Gran Paradiso Alpha 2 ReleasedSunday February 11th, 2007Gran Paradiso Alpha 2, an early developer milestone aimed at testers and web application developers, has been released. This is the second milestone released from the Gecko 1.9 branch. There are no significant user interface changes. Core layout and rendering changes include support for the Web Applications 1.0 API for changing stylesheets, ACID2 test compliance, and improvements in the Cairo graphics layer. As mentioned earlier, Gran Paradiso is the project codename for Firefox 3. For more details, refer to Gran Paradiso Alpha 2 Release Notes. Where is Page Zoom? It is (unofficially) targeted for 3.0, but nobody is working on it right now. It is my understanding that most of the back end pieces are in place, but someone needs to design & write the code for the UI front end. Feel free to follow its progress in the bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4821 I hope there is work going on with performance issues in Linux... The release notes say "Greatly improved Mac widgets support since Alpha 1.". I think this referres to bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175279. But I still see those ugly buttons, checkboxes etc. in webforms. Do I have to activate them via about:config or what do I have to do? Or does it only refer to widgets in the settings dialog? No, that refers to the actual user interface. The HTML form widgets might get better native theming in the next alpha, possibly. I have tried Firefox on both Linux and Mac OS X - and it is (1) dang slow and (2) stands out too much. At moment on Linux I use Konqueror and it does work perfectly fine for all what I need from web - documentation, forums, etc. GMail does seem to have higher requirements and does support all the bells'n'whistles - plain html web ui still works. Firefox was and is primarily targeted as Windows with all consequences. In office, under Windows, all other browsers look like gimmicks in comparison. Are you saying you don't like the Gran Paradiso alpha 2 release for some reason? I meant to say, that I have given up on "Firefox for Linux" affair. And you felt the need to unburden yourself of this information on the mozillaZine Gran Paradiso Alpha 2 story.. why? To hopefully spur some Mozilla programmers into action relating to the problems of Firefox on Linux. Then again, the issue is actually more Cairo than Firefox; apparently the lack of 'teh snappy' is going to be corrected in 1.4 - if you have a look on the Cairo site, there are some benchmarks about the improvements made in 1.3.x vs. 1.2. Actually... I'm using it on Debian Etch right now... it's pretty fast. And the loading of some badly designed site (e.g. news.sina.com.cn) is way faster than before. For "stands out too much", I've to say firefox is actually pretty hard to look good on most GTK2 themes I use... The colour and border of Navigation bar and bookmark bar is just... not right in many themes.... (except those very standard clear look like stuff) |