Firefox 3 under the hood

By Robert Palmer

Firefox developer Josh Aas has an interesting technical discussion about what's new in Firefox 3 for Mac OS X. Chiefly, he talks about Gecko 1.9, the updated rendering engine for Firefox 3.

The most significant change, he notes, is that Gecko 1.9 is now written in Cocoa instead of Carbon. Also, Gecko 1.9 uses Core Graphics and ATSUI instead of QuickDraw. QuickDraw is deprecated and the writing is on the wall for Carbon, so moving to newer APIs was a priority for the Gecko team.

Firefox 3 release candidate 2 3 is available in over 45 languages. Mozilla has not yet announced when the final release of Firefox 3 will be available.

Update: 6:00 p.m.: Release Candidate 3 is now available due to a bug related to Mac OS X 10.5.3. Check out the Macworld story for more details.

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