Day in, day out…

Since its Alphas, I’ve been comparing font rendering in official Firefox 3.0 Linux builds and the ones I used to compile myself. Fonts in the official builds were, and still are, very crudely rendered. Upon reading a little, I learned that this difference is due to the use of different version of Cairo, a graphics library that Firefox uses under the hood.

Using --enable-system-cairo option when building Firefox greatly improves the look of fonts. I used to compile my own nightly builds using this option, hoping that the official builds will move to using that option too, before the final 3.0 release.

I just tried the final release and found that it still does not use --enable-system-cairo option, and the fonts are still not neat.

Thankfully, I also noticed that Ubuntu’s Firefox 3.0 - that got updated today as well, does use --enable-system-cairo option. Now I don’t have to compile my own builds. I wish I had noticed this the first time I installed Hardy - the Firefox 3.0 beta that came with it probably used system Cairo too. But I am glad I noticed this, better late than never.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the difference:

Click on the image to view full size - The one on top is the Ubuntu build, using --enable-system-cairo option. The one a the bottom is the official Firefox build, not using that option. Notice how the fonts in the Ubuntu build are so much better than the fonts in the official Firefox build

Now, go download Firefox 3.0 while it’s hot. You don’t get to set a world record everyday!

Support for Indic script in Mozilla Browsers on the Mac has so far been missing. But I got a pleasant surprise with the latest trunk builds of both Firefox and Camino. They both handle Indic Scripts pretty well. I am sure this is thanks to Gecko 1.9.

Here’s what I am talking about. The snapshot below shows rendering of Hindi version of Google News on Camino 1.5. It is mostly… well, question marks!

Following is the same page viewed with the trunk version of Camino. That’s more like it!

Like I mentioned, I saw this with trunk versions of both Firefox and Camino - with many websites using Indic script.

शुभ वाचन !! (Happy Reading… if there’s such a greeting )

I like Camino, but it is not my default browser on the Mac - Firefox is.

So far, I was under the impression that Firefox like Live Bookmarks - or more so the lack of them in Camino - was the show stopper for me. But recently, I have stopped, although not completely, using Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

I was wondering, what changed? Turns out, I was mostly using Live Bookmarks like a feed reader. Once I started using Google Reader, I no longer felt the need to use Live Bookmarks the way I was using them.

Secondly, I had feed that contained all the websites I visit frequently. I Live Bookmark’d that feed to get access to that list from multiple machines. I’ve started using Google Bookmarks - via the Google Toolbar - to maintain a globally accessible repository of my bookmarks.

So it was not exactly Live Bookmarks that I was missing in Camino. What I was missing was the ability to gain access to my bookmarks that I might have updated at work, or on a different machine etc. Now I am going to find out if there is a way to use Google Bookmarks in Camino - other than over the web of course.