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."

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.

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 [webstandards.org] CSS compliance test.

Re:Release notes and comments

[mhall119]

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:Release schedule?

[dvice_null]

Firefox 3 is planned to be released on November: http://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap [mozilla.org]
Wikipedia quotes the same source.

Re:Run both firefox and Gran Paradiso ?

[obender]

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.

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:So..

[jesser]

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.

about:config

[SavvyPlayer]

browser.cache.memory.enable

Re:Strange OSX behaviour

[Bazzargh]

*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)

Re:redraws involve headache-inducing white flashes

[jesser]

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.

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? [pcworld.com]
IE 7 vs IE 6 [zimbra.com]
Firefox 2 - the lean, mean browser [mozillazine.org]

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.

Re:Bug!

[kbrosnan]

It is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36349 6 [mozilla.org] - "gmail talk, onclick textarea creates new space in contacts list"

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.

Re:Release notes and comments

[mhall119]

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.