With the release of Firefox 3 Alpha many people are left wondering what the benefits are of Mozilla switching to Cairo for the rendering engine. As demonstrated above the corners that are rendered using the latest Firefox 3 Alpha are anti-aliased meaning they are smoother. There is only a slight difference when looking at the two comparisons but it is a little more noticeable when you look at the zoomed-in portion. According to the Cairo Homepage these are some of the other things that it is capable of:
Operations in cairo including stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines, transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering. All drawing operations can be transformed by any affine transformation (scale, rotation, shear, etc.).
As if that isn’t great enough news for Firefox fans, the latest nightly builds are also passing the Acid 2 test. That can’t be found in the Alpha 1 release but it will surely be a hit when Alpha 2 is released (which is currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2007). For those of you wanting more information on Firefox 3 here are some links that CoryC pointed out along with certain features highlighted from each:
- Firefox:3.0 PRD
- Firefox:Password Manager
- The “Should Firefox remember this password?” dialog shouldn’t block the loading of the new page.
- Password generation (eg, hash site name and a common password.) Has anti-phishing benefits because user doesn’t even really know their own password.
- Firefox:Configurable Keybindings
- Firefox:3.0 Tabbed Browsing
- If there are a lot of tabs, a second row of tabs may be useful.
- Firefox:Safer Extension Installation
- Firefox:Download Manager
- Media support for:
- BitTorrent
- Podcast
- Podcast through BitTorrent
- RSS
- RSS feed of BitTorrents (Goodbye hard disk space)
- Media support for:
- Firefox:3.0 Unified XPInstall Download Back End
- Firefox:Info Window
- Firefox:3.0 Options Dialog reorg
- Firefox:3.0 Accessibility
- Do something like the gesture command of Opera, when you push the right mouse button and make a specific movement to issue a command. I use the close window gesture intensivly. I think that is the fastest of all ways to issue a commands.
- Firefox:3.0 Customizable Toolbars
- Firefox:3.0 Bookmarks
- I’m sure everyone has read what I’ve read, but it doesn’t hurt to write a reminder. Here’s a link to UIWeb’s “How to build a better web browser” essay: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay37.htm
- Firefox:3.0 Places
- Detect duplicates
- Sync mode. Keep Delicious/Shadows/etc bookmark services constantly in sync with bookmarks.
- Online mode. Do not store bookmarks locally. Retrieve them from bookmark services. Store some heavily accessed bookmarks (i.e. Bookmarks Toolbar) to lessen traffic.
- Firefox:3.0 User Information Management and Privacy
- A personal information manager would be great to have in Firefox – like “saved forms”, only more structured, maybe with the user filling in their information in the preferences dialog.
There we go, I went through each of those topics and what’s listed are the things I found interesting on each of the pages. All of those aren’t guaranteed to be implemented but I would like to see support for BitTorrent and definitely an online bookmark manager which mixed into a few of the pages. Sure there are a lot of extensions that will manage your bookmarks online but I think that a majority of users (especially a lot of my friends) never bother to install extensions and they would be amazed if Firefox synchronized their bookmarks.
Good list
Personally, I don’t want FF 3 to support BitTorrent. I want a web browser to be a web browser and a BitTorrent client to be a BitTorrent client. I think there’s plenty of browser work to be done and they should waste the time adding support for BitTorrent.
Also, there are security risks with any BitTorrent client. Adding support will only open holes for attacks.
It is my understanding that the goal with regards to downloading is to have a pluggable download manager. This way, third party downloading tools can be easily integrated into Firefox for a better first-hand downloading experience. With this, bittorrent as well as any FUTURE downloading protocols can be supported.
According to [squarefree.com] reflow did a lot than just fix layout bugs and make FF pass the Acid 2 test. It also improves layout performance, among other things.
Yes, I have noticed the antialiased rounded corners, and antialiased image scaling too.
“Cairo” is the next best thing (after ACID2-compliance) in Firefox 3.0.
Some words about image scaling. Some time ago (about 1 year) I tested, how different browsers deal with scaled images. As I remember, Firefox and IE did it ugly (no antialiasing), and Opera did it perfectly (with antialiasing).
, Firefox 2.0 – ugly, IE7 – ugly, and Opera 9.0 – …ugly too! What’s wrong with Opera? Either this is my mistake (maybe I was wrong about good antialiasing in Opera 8.x), or they have downgraded their image library?
Then I tested this feature again, a few days ago. Firefox 3.0 did it perfectly
Apparently [weblogs.mozillazine.org]
* simplification of code
* fixing incremental reflow (”{inc}”) bugs
* fixing intrinsic sizing bugs
* allowing better integration of nsIBox and nsIFrame layout
* allowing easier implementation of new features like ‘inline-block’
Wow that is one extensive list for sure. But it looks like they are doing some really good stuff especially with rendering engine. Also it is good to see that it passed Acid2 test, this is a very good news that CSS is fully supported. Also integrating Cairo into the mix makes it much better on the coding side.
That is what it added from a coder’s perspective. These all have great implications from a user’s perspective. To summarize: faster, better, stronger. (Stronger meaning more stuff you can do.)
Good Work ^^… this list is much completed