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