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!

Its official, Firefox 3.0 will be released on June 17^th, 2008.

Join more than a million others by pledging to download Firefox 3.0 on the day of release. Celebrate the Download Day by setting a world record. Click on the image below:

To see what to expect from the new version of Firefox, watch this screencast.

Cheers!

UPDATE (06/12/2008):

There’s an excellent post on dria.org that lists the new features in Firefox 3.0, it is called Field Guide to Firefox 3.

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 have been using Google Bookmarks for a while now. Needless to say, I like the Bookmarks button on the Google Toolbar. Although I don’t really care about most of the other functionality in the toolbar. So I got rid of it (via Customize)! With Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar not needed anymore, the browser window looks pretty clean!

I like this for now, may be until Places changes the bookmarks scene. I hope Google finds a way to seamlessly link Google Bookmarks with Places… that would be very useful.

Which reminds me of Browser Sync. I tried it, but quickly gave it up after I came across too many issues using it on different machines running different platforms. Another problem was that, at least at that point, there was no web access to manage Browser Sync data. You could only delete it! Google Bookmarks gives me greater control over the bookmarks database.

And what more, if need be, I can use Google Bookmarks with IE too! Well, for that matter, with any browser with access to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Like I said in my previous post, I’ve been playing around with Flock.

So far, the only really useful feature I’ve found is this blog posting tool - which could use a spell checker, by the way. The Flickr bar, the shared bookmarks are all good features but I did not end up using them a whole lot. Shared bookmarks don’t preserve collections - when I sync bookmarks, I still have to move new entries into appropriate collections. This may be a limitation posed by del.icio.us bookmark format. Whatever it may be, its no better than importing exported bookmarks between Firefox installations.

So, to me Flock seemed more like a dressed up Firefox - and the get up is not compelling enough. Flock seems to be heading in the right direction, so I will probably check back with Flock in near future to see how its developing, but for now, Firefox is still my default browser on both windows and Mac.