Till Firefox 2.0, the Gecko engine use the old Quickdraw graphics library (originally developed for OS9). With the upcoming new Firefox 3.0, it uses Quartz or Cairo, the more recent Core Image libraries. Safari have been using this for a long time. This is one reason why Text looks much crisper, smoother and clear on the new Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 codenamed Gran Paradiso. Jeffrey Zeldman have a nice article on text render handling at - Safari better than Firefox?.
It may be noted that the Windows and Linux already enjoys a Cairo enabled Browser long before the Mac. So, get your copy of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 today and see the difference, perhaps report bugs if you see any.
Try out Firefox 3.0 Alpha 1 today and enjoy the new features including the Cairo enabled engine and many others.
UPDATES
- 2006 Dec 11 — This article was spotted on Digg and got dugg to the front page on Dec 11, 2006.
- 2006 Dec 12 — For those not willing to upgrade because of the Addons incompatibility, please try the Nightly Tester Tools and enable your addons. Do remember to set the preference not to check for compatibility else you have to Make All Compatible every time you do any update.
Brajeshwar posted this article
on Mon, Dec 11th, 2006 at 4:11 am
Categorized under Technology
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Thanks, I really needed a better Firefox on the Mac. I’ve been using Safari precisely because of the superior text rendering.
It seems to suffer from horrible flicker problems though. Try opening a history sidebar and resizing it, for example. I even get flicker when pages are loading or I scroll certain sites. Hopefully this will all be fixed by 3.0 final.
Hi
I was wondering if you would blog about our website( i would really appreciate it), which is a simple yet interesting way to show support for firefox.
(I believe firefox should be big because of its save session feature also.)
regards
-m.
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