

      by Seumas (6865) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:36PM (#18481041)
      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: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anc (953115)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by jesser (77961)
          Yeah. For a solid percentage of the 6-digit numbers, Google will give you a Debian bug report, a Gnome bug report, or a Mozilla bug report.
  • I was looking at the mozilla wiki and I couldn't find a release schedule for Gecko 1.9 / Firefox 3. Does it exist somewhere? I read allusion to like March and then to the end of the year. I guess if we are still in Alpha, its more like Q3/Q4 ?

    I tried recent nightly builds, and I really liked what I saw on the painting front. I hope we can get a stabilized release soon.
  • Is there a way to run both firefox and Paradiso without affeting firefox settings and extensions etc ?

    • I keep a separate user account for this sort of thing. Not exactly convenient though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by obender (546976)

      Is there a way to run both firefox and Paradiso without affecting firefox settings and extensions etc ?

      Unzip firefox in a separate directory, for example c:\beta\firefox, make an extra directory for profiles and start firefox with the -profile option:

      set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
      c:\beta\firefox\firefox.exe -profile c:\beta\profile

      The MOZ_NO_REMOTE variable will prevent it from connecting to another running instance of Firefox. All the settings are stored in the profile directory so it will leave the regular installation alone.

    • "Is there a way to run both firefox and Paradiso without affeting firefox settings and extensions etc ?"

      First of all I recommend you create a new profile for V3 (Gran Paradiso). After that it's possible to run new instances of Firefox from a batch file with the contents:

      set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
      firefox -P

  • Mac users, give it a try! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chrysalis (50680) on Sunday March 25 2007, @05:18PM (#18481743) Homepage
    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.

  • Even Mozilla guys ignore non-x86 Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cyba (25058) on Sunday March 25 2007, @06:02PM (#18482039) Homepage
    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?

    • Why should it? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:22PM (#18480949)
      I consider it a feature if a browser prevents people from visiting MySpace.

    • Re:So.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeffrey Baker (6191) on Sunday March 25 2007, @03:49PM (#18481139)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jesser (77961)
        It's possible to turn off the back-forward cache by setting browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers to 0 in about:config. That said, for some users, Firefox uses a lot of memory due to actual leaks rather than this kind of caching.

      • New word! (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 25 2007, @05:33PM (#18481833)
        Fucknozzles! That's a new one. I suppose if you've already got an asshat, you need some matching fucknozzles to go with it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Man of E (531031)
        Other browsers have shown (Opera, Safari) that it's possible to have speedy back and forward buttons without taking up a gig of memory. You can claim that the Firefox back-forward code is so poorly written that it would have to be redone from the ground up, and that the developers consider a new spellchecker to be higher-priority than a time-consuming rewrite of this memory-hogging component. But please don't pretend that this is an intrinsic trade-off in browser design.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bazzargh (39195)
      *Holds up hand*

      my fault, assuming you are using an alpha or nightly build. There are still a bunch of font bugs in cairo, in particular when the text is scaled. Most of those were fixed in cairo 1.4.2, they should land in the mozilla soonish, and hopefully the next release will look a lot better. Mac fonts on cairo trunk are now pretty much up to par with the other platforms, and Robert O'Callahan, Vlad, etc have done great stuff making it all perform well too.

      -Baz (maintaining mac font stuff in cairo)

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