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December 9, 2006
Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 and SVG
Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 (aka gecko 1.9a1) has been released. Amongst other things, this contains a major update to the native SVG implementation. While not at the level of a scorched earth rewrite, large portions of the code have been rewritten or restructed. As such, we're quite interested in hearing how your content works with this version, and especially if you notice any regressions from Firefox 1.5/2.0. Please file bugs with testcases.
These are the highlights of the changes since 1.5/2.0:
- New elements supported: <textPath> (was backported for FF2), <mask>, <pattern>, <filter>, <foreignObject>.
- Filters currently supported are: <feComponentTransfer>, <feGaussianBlur>, <feMerge>, <feMorphology>, <feOffset>.
- Printing should be much higher quality, and will be vector based as long as cairo doesn't hit a fallback path.
- Group opacity should be much faster.
- Many more DOM functions for text implemented, and existing ones enhanced for <textPath>.
- New version of cairo being used will be faster and fix some glitches seen in 1.5/2.0. However the version is prior to the new tessellator landing, so SVG files experiencing performance problems with that will still be slow.
- Cairo backend for OS X switched from cairo-quartz to cairo-nquartz. Should be much faster, but has not been heavily tested. Please file bugs if problems are experienced.
- Painting logic only renders objects intersecting the dirty region now, should improve performance of dynamic svg or scrolling large svg files.
- Specification compliance generally has been improved.
- Code has been restructured to be cleaner, easier to maintain, smaller memory footprint, and for increased performance.
Posted by tor at 3:24 AM | Comments (27)