Firefox to get a speed boost

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

Mozilla have announced the release of Gran Paradiso Alpha 3, the latest step on the road to Firefox 3.

Notable in this release is support for the APNG format, which aims to provide the simple animation style of GIFs, but with the advantage of PNG’s transparency support. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any of the examples to work.

What definitely does work though is the movement to the Cairo graphics layer; page loading time is noticeably faster. CSS implementation has been improved as well, so this latest incarnation passes the Acid2 test – leaving IE as the only major browser that doesn’t.

There have been no changes to the UI in this release, it’s more of a showcase for the latest version of the Gecko rendering engine. On that count alone, I’m impressed.

Comments are closed.