Platform/Performance Improvements
Desktop Apps Training - Firefox 3.0

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New Graphics Font Handling

With so much focus going to the Firefox 3.0 features and usability lets not forget about improvements that have been made with the web developer in mind. With the addition of gecko 1.9 Firefox 3.0 boasts new graphic and text rendering architectures. This has provided improvements in CSS, SVG and fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

 

Native Web Page Forms

Now forms on Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) desktops have a more natural look and feel.

 

Color management

While using Firefox 3.0 images with embedded color profiles are adjusted automatically. To do this just type about:config into the location bar.

about:config

Now we see a confirmation message that makes sure we're aware of what we're changing.

warning

After we confirm our intentions we see a list of parameters. Scroll down until you see the one highlighted below.

gtx

 

Right click on gtx.color_management.enabled and select toggle. This should turn the value to true.

You must restart the Firefox 3.0 browser to enable this feature.

 

Offline Support

If enabled by the website author, Firefox 3.0 allows web applications to give users offline functionality.


Reliability

Improved reliability comes in the form of a transactionally secure database format for storing the user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences. This you from loosing data when your system crashes.



Speed

Firefox 3.0 includes some drastically large architectural changes that should put Firefox 3.0 in line for some performance fine tuning. Changes like transitioning to Cairo and a rewriting how a reflowing a page layout works.


Memory Usage

Although many users held off during the early beta versions, Over 300 memory leaks have been plugged for Firefox 3.0 and with the Beta 2version 30 more leaks were plugged along with 11 memory footprint improvements that were performed. With the addition of XPCOM cycle collector, many more memory leaks have been removed completely.


As a whole Firefox web browser offers some decent advancements for web developers and users alike. With major changes to architecture and an emphasis put on memory usage I think the Firefox web browser is headed in the right direction.