Firefox 3 Alpha 1: Acid2
December 9th, 2006
Alpha 1 of Gran Paradiso, or what will eventually become Firefox 3.0, has been released. This release is not for end users; it only consists of backend and rendering changes.
Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Gran Paradiso Alpha 1.
Acid2
After almost exactly two years of working on it, David Baron landed the reflow branch last night. In addition to fixing numerous bugs (including all remaining Acid2 issues) and improving layout peformance some, the changes significantly simplify, the table column balancing code and block reflow. The landing lays the groundwork for implementing inline-block and inline-table display values, as well as some further optimization work.
This means that Firefox finally passes the Acid2 test. Here’s a screenshot I took:
It is true that other browsers such as Opera and Safari managed to pass the Acid2 test. The Acid2 test actually came at a bad time in the development cycle for Mozilla. Gecko 1.8 was stabilized and trying to get Acid2 to work on it would have been extremely risky. And the next Gecko update after that, 1.9, won’t be used in a Firefox release until version 3.0.
Acid2 also contained a load of useless stuff which web developers are unlikely to need anyway, so not trying to pass the Acid2 test until Firefox 3.0 was a smart move.
Other Changes
According to the release notes, this is what’s new:
- Cairo is now being used as the default graphics library, affecting all graphic and text rendering
- Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds
- An updated threading model
- Changes to how DOM events are dispatched (see bug 234455)
- Changes to how <object> elements are loaded (see bug 1156)
- Changes to how web pages are painted
- New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance
About the Author: Hi! I'm Ken. I've been using mobiles for over 10 years and technology for a lot longer! I'd love to hear from you.
- Browsers , Firefox , Web Development
- Comments(3)
The interesting thing is that it wasn’t the main goal to make Gecko display acid 2 correctly, but just a side effect of outstanding bugs that had to be fixed anyway. I’m not sure if the other browsers were better from the beginning than Gecko 1.8 or if they "hacked" the code in order to make it work for Acid2, so just that they can say "we are better, because we support acid2".
In any case, even though not all acid2 features are useful it is definitely a move in the right direction.
It’s not exactly Gran Paradiso Alpha 1; it’s Minefield 3.0a2pre. Build ID:2007011604 is what i have to pass Acid2 test. I’m going to post my screen shot soon.
Here’s my Minefield passing Acid2 as well as it’s about screen:
