Tuesday 23 January 2007, 10:11 AM

Firefox 3 on the horizon

Posted by David Long

You can download this blog post in audio format here (right-click and save target/link as..) or play it using the podcast player on the right.


Firefox 3 - code named Gran Paradiso is under development. It will use the Gecko 1.9 engine and the latest build released already is said to have passed the CSS Acid2 test. Although Opera, Safari have already achieved this it's a big landmark for Firefox and a good sign of things to come. Firefox 2.0 already features the most advanced CSS 3.0 support including CSS rounded corners and alpha transparency and Firefox 3 is set to have full support. Other features include improved graphic rendering and support for Javascript 2.Of course we can expect there will be many bug fixes and tweaks making Firefox faster and more stable. It has been optimised to make better use of your systems hardware so if you have a good graphics card you should notice big improvements both in visual quality and speed for sites that take advantage of this.

Firefox 3 is still in Alpha 1 since december but is expected to reach Alpha 3 the first quarter of this year and Hopefully a full beta will be with us before end of the summer. Final release is still unknown.By final release Mozilla expect to have near perfect web compatibility meaning nearly all pages and webapps you may struggle to use in the current firefox release should work smoothly. They also promise a reduction in system resources used. Currently my firefox averages 100-130kb of Ram.On the agenda is also improved start up times for opening the browser and load times for actual pages. They will also be attempting to make as many as many of the existing extentions and themes compatible.More details on what we can look forward to with CSS 3 and what is already possible will be featured here soon

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