Firefox 3 In Alpha

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). 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.'"

Too bad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Because of the new Gecko code, this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.

One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware. Not so with this new release of Firefox. But then it's the same with other "heavyweights" like KDE, so I guess there's a trend there. That's too bad...

Cairo

[astralbat]

Glad to hear that the rendering will now get some hardware accerlation. Does anyone know how faster this will be? Will it lead to smoother scrolling as on my Linux machine 'smooth scrolling' is very jerky - especially so with flash adverts.

Re:will not run..

[Threni]

> face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going
> to get left behind.

I don't love my old OS, but I have to use it (sometimes) at work because it's the OS that deployed apps use. No point in retesting huge apps on different OS's just to get a new browser. It doesn't bother me - I now use Firefox on those machines anyway. It seems a little odd, though. Aren't browsers just displaying text and graphics, and running scripts? (I don't include plugins such as Flash and Qtime as the run as seperate executable code invoked by the browser).

> Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.

Hmm. You could also write "Pointlessly adopting new technology leads to the need for frequent bug fixes and faster CPUs".

If it means decent Zoom...

[Short Circuit]

If this means Firefox will have decent support for higher dpi displays, then I just might jump at it once it goes Beta.

As it stands, the rest of my Linux desktop is perfectly readable at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor from 10' away. The browser is the only part of the experience that gives me trouble. Sure, I can increase or decrease my font sizes to make the text readable, but that seriously borks most sites' CSS layouts, and doesn't do squat for image-based text.

Re:fix the memory leaks first

[Max Romantschuk]

Even though I have 2 gigs of RAM, FF routinely escalates to over 1 GB of usage (I have a lot of tabs open, but c'mon), and hogs so many resources that the system slows to a crawl that requires a reboot.

IMO, this issue should have been the #1 priority in the move from 1.5 to 2.0. I am losing hope it will be fixed in the next release either (which is a shame, since I would prefer to run FF). IE7 and Opera9 simply do not have this problem to the extent FF does.

While I wholeheartedly agree I've found that using the session saving features in Firefox 2 together with the FlashBlock extension greatly improves things. This lets me close Firefox and return to where I was, and only view the flash content I specifically decide to.

It's more of treating the symptoms than the disease, but at least I can benefit from Firefox's other great extensions this way.

Re:Hosed?

[kimvette]

In some people's minds, an extensible system where you can selectively add everything and the kitchen sink by your own choosing is bloat, even if the minimal installation is extremely efficient.

I prefer to call that level of choice flexibility.

Re:What does this mean?

[modeless]

It means that they're making the graphics of AJAX apps faster to better compete with Flash. That way the kinds of things that used to require Flash can move back to HTML + SVG + JavaScript. In the future we should see a lot more Google Maps style interactive HTML applications, where it becomes meaningful to talk about the "frame rate" of your web page. Firefox will achieve high frame rates using hardware graphics acceleration provided by Cairo. Today, your GeForce 8800 with X hundred million transistors and X MB of video RAM is almost totally ignored while drawing web pages on the screen; Cairo could change that.