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[Richard]

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Alpha 2 Out -
Windows Download Link
Linux Download Link
Mac OSX Download Link


Release Notes: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a2/releasenotes/

Gecko 1.9 Alpha 2 introduces several new features which can be tested by using Gran Paradiso Alpha 2:

* Core layout code affecting the calculation of widths in tables, floats, and absolutely positioned elements has been rewritten. The code for handling incremental layout of pages (as data arrives over the network, as images load, or as dynamic changes are made) has also been changed extensively. (See the Reflow-Refactoring wiki page for more information.
* Resolved remaining issues with ACID2 test compliance.
* Support for the Web Apps 1.0 API for changing stylesheets.
* The inline-block and inline-table values of CSS 2.1's display property are now implemented.
* XML documents can now be rendered as they're downloaded instead of only after the full document has been loaded.
* Greatly improved Mac widgets support since Alpha 1.
* Improvements in the Cairo graphics layer.

Some of the changes in Gecko 1.9 Alpha 2 will affect the web and platform compatibility of Gran Paradiso Alpha 2:

* Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME are not supported for Gecko 1.9.
* OS X 10.2 is no longer supported, and OS X 10.3.9 or better is required.
* The non-standard JavaScript Script object is no longer supported.
* Moving DOM nodes between documents now requires a call to importNode or adoptNode as per the DOM specification.

Please Note
Quote -

    * The browser may consume excessive amounts of memory after prolonged browsing. In order to better handle memory issues, a new garbage collection system has been implemented. However, as the process of integrating Gecko into this system is still ongoing, there are some known leaks that result in large memory usage when the browser is used for a long period of time. A restart should resolve the problem, which will be fixed in Alpha 3.
    * The Cairo graphics system has drastically changed the way all text and images are rendered from previous versions of Gecko, so occasional misrenderings of non-latin scripts and fonts may occur.

[MetaMan]

Finally. It took them long enough. Still, why are there so few new features? (This is assuming you consider any of the upgrades new features.)

[El Guru (Al)]

I did see on the last weekly update meeting on 02/05/07 about the memory leak issue.  This will be fixed with the Gecko 1.9 Alpha 3 release.

[Nogg3r5]

This explains why the latest version of 2.whaetever is taking so long to release!

[Ryan Wagner]

Finally. It took them long enough. Still, why are there so few new features? (This is assuming you consider any of the upgrades new features.)

It really just depends on what you consider to be a new feature, I see the Cairo rendering engine to be a huge new feature and I'm sure it took a lot of work to get that implemented into firefox. They still plan on throwing some new things into Firefox 3 that will add functionality as well, but right now they are just trying to get the rendering engine right.

[El Guru (Al)]

From Mozilla Links:

The Mozilla project has released the second alpha of Gran Paradiso. Like Alpha 1 it is not much about Firefox but a testing vehicle for a  large number of changes to the underlying Gecko rendering engine.

[Ryan Wagner]

I haven't been keeping up on that terrible memory leak bug that everyone has been talking about, but I am really impressed with the low memory usage I'm receiving. For some reason the past few days I have had 300MB+ memory usage with Firefox 2 and I haven't seen Firefox 3 go above 115MB. Of course I'm running the latest nightly build so something might have been fixed, but I doubt it would have so soon.