The Browser Report

The WHATWG HTML Draft Recommendation has § 8.2 Parsing HTML documents that “only applies to user agents, data mining tools, and conformance checkers.” However, this matters to all of us because it takes implementations of a spec to forward the spec.

Error handling is a large part of parsing:

This specification defines the parsing rules for HTML documents, whether they are syntactically correct or not. Certain points in the parsing algorithm are said to be parse errors. The error handling for parse errors is well-defined: user agents must either act as described below when encountering such problems, or must abort processing at the first error that they encounter for which they do not wish to apply the rules described below.

Anyways, I’m writing about this because Henri Sivonen has a “preliminary build” of the HTML 5 parser for Gecko, which is celebrated as “a step out of the vaporware land” for this effort. It’s admittedly early going and not consumer friendly yet, but for those of us that care about the future of browsers this is a definitely important step.

The famous and respected Sam Ruby discusses it more intelligently than I can hope to:

Henri’s approach is interesting. He starts from a single source, in Java. The Java code can be compiled to Java byte codes, JavaScript source, or C++ presumably making use of Mozilla libraries for things such as memory management. If he can do that, it seems to me to be a rather small leap from there to producing C++ using, say, either Ruby or Python libraries for memory management, as well as a thin binding to the language. C# would also be a reasonable target.

For the more adventurous, follow along with some of the comments to Sam’s post. Some nicely techie things discussed.

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development. Their stated goal is “creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music.” I’ve reporting their graduation from “beta” on this blog because Songbird is a browser at heart: it’s guts are the Mozilla Gecko engine.

I’ve been using it for a while now — at least for browsing MP3 blogs and the like — and it’s impressive and fun to use. Plus, it’s just super cool that it’s Gecko.

Inside Firefox 3 video from CNET TV takes us on a 1:40 minute “Insider Secrets” tour of the ins-and-outs of the latest version of Firefox guided by Randall Bennett.

Firefox 3 beta 5 portable edition available - safest way to try out FF3b5 - Download Squad

: “But you can also install a portable application like Firefox 3 beta 5 portable edition to any folder on your hard drive. Why would you want to do that? Because then you can try out the latest test version of Firefox without overwriting any of your Firefox 2 settings.”

(Via Download Squad.)

In addition to today’s release, Mozilla also indicated that the source code of the final release candidate will be frozen next Wednesday, April 8th.

According to downloadsquad.com:

Firefox 3 beta 5 features tighter integration with the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating system. That means you have native icons and interface widgets. The OS X version supports Growl notifications, and the Linux version uses the native GTK theme.

However, I can still tell you what’s new in Firefox 3 Beta 5. In continuing some of the more notable updates to the overall Firefox 3 release, Beta 5 includes more personalized options. For instance, a Places Organizer lets you better manage your bookmarks, tags and browsing history, with search capabilities, smart folders, multiple views, and saved frequent searches. That should also give you a few more restore settings to save you when your browser crashes because you’re testing Beta 5.

Other updates include integration with Windows and Macs, with improved icons and the use of native interface widgets in the browser and web forms. Linux integration also uses native icons/buttons/menu styles. Lastly, thanks to improvements to the JavaScript engine and profile-guided optimizations, the speed of Firefox 3 Beta 5 has been increased, so your apps will run faster. See here for previous coverage of Firefox 3. Wired’s Compiler blog adds these notes about the newest beta:

• 755 bug fixes, including all Firefox 3 P1 blockers (these are the top priority must-fix bugs).
• Improved performance. Dotzler says Beta 5 is even faster than Beta 4 according to Mozilla’s own testing. We here at Compiler found that Beta 4 is already extremely fast, so that’s good news.
• This release was prepared in a very compressed beta cycle of three weeks.

Dan Burkhart, Flock’s VP of Marketing, notes

With the decision to cease ongoing support of the Netscape browser, we are honored to have the support and endorsement of AOL and Netscape, who have introduced Flock to millions of loyal Netscape users as AOL sunsets ongoing support for the Netscape products in the field. Tom Drapeau from Netscape has been instrumental in helping increase awareness of the Flock browser, and by doing so has introduced a global audience of people to the unique experience that only the Flock browser delivers.

Flock is designed to support and enhance the way that we use the web today. We appreciate Tom’s assistance in helping get the word out, and encourage you to be a champion of innovation by telling your friends about your experience with Flock as well. If you like the idea of people working late nights to deliver a free product to you, so that you can get more enjoyment out of your daily web experience, please lend a hand.

Netscape ruled, and now Flock rocks! We’re committed to keeping the Netscape’s original spirit of innovation alive and well.