Re: [tlug] Firefox beta 3 (was: NEWBIE: My Way and NOT Their Way?)

[Gen Kanai <gkanai@example.com>]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 10:51 AM, Wayne wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 09:36 +0900, Josh Glover wrote:
> > 3.0 runs like a dream. You may have to port some of your favourite
> > addons forward for now, but it should be as simple as changing the
> > version line and rebuilding.
>
> I tried the latest Swiftfox and the font rendering is &^^&* awful
> compared to Swiftfox/Firefox 2.... I tried all kinds of  
> combinations but
> couldn't get it to look as good as it does now.

Wayne,

If you can let us know what you don't like, we can try to address  
your concerns.

For Firefox 3 we've switched to the open surce Cairo library and  
Thebes for most of our graphics and font rendering.  Previously, in  
FF1.5 and FF2, Cairo was used for rendering SVG but that library is  
being leveraged much more significantly for FF3.

http://cairographics.org/

One of our graphics experts, Vladimir Vukićević, has a post on the  
specifics of the Cairo and Thebes implementations if you want more  
detail.

http://blog.vlad1.com/2007/12/11/graphics-in-mozilla/

Vlad explains that Thebes has given FF3 better text support for  
ligatures, kerning, better handling of double-byte complex scripts,  
and a number of other text-handling benefits.

Chris Blizzard has a post from earlier this January about some of the  
many updates to FF3 for Linux.

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=325

If you can file bugs on the problems with font rendering, it would  
help us a lot.  There's a number of folks who work full-time on fonts  
and gfx rendering and care a lot about how we are rendering, so the  
more feedback you can provide, the better FF3 will be.

Sincerely,

Gen

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