gran paradiso - firefox 3 alpha 7
I'm sure most of you are already aware of it, but judging from my logs, many of you haven't actually moved to the latest Gran Paradiso release.
Gran Paradiso Alpha 7, built on top of Gecko 1.9, and the precursor to Firefox 3, needs you! Most important, we need feedback on website compatibility and stability. Gecko 1.9 has been under development for two full years now and there's a lot that's changed under the hood that will be of great interest to web developers. Some of the changes are listed below:
- Full page zoom of images, layout and text (see bug 4821)
- Color profile support (see bug 16769)
- document.all now returns a NodeList of elements (see bug 259332)
- Several new clipboard events (see bug 280959).
- Cross site XMLHttpRequest specification implemented (see bug 389508)
- A method for opening modal dialogs from content (see bug 194404)
- SVG lighting (bug 383184) and tile filters (bug 373572)
- Support for CSS text-rendering property for HTML (see bug 387969)
- window.getComputedStyle supports all supported CSS properties (see bug 316981)
- Browser-side support for windowless plugins on Unix/X11 (see bug 137189)
- A full Gecko 1.9 bug fix list
You can find the full set of release notes here.
And for the really brave (actually, it's not that scary,) you can get the latest nightly build here.
Photo by Flickr user johnthescone and used under a Creative Commons license.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Maybe this is just me, but I was expecting autoupdate to upgrade me from a6 to a7 whenever a7 was released. Update didn't work for (or even see) a7, and I didn't notice it was out for a while.
Posted by: Aaron | August 22, 2007 4:14 PM
I've tried a7. It still consumes 100% of CPU while opening download manager for like 10 seconds. Is Ben going to write a patch for slow download manager as he did before (it was 0.8 or something like that)? :P
Posted by: rouslawn | August 23, 2007 4:22 AM
I've moved over to Gran Paradiso, however, I didn't make it my standard browser, because I wanted to ... it automatically took over all of Firefox's file association. That wasn't nice and alphas shouldn't set theirselves as standard browser.
On the other hand, there's not much I could complain about ... it sometimes crashes, because of the incompatible extensions I made compatible, but that's not an issue with the browser. Oh, and Bookmarks menu shows JS errors, when I add things to bookmarks. Searchable bookmarks and page zoom (though the page zoom extension is a bit immature) are nice, SVG is nice (though its drawn a little slow maybe, but I can't compare it to other vector image software because I have none, except Flash and I don't know whether comparing it to Flash is fair).
Posted by: Aaron Strontsman | August 23, 2007 4:45 AM
I use nightly builds of GP (Minefield) but I read your blog using FF 2.x because I don't expect Sage (my RSS aggregator) to work reliably on the nightlies.
Posted by: David | August 23, 2007 6:39 AM
Unfortunately Sage doesn't seem to work with Places at all. I'm now using Thunderbird for Feeds
Dang! I didn't know that I could simply make Firefox 2 the standard browser by clicking on the appropriate option in the option window. Thought there was some error message.
Posted by: Aaron Strontsman | August 26, 2007 5:59 AM