A Mozilla developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3 has been released. The release comes in the form of a nightly build of Firefox 3.7 alpha 3. The new build introduces several new features including an experimental Direct 2D for the Windows builds of Firefox, JavaScript api improvements, stability and security improvements as well as additional fixes for multi-process plugins.
This comes in addition to changes that have been introduced in the alpha 1 and alpha 2 releases of Firefox 3.7. Interested users can take a look at the release notes of the new Firefox development release for a complete overview of all changes that have been made in all Firefox 3.7 alpha versions.
- Performance An experimental Direct2D rendering backend on Windows is available, turned off by default.
- JavaScript Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions. ctypes.jsm now supports complex types including structures, pointers, and arrays.
- Stability Mozilla now uses an infallible allocator: if a request for memory cannot be fulfilled, the allocator aborts. This allows for simplification of the Mozilla code, as well as preventing a class of security errors with unchecked null pointers.
- Plugins Additional fixes for multi-process plugins:
* crash and hang fixes;
* the Foxit Reader and Octoshape plugins work correctly;
* Performance improvements in the delivery of network streams.
The experimental Direct2D rendering backend is disabled by default. Firefox users need to perform the following operation to enable it in the Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 release.
1. Go to about:config
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter ‘render’ in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Double click on ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’, set the value to 6
6. Restart
The Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 download is listed directly in the release notes.
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Has anyone tried 3.7 yet? Is it reasonable stable? Any differences to 3.6?
Yep it is very stable on my xp. And it is heck’a fast . But the start up time is the same.
With the Direct 2D rendering enabled, the answer is no. Alpha 4 has been released and it is still suffering from numerous glitches, crashes, and freezes resulting from the Direct 2D implementation.
Yeah…Its really cool dude..!
With enabled Direct2D rendering this page looks ugly (check here http://goo.gl/ykIo)
what do you mean by ugly? The rendering of the sidebar links?
Yes, but it is only my opinion.
It is not ugly, the fonts are rendering differently, but it’s not ugly.
Font rendering is a constant annoyance for me as a web developer as all platforms make a website look different. Mac doesn’t render like Linux, which doesn’t render like Windows.
I’ve been tired of Windows bludgeoning every font squarely into the pixel or sub-pixel grid with the delicacy of a brick going through a window. There is no platform that does a better job of making all fonts look the freaking same.
Direct write doesn’t go as far as I’d like it to, but it does bring definite and substantial improvements to Windows font rendering.
Of course it will make some sites look different to what we’re used to, but when authors get used to designing for it things will be better.
Firefox 3.7 alpha 3 seems very fast without the special activation of Direct2D , Are you saying it will be even faster with Direct2D enabled? I have windows XP. Is this enough or do I really need Windows 7 for this Direct2D?
1. Go to about:config
2. Click through the warning, if necessary
3. Enter ‘render’ in the ‘Filter’ box
4. Double-click on ‘gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled’ to set it to true
5. Double click on ‘mozilla.widget.render-mode’, set the value to 6
6. Restart
They is no gfx.font_rendering.directwrite on my firefox 3.6
Smell like bullshit here
That’s because it is not there in Firefox 3.6. The feature is added to Firefox 3.7