Gecko:1.9a2/ReleaseNotes

What should be on this page

There are four categories of items that should be on this page.

Areas of Focus/Major Changes --- these are areas that all users of the alpha release should pay attention to, and should cover major changes since the last release as well as any known stability or data loss issues that users should be aware of. Issues that may affect web compatibility should also be in this section.

Minor Changes --- areas that have been improved or changed and deserve explicit mention in the release notes.

Bugfixes --- specific bugs that were fixed that deserve explicit mention. Items in this category will not make it into the actual release notes page that lives on mozilla.org, but that page will link to this page for those desiring more information.

For reference, here are the 1.9a1 release notes.

Known memory leak after prolonged browser usage. In order to better handle memory issues, a new garbage collection system has been implemented for native code. However, the process of integrating code into this system is still ongoing, and you may notice excessive memory usage after the browser is used for a long period of time. A restart should fix this problem, which will also be fixed in 1.9a3.

Some Windows font rendering issues. With the partial landing of the new Cairo-based nsTextFrame, some font rendering issues have been discovered on Windows-based platforms. These regressions will be fixed when the new code is fully landed for 1.9a3.

Changes that refactored intrinsic width computation and incremental layout landed. This means that the code for determining intrinsic widths, used for width calculations in tables, floats, and absolutely positioned elements, has been rewritten. The code for handling incremental layout of pages (as the page arrives over the network, as images load, or as other dynamic changes are made) has also been changed extensively. These changes also resolved all of the remaining issues with ACID2 compliance

The inline-block and inline-table values of CSS2.1's display property are now implemented.

Incremental XML rendering. XML documents can now be rendered as they're downloaded from the originating server instead of after the full document has been downloaded. This does not apply to pages that use XSLT.

Support for Web Apps 1.0 API for changing stylesheets. This change enables Gecko to use a standard method for changing stylesheets via the DOM.

Removed Script Object. The non-standard JavaScript Script object is no longer supported in default browser builds.