Now there is something to test. I am providing builds with my preliminary patches for four target platforms.

The builds are based on Firefox trunk pulled on 2006-07-05. I have applied preliminary fixes for bug 31961 and bug 18333.

Currently, builds are available for Mac OS X PPC, Mac OS X Intel, Linux i686 and Linux x86_64. Source is available from the same place. The Mac targets are in one package as a Universal Binary. Update: The builds have been respun.

The Linux packages have been built on Ubuntu Dapper. They require Xft. I am clueless about cross-distro compatibility. If you have a different Linux setup and the packages don’t work for you, I can only point to the source tarball. Sorry.

I have not run the Linux i686 and the Mac OS X Intel versions myself.

Thanks to Mikko Korpela for contributing the Linux i686 build and to Yrjö Kari-Koskinen for letting me use his Linux x86_64 system for building and debugging.

What’s There to See?

• The menu command View / Text Size / Normal (accel-0) activates a smart zoom. If the page has already been zoomed to the smart level, the zoom level is reset to 100% instead.

• XML documents that arrive slowly from the network are rendered incrementally.

It is quite possible that the case where the network delivers data at full speed but the CPU can’t process it fast enough needs further tweaking. Update: The builds have been respun and this issue has been adressed. Hopefully. Anyway, please let me know if anything breaks with XML loading. (Or HTML loading, but I’m pretty confident that I didn’t break the HTML side.) Also, please let me know if you like the zoom feature and if you like it replacing the normal zooming to 100% command.

Known Problems

• MathML rendering breaks if layout happens to run when a math subtree is incomplete.

• Scripts continue running when the Yellow Screen of Death is shown.

Warning

These are test builds off the trunk with patches. The risk of profile corruption (etc.) is at least similar to running a random trunk build in general. Please be sure to understand the risks of running test builds and proceed at your own risk.

Legal Stuff

I don't place any additional licensing restrictions on the source. That is, the bulk of the source is under the usual MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and the libraries have their usual licenses. However, I opt to provide the binaries under GPLv2 as opposed to MPL, in order to escape the long-term source retention & distribution requirements of MPL. In practice this means that I intend to keep the source available on the same server as the binaries as long as the binaries are there, but I don't necessarily intend to keep the source available beyond that. If you want the source, please get it now.