Curiosity killed the cat… and set fire to the firefox. ;) Having read the extensive documentation on how to get Mozilla’s browser source from CVS, grab the various tools and applications then generally a lot of RTFMing plus a bit of trial an error, I finally compiled a working build for Windows from the “Reflow Refactoring” branch which passed WaSP’s Acid2 test:
If it wasn’t enough to see Mr. Smiley in perfect form, I was also curious to see how Mozilla bug #18333 which requests that the XML content sink be fixed and made incremental, just like the HTML so that most XML document types, such as XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml can benefit from being able to render incrementally.
Grabbing the latest source, applying the patch and spinning off a build (not without a minor hiccup), the improvement in apparent performance (as the browser no longer locks as it builds the content) on larger documents are clear to see (using anime.svg):
All this cool stuff is currently being hammered out under Gecko 1.9 and will form the basis of Firefox3 under the codename of “Gran Paradiso” with a pretty aggressive release schedule which should keep other browser vendors honest. According to Gran Paradiso Developement Schedule, Alpha 1 (Developer Preview 1) could land as early as October 2006 and Beta 1 (General Preview 1) just a few months later in February 2007, all culminating in a final release of Firefox3 in May 2007! ;)
Of course “Minefield”, which now appears to be the perpetual codename for Mozilla’s CVS HEAD code, will have by then moved on to the Next-Next-Next Big Thing™. :D
Brave little devil you are, congrats on the success.
Just one question, you are using the Reflow Refactoring braunch, this isnt the main braunch im guessing, (otherwise you wouldnt have mentioned it), have you seen anywhere as to why Firefox2 has not followed that braunch to achieve compliancy along with Safari, Konqueror and Opera? Or has it?
Comment by Alex Latchford — 12:53:18 UTC on the 2nd of August, 2006
At 4 to 8 hours a compile on my laptop, it was more a case of “bloody time consuming”. :P
The “Reflow Refactoring” branch is the same as Trunk, except the layout module which was forked in early June ‘06 & relies on Gecko 1.9… ;)
Comment by Jonathan Stanley — 15:52:01 UTC on the 2nd of August, 2006