A First Look at Firefox 3.0

[jbarcus81]

got ya..... ty

[Starchild]

I don't know about you guys but I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

...

And you could render pages to PDF, PS, SVG, PNG.

...

Save as PDF anyone? :whistle:

I'm mainly interested in Cairo, the Quartz backend means Firefox won't suck as much as it currently does on OS X (although the UI doesn't fit in at all)

[Marshalus Veteran]

Ah, understand. But I don't see any difference between the FF 2 and 3 icons. (Except that FF2 is a bit brighter.)

It's the way that FX3 renders SVG.

[em_te]

A quick explanation for any of you who might be curious why passing Acid 2 is essentially useless right now:

...

-- Source: My blog entry about this

My spidey senses are tingling: A statement whose information source points back to itself.

[sacrifist]

I heard that 3.0 will have the same style of zoom feature that opera has. If that is the case I might jump back over to the Fox

[Ently]

In relation to all this hype about "Acid tests".. everyone knows its bull****.. the only thing even capable of handling the acid test is obviously a PS3...

/hype&sarcasm

[P.M.K]

Because 3.0 is going to be a huge jump and warrants the new numbering. If you ask me, 3.0 is what 2.0 should have been.

A huge jump you say.

Sounds good to me.

[WigglesTheFish]

I personally couldn't give a crap about the Acid2 test, like a few said way too much emphasis. The only thing I'd care to have in Fx3 would be better memory management.

[Bant Veteran]

i care a great deal about the acid2 test, but will only be ###### myself over it when all browsers have passed it. that will be a truly great day :p

[canuckerfan]

I personally couldn't give a crap about the Acid2 test, like a few said way too much emphasis. The only thing I'd care to have in Fx3 would be better memory management.

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/memusage.html

3.0 should be an improvement in that regard. :)

[mattrobs]

This Cairo better have Vista glass support; FF 2 looks like crap.

[Smigit]

If you ask me, 3.0 is what 2.0 should have been.

I agree. I think they could have simply delayed 2.0 to get the extra features finished and optimised. 2.0 isnt bad but and I await 3.0.

[SamNeeds]

Personally I'm not really too fussed about it passing the Acid 2.0 test. However I do think the improvements mentioned will make this my ONLY browser of use! Thats assuming they do all that they've mentioned.

[Antaris Veteran]

The Acid2 test is an idealist test and doesn't really reflect on the needs of current day web designers.

[+Cryton Subscriber²]

Just for information, so far the new reflow rewrite has fixed over 105 rendering bugs (some were probably dupes of each other, but still, it's a lot) and there's probably still more bugs to find in bugzilla that have been fixed by it. Of course, the reflow rewrite has caused some regressions too, but nothing that won't get looked at and fixed. And it also means some other long-standing gecko bugs are now fixable, as well as providing a solid base from which to implement new layout features (inline-block, et al)

Also still to come is a big patch to improve the units that gecko uses for calculating layout positions, which will fix a lot (all?) off the 'off by 1' layout bugs and speed things up (less conversion between different units, also a proper 'zoom' feature), and removal of child widgets (which will make code easier to read and maintain, and should also provide a significant performance win).

Places should also give a noticable memory usage improvement too, since it stores its data in a much more efficient way than the Mork (the current firefox bookmark implementation), as well as being faster and more powerful.

[xxdesmus]

This Cairo better have Vista glass support; FF 2 looks like crap.

I really doubt you'll see better glass support any time soon (maybe not until the release after 3.0) because you have to keep in mind they are writing Firefox for Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Firefox 2 doesn't look any worse than every other application out there that doesn't implement glass more in the client area (like Office 2007 or Maxathon).

[Ikshaar]

-- Source: My blog entry about this

My spidey senses are tingling: A statement whose information source points back to itself.

And you missed the best part... his argument on his blog is "IE7 is crap but most use, so there is no point to update other browsers (FF, Opera).... ". Obviously asking for a leveling at the lowest common denominator.

Ah, the strive for lack of features, no clue on compatibility, and lock-in mechanisms.... brilliant :wacko:

[Veedems Veteran]

This Cairo better have Vista glass support; FF 2 looks like crap.

Cairo is the rendering engine for web pages, not what renders the program.

[jackwanders]

Why? The test has no real bearing on real world browsing. Some how, over time, people managed to put too much emphasis on it.

As Chris said, Acid 2 is so over hyped at this point that it's almost funny.

Acid 2 isn't about the end-users, it's about developers. Any time another browser passes the Acid 2 test, it's a win for web developers. Why? The working base of CSS increases and provides more tools with which to work with. Developers can then build better websites that are more compatible across more browsers.

Saying Acid 2 isn't important is like saying power tools aren't important. Sure, there are other ways to get the job done, and a lack of power tools doesn't affect how you live in your house, but it certainly affects how that house was built and the time needed to build it.

Yes, passing the Acid2 test has little to no effect on how you browse the web. But it has a significant impact on how we develop it. Now if MS would just buckle down and fix all their damn bugs, we might actually start to get somewhere.

[xxdesmus]

To be completely honest, IE will very likely never pass Acid 2.

Why? If IE was to strictly conform to the web standards needed to pass Acid 2, millions (and perhaps billions) of websites across the web would break over night.

The pathetically small changes they made in IE7 already broke a few million web pages, and that was only inching towards conforming to web standards in any vague sense.

It's the curse of being that big and that popular (still roughly 90% of the market)...you can't possibly make any drastic changes without the s**t hitting the fan.

As for referencing my own blog, I don't really see the problem here. I very specifically said "my blog entry" ...I wasn't even remotely trying to deceive anyone. Perhaps you're reading into that a bit much.

As for your misguided claim that I was saying Firefox shouldn't innovate, well that couldn't be further from the truth. What I was saying, even though I never really touched on this at all (but you decided to bring it up), was that while it will be nice to play with these standards/features, they still can't be used on any type of large scale considering Firefox is still the minority. Firefox can strictly support all the standards (and I will be very very happy about that), but until Microsoft gets its act together they simply isn't any way of using them practically.

I always laugh when I come across a "Too Cool for IE" site. That is just funny. It's like saying "I am too lazy to design for 90% of web viewers" way to go. Sure it's a choice, but ignoring IE is the wrong choice. Any halfway competent web designer can tell you that.

Don't get me wrong, I hate IE. I hate designing for it, and I hate having to hack together web pages for it, but the reality is that it is the most popular web browser right now. period.

[xxdesmus]

I can't edit my post, but I just checked out Gmail on Minefield (Gecko/20061213 Minefield/3.0a1) and noticed this at the bottom of Gmail. I've never seen this before so perhaps it's using some of the new CSS 2.1 specs?

Can anyone else confirm this? Perhaps I've just missed this since I use Gmail skins to usually cut out the footer anyways. Though I did check in IE7 and it's definitely not like this.

Now I am all kinds of curious what new code it's using? ...it doesn't look like it's anything fancy though.

Edited December 13, 2006 by xxdesmus

[Aperture]

I can't edit my post, but I just checked out Gmail on Minefield (Gecko/20061213 Minefield/3.0a1) and noticed this at the bottom of Gmail. I've never seen this before so perhaps it's using some of the new CSS 2.1 specs?

Can anyone else confirm this? Perhaps I've just missed this since I use Gmail skins to usually cut out the footer anyways. Though I did check in IE7 and it's definitely not like this.

Very cool! Not in Firefox 2.0 either!

[primexx]

I can't edit my post, but I just checked out Gmail on Minefield (Gecko/20061213 Minefield/3.0a1) and noticed this at the bottom of Gmail. I've never seen this before so perhaps it's using some of the new CSS 2.1 specs?

Can anyone else confirm this? Perhaps I've just missed this since I use Gmail skins to usually cut out the footer anyways. Though I did check in IE7 and it's definitely not like this.

Now I am all kinds of curious what new code it's using? ...it doesn't look like it's anything fancy though.

Very cool! Not in Firefox 2.0 either!

no it's been there for a long time, in all sorts of browsers. It just appears and disappears psudo-randomly for some psudo-random accounts at any given time. It's a Gmail thing, has nothing to do with the browser.

[xxdesmus]

^^ Ok, I figured it might be somethin like that.

Cheers.