Firefox 3 under the hood

Firefox developer Josh Aas has an interesting technical discussion about what's new in Firefox 3 for Mac OS X. Chiefly, he talks about Gecko 1.9, the updated rendering engine for Firefox 3.

The most significant change, he notes, is that Gecko 1.9 is now written in Cocoa instead of Carbon. Also, Gecko 1.9 uses Core Graphics and ATSUI instead of QuickDraw. QuickDraw is deprecated and the writing is on the wall for Carbon, so moving to newer APIs was a priority for the Gecko team.

Firefox 3 release candidate 2 3 is available in over 45 languages. Mozilla has not yet announced when the final release of Firefox 3 will be available.

Update: 6:00 p.m.: Release Candidate 3 is now available due to a bug related to Mac OS X 10.5.3. Check out the Macworld story for more details.

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Source: http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/firefox-3-fo…

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Firefox developer Josh Aas has an interesting technical discussion about what's new in Firefox 3 for Mac OS X. Chiefly, he talks about...

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Michael

Sure as far as Camino vs FF, I know I am going to regret this but this was the most intensive graphics I saw.

Goto Kink.com and view the trailers of the movies , in FF it hangs and does not load all the way. In caminion worse case scenario I reload once "which is rare" and the movie is there.

As far as other web features, Camino BLOWS FF3 away. Hands down

Also FF locks up on MAC OSX and WINBLOWS 2000, XP its just NOT the best and fastest browser around in my opinion.

Take it for what you want.

June 11 2008 at 9:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David

I might want to comment that RC3 is now out...

June 11 2008 at 5:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Wheelie4

They never said FF3 is all Cocoa. They said the browser ENGINE (Geiko v1.9) is all Cocoa.

June 11 2008 at 4:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

koda

i wonder why in every mac blog that's speaking about firefox, we must always end up in browser war!

firefox 3 is more cocoa than before? very nice :)
i hope that future realeases will continue developing more this wonderful app!

June 11 2008 at 3:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

William

Firefox is a bloated hippo, and Sloooooow.

June 11 2008 at 1:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to William's comment

toejam07

Have you tried the latest release candidate (which is the subject of this post)? It is nearly as fast as Safari. I haven't used Camino since just after I switched to the Mac last summer, but its lack of drag and drop tabs prevented me from ever considering it. Firefox may not be completely Cocoa, nor will it ever be because of its cross-platform nature, but it is actually and finally a really good browser on the Mac. I still use Safari most of the time, but Firefox works just as well, especially if you install Grapple instead of the lame default theme.

June 11 2008 at 1:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon Arch

Spoken like someone who hasn't tried it since 2.0 was released.

June 11 2008 at 1:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jasonpoon

So is it possible to use the dictionary tooltip (ctril+cmd+D) in Firefox?

June 11 2008 at 12:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nick K.

Firefox 3 gets a 71/100 on the ACID3 test. Safari 3.1.1 (current version) gets a 75/100.

June 11 2008 at 12:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Nick K.'s comment

Mr Lizard

What does that mean for me as a user?

June 11 2008 at 6:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Farmer Joe

Firefox 3 still crashes on certain websites. Camino handles them fine.

June 11 2008 at 11:52 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Farmer Joe's comment

mingistech

Can you provide an example site that crashes FF and not Camino... I'd be interested in seeing this first hand.

June 11 2008 at 12:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

pythonic

FF3 RC2 on OS X has a nasty bug that causes crashes when certain plugins (Flash, Java) are loaded. This should go away in RC3.

June 11 2008 at 3:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

nova20

How come no one is saying anything about one major benefit Camino has over Firefox? Weren't we promised keychain integration with FF 3?

June 11 2008 at 11:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nick K.

I downloaded it yesterday-
Still has a huge memory footprint. I want it to stay at UNDER 100MB, please. A web browser shouldn't get to 300MB *coughcoughSafaricoughcough*
I changed the Quicktime preference to not save videos in the cache, etc, but it still doesn't help at all. With 3GB of RAM, I still have swapping...

June 11 2008 at 11:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

3 replies to Nick K.'s comment