New Firefox
I installed Firefox 0.9 hours after it was released, and have been playing with it for a few days. A few observations are in order.
1. It “crashes”:http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246836 … on sites that older versions render correctly. Firefox 0.8 never crashed on me, and in older versions, the only problem I’ve seen has been due to the textbox completion bug.
2. It does Complex Text Layout better, for Indic languages. It seems to handle zero width glyphs correctly, which is a major improvement, but it still does not handle “negative width” glyphs correctly.
3. What’s with the default xft build? Doesnt anyone else believe that anti aliasing regular fonts is a “bad idea”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000041.html ? Looks like I’ll have to rebuild from source, which I have tried to avoid, since building mozilla isnt your usual cofigure/make deal.
4. My “favourite theme”:http://fls.moo.jp/moz/breeze.html doesn’t work with 0.9, and its replacement is no match to the elegance of the original. So I’ve been messing around in the theme definitions to create my own… the biggest barrier currently is the fact that I cant find a way to test a new theme without packaging it up!