Month: September 2007

Firefox 3 Rendering Improvements

Firefox 3 is scheduled to be released later this fall; I haven’t really been following its development, but one thing I have heard about and am excited about is its (or, more accurately, Gecko‘s) new graphics library, Cairo.

Cairo Image Resizing

First I heard that it would resample rather than simply rescale images, as demonstrated in the image above (via Acts of Volition).

Later I learned that it will also render fonts more smoothly. I enjoy the soft way pages look in Safari for Windows, the result of a different rendering engine, WebKit, so this is something I’m really looking forward to. Here’s an example of Cairo’s font rendering, as seen in Camino 1.2+ for Mac, via hicksdesign:

Cairo Font Rendering

There are very specific reasons for the intentional differences in these approaches to font rendering. It’s a matter of personal preference, and I think my preference will be for Cairo. Some are floored by the superiority of WebKit, and designer Jeffrey Zeldman makes a solid, objective case for it; others are horrified.

Finally, Gecko’s non-standard CSS attribute -moz-border-radius, a precursor to CSS3‘s border-radius attribute, will make image-less rounded div corners easy and pretty (via Acts of Volition):

Cario Border Radius

I would have posted screenshots of my own, but I don’t trust these alpha builds not to eff things up.

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