Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 ReleasedFriday December 8th, 2006Gran Paradiso Alpha 1, an early developer milestone based on the Gecko 1.9 branch, has been released. Gran Paradiso, a mountain group located in Italy, is also the project codename for Firefox 3. There are no significant user interface changes. Core layout and rendering changes include use of Cairo as the default graphics library, use of Cocoa Widgets for MAC OSX builds and new SVG elements. For more details, refer to Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 Release Notes. Shouldn't the next major version be Firefox 2.5?? Isn't it a little early for alpha releases? Wasn't Firefox 3 scheduled for a year from now or am I, as per usual, highly confused? John, Firefox 3 will hopefully be no later than a year from now. But the more important point is that work on Gecko 1.9 has been happening since August 2005. That's a years' worth of major changes that really need to be tested. We're hoping to finish landing the remaining big changes in the next month or two, and there will probably be another alpha release at that point, then betas. In the meantime, we desperately need testing, especially of website compat, with these builds. I'd be more than happy to test the new Gecko for website compat, but I'd also like to keep using my existing FF2.0. Would it be possible to provide an extension along the lines of the (very successful) "IE Tab" that uses the new page renderer in the existing FF window? Or am I fundamentally not getting it? This is an alpha for Gecko 1.9. the rendering engine, not for Firefox per se (thus the "no significant user interface changes"). Given the nature of the changes that will be in Gecko for 1.9, getting early testing to help find bugs and regressions is imperative. BTW, author of the article: It's Mac OS X; Mac is short for "Macintosh", not an abbreviation for Media Access Control, and there's a space between the abbreviation for "operating system" and the Roman numeral 10 ;) Where did you hear that the X is supposed to represent a numeral rather than just be an "X"? Even Apple's own page (http://www.apple.com/software/) puts a version number after the X. "Mac OS X" is pronounced "Mac Oh Ess Ten": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X But you don't have to accept a company's definitions for how its words should be pronounced (nor spelt, or we'd be writing PLAYSTATION in capitals all the time). Personally I pronounce OS X as 'OS X' not 'OS 10', PNG as 'PNG' not 'ping', and am about 50/50 on whether it's 'SQL Server' or 'Sequel Server'. :) I'd kind of like to try this release but it's a bit of a pain running multiple Firefoxes alongside each other so I'll probably wait for a beta or some such point where I know I can basically switch over to it, keeping the older one around only for testing. (Oh, and Firefox? Pronounced 'Firefox', but abbreviated 'Ff' - a spluttering sound, or the musical symbol for 'very loud' - and certainly not 'Fx'.) --sam Link to a real source (like apple.com), not wikipedia. Wikipedia is unreliable. Anyone and their grandmother can edit that page to say whatever they want. Hardly a good argument. If your information is wrong, you can bet it'll be edited out rather quickly in many cases. Just because anyone can edit Wikipedia does not mean that it doesn't have a lot of good information. It's as stupid as: "Why use a computer? It could crash!". Ok, here's a better argument. Find a supporting source. If there's a reputable source to corroborate the Wikipedia article then I'll be more inclined to believe it. For example, is there a mention, or audio example, of the pronunciation on apple.com? All of the Apple users I have met have always called it "Oh Ess Ecks." That, combined with the fact that Apple lists version numbers as Mac OX X 10.3 (why would ten be listed twice in a row?) have lead me to believe that it's pronounced "Oh Ess Ecks." I have yet to find anything to change that opinion. For what it's worth, Steve Jobs and just about everyone who has appeared on an Apple keynote presentation pronounces it as "OS ten". Well, searching Google for "Mac OS X pronounced" finds a lot of people agree it's "ten": http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mac+os+x+pronounced Easiest official source as someone already said would probably be to hear Steve Jobs or any of the people at Apple say it - should be easy enough to find video of something on the net. But this doc is from Apple, and says it's pronounced "ten": http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25808 #36 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: *scratches head*by FattMattP Tuesday December 12th, 2006 11:19 AM I guess I stand corrected. Will running the new Alpha damage profiles created in Firefox 2 the way Firefox 2 would with profiles created in Firefox 1.5 if you switched back? Thanks Reset your theme to the default before starting. The old one was ruined by my not doing that. But extension compatibility is otherwise excellent. Will Gran Paradiso work with Vista RC2? What is the difference between this and minefield? Minefield is "current trunk as of today". This is "trunk from a certain day when we know things worked fairly well". We hope this will get somewhat wider testing than Minefield does. If you're already using Minefield, just keep doing that! ;) #11 Is SeaMonkey 1.1 compatible with SeaMonkey 1.0.6 pby pkb351 Saturday December 9th, 2006 5:49 PM Good mnews about the Cocoa widgets for OS X...this is jsut about the only item holding back OS X users from switching to products based on Gecko. If FireFox/ThunderBird/SeaMonkey is to be widely adopted on OS X te apps have to look like an OS X app. Moving to Cocoa widgets will finally make all Gecko based apps look like the "belong" on the Mac. Yippeee! #12 Re: Is SeaMonkey 1.1 compatible with SeaMonkey 1.0by mmcmonster Sunday December 10th, 2006 6:28 AM As opposed to, say, itunes? ;-) #13 Re: Is SeaMonkey 1.1 compatible with SeaMonkey 1.0by sardisson Sunday December 10th, 2006 10:46 AM "Moving to Cocoa widgets will finally make all Gecko based apps look like the "belong" on the Mac. Yippeee!" No, Cocoa widgets has absolutely nothing to do with how the apps look. It simply means that the code in the mozilla/widget directory is written mostly in Cocoa instead of in Carbon. #18 Re: Re: Is SeaMonkey 1.1 compatible with SeaMonkey 1.0by aragost Monday December 11th, 2006 3:58 AM http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mac:Cocoa_Widgets Reading the link above suggests that cocoa widgets *should* be like they are in Camino. I misunderstood. Hopefully moving to Cocoa will make the app run faster. Can someone explain the benifit of moving the code in the mozilla/widget directory from carbon to cocoa? "Can someone explain the benifit of moving the code in the mozilla/widget directory from carbon to cocoa?" Well, a native look for form widgets will come with the move, but as has been said that's not the reason, since the appropriate look _could_ be done in Carbon. (See, e.g., iTunes, which has got pulsing action blue buttons although it's a Carbon app.) The move seems to be to save Mozilla from having to maintain _two_ sets of OS X widgets, since they need Cocoa widgets for Camino as it is. Besides, Cocoa widgets have some important advantages, and Cocoa is Apple's preferred environment for developers, so if you want to drop one set of widgets dropping Carbon ones makes more sense. Have a look at what Josh Aas says: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/josh/archives/2005/12/why_cocoa_widgets.html On websites, like http://www.morpheussoftware.net/ the dropdown menus at the top of each page have the text sorta fuzzy looking with red/blue tints around the edges of some of the letters when using Gran Paradiso Alpha 1. Also the right pixel or two of each line is cut off. Probably both related to Cario rendering now. Neither problem shows up in Firefox 2.0. I'm not seeing that problem? Could you file that as a bug in bugzilla? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi File it under Core->GFX->Thebes #30 ff3 and ff2 on the same machine without painhead?by snarkhx Monday December 11th, 2006 11:29 PM There is a way to have ff3 and ff2 installed and with one doesn't know about the other ? #35 Re: ff3 and ff2 on the same machine without painheby dave532 Tuesday December 12th, 2006 7:27 AM Make use of profiles, they're not as obvious as in SeaMonkey (that adds a link to the profile manager in Windows start menu and even has it as a menu option in the app last time I looked). Here's a guide: http://browserden.co.uk/blog/2006/12/01/running-multiple-versions-of-firefox-on-the-same-machine/ Basically, use profile manager to create a profile for each firefox instance and then alter their shortcut icons to always load the correct profile. As evident from bugzilla, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9101 there will be no support for soft hyphenation as needed for European languages. The bug is one of the most voted for in FireFox and was reported in 1999 How is it evident from bugzilla that it won't happen? The most recent comment from a developer in that bug says it won't be fixed until the underlying code is rewritten. That rewriting is happening now (I'd link to the bug, but it'll just mean it'll get 200 comments from people complaining that it hasn't happened 5 years ago...), which should then mean they can improve the hyphenation (and a bunch of other things). Actually, that bug is fixed in roc's tree (part of his textframe rewrite). that's good. but dynamic fonts is what I really want. #40 Re: Re: Re: Still no support for European languageby bzbarsky Tuesday December 12th, 2006 9:44 PM Great. Fix the copyright/patent mess around them, and we'll do them! ;) Check out the post above this, on Mac with the alpha it's missing the containing box's bottom line for me. jason I thought that it would be for firefox 2... now the first alpha of firefox 3 is out and it still can't render the acid2 test right http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ Try the latest in CVS, that appears to pass the Acid 2 test(the patches just landed shortly after this release). That will probably become Alpha 2. Firefox 3 by the end will completely pass the acid 2 test, don't worry. #45 version numbering and naming of mozilla productsby kompooter Saturday December 23rd, 2006 10:53 PM the next release roadmap, as of now, is as follows: firefox 1.5.0.9.1.1, followed by 1.5.0.9.1.2, based on gecko version 1.8.0.9.1.1.1a future version numbers will be decided by the mozilla foundation. seamonkey will be renamed as vermincutler due to trademark issues new features of gecko 1.9.0.0.0.0a will be under the project name the "itching igloo" and the corresponding alpha 0.0.0.1a of firefox will be called as "gnawing gnat". I've switched almost entirely to SeaMonkey because it's faster than Firefox and it isn't a memory hog. Using Firefox with any other app slows my computer to a crawl and needless to say any brower that needs 100% of my resources to browse the Internet isn't worth it. I switched to Firefox because of its speed, then security, then its rendering of CSS. Now I use anything BUT Firefox. I've also checked out Opera and after a little tinkering I find it more than acceptable. Plus it passes the Acid2 test with flying colors. The only reason I haven't switched to Opera is because it doesn't render some CSS correctly. My point is simple; if Firefox 3 becomes a continuation of Firefox 2 in any way, shape or form, I won't be using it. I need many apps open at one time and FF2 simply makes that impossible. |