
Firefox 18 Gets Support for Retina Display - twapi
http://browserfame.com/857/firefox-retina-display
======
phoboslab
Can anyone with a retina display and the Firefox nightly check this test case
for Canvas, please: <http://www.phoboslab.org/crap/backingstore/>

I hope they didn't screw it up as bad as Apple did with Safari:
<http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/drawing-pixels-is-hard>

Edit: judging from some comments in the source, the Canvas element still uses
a low resolution, so the test case should work as expected in any case.

~~~
tathagata
I just tested this and unfortunately the test case doesn't pass on the
nightly. I am seeing (252,40,252) instead of the (255,0,255).

~~~
chmars
Same here:

(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),
(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),
(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),
(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),
(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),
(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),
(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),
(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),(252,40,252),(0,0,0),

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0
as downloaded and installed just a few minutes ago.

------
akurilin
I wonder at what kind of resolution we will no longer need anti-aliasing. Did
they provide any Retina screenshots with AA off? You'd think that with small
enough of a pixel it would no longer be necessary.

~~~
Retric
There is no clear cut answer to that. Even at 10,000ppi you can still get
visual artifacts without anti-aliasing. The problem is pixles are averaging a
single point source over a 'full' pixel so with some patterns they can become
vary sensitive to slight motions. Think chain link fence, all the pixels could
be on the fence and it looks solid, or between them and it looks clear, and if
your rotation it can swap between them.

------
listic
What is there in a higher-resolution display that actually needs software
support from Mozilla?

~~~
keeperofdakeys
Applications need to be 'retina aware' to actually get the full resolution,
otherwise they are told the resolution is 1440x900 (this doesn't include
fonts, and other system-rendered features, which the OS can always render at
full resolution). The program icons also need to be shipped in a higher
resolution.

------
chmars
OT: When does HN upgrade it's voting arrows for Retina displays?

~~~
chrisdroukas
Preferably it would be CSS.

    
    
       .upArrow {
       width: 0; 
       height: 0; 
       border-left: 6px solid transparent;
       border-right: 6px solid transparent;
       border-bottom: 6px solid #828282;
       }

~~~
chmars
CSS is fine with me. On the desktop, we could even replace the non-Retina
arrows with own CSS and images, however, Safari on iOS doesn't offer this
possibility.

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navs
So do Retina apps mean we now have to deal with larger software packages, even
if we don't have retina displays?

~~~
chmars
I guess so, same as on iOS devices. The example of iOS, however, shows that
Retina will become the standard sooner or later … :)

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lawnchair_larry
I'm confused about this. I've been running the sept 11 Nightly and it has
retina support. Did they take it out, and this is just about re-adding it?

Prior to that I used the "retinizer" app and the about:config hack to disable
acceleration, but performance was really bad. Since running nightly, it has
been fully retina enabled and smooth.

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cheald
About frickin' time. Firefox looks _horrible_ on retina Macbooks right now, to
the point that it's unusable.

~~~
teilo
Relative term, and totally subjective. I have an rMBP, and use Firefox (as
well as InDesign) all the time, and it's not horrible. If your entire screen
looked that way, you wouldn't even notice.

~~~
cheald
Maybe yours does something that mine doesn't, but here's a screenshot:
[http://cl.ly/image/2O2K1g411N3l/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-29%2...](http://cl.ly/image/2O2K1g411N3l/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-29%20at%208.52.31%20PM.png)

Left is Firefox, right is Chrome. Nothing special done to either. MBP is at
the factory resolution. Very ironically, the screenshot at half-size looks
better on my 24" Windows display than it does on the actual MBP does,
presumably as Chrome is doing some resampling to downsize it. Look at it at
full zoom to see what I mean.

I'm doing active web development on a number of browsers across a number of
devices (Macs, Windows, iOS, Android), and Firefox on the Mac is easily the
worst of the lot, by a rather large margin. I would easily notice if the whole
screen looked like it - text is blurry and awfully aliased, to the point that
it's jarring to read. I spend most of my time on Windows, which by most
accounts has less beautiful text rendering than OS X, and switching over to
Firefox on the rMBP feels just awful.

Given that I spend 99% of my day looking at a 94 DPI screen, I don't think
it's too much to ask that the same application on my 220 DPI display not look
like I'm playing Minecraft.

~~~
krzyk
For me both windows look almost the same. And definitely Firefox is not
"unusable" from this single screenshot.

Could you write more what is wrong with firefox on this screenshot?

~~~
masklinn
The text is fuzzy and blurry. You may not see it if you don't zoom in (to
100%), because your browser will apply crappy resizing filters to the whole
image, so both browsers will have the same look.

------
ChuckMcM
This is fabulous, now if I could get it for the iPad, tell it to lie about
what kind of device I was so that I would not be stuck with the 'mobile'
version of Gmail. That would be a usability win.

~~~
eurleif
Gmail's mobile version has links at the bottom: 'View Gmail in: Mobile | Older
version | desktop'

------
Aardwolf
Why do you need "support" for a screen resolution? PC's have had different
screen resolutions forever, why were there never news articles about "Firefox
Gets Support For 1280x1024" or "Firefox Gets Support For 1920x1200"?

~~~
ringm
1920x1200 does not equal high dpi. Think 1920x1200 on a 10" display. If your
app runs on a high DPI screen, and the OS and your app has no support for
this, all fonts and UI elements become tiny, which is unacceptable.

Windows XP had abysmal support for high DPI which usually resulted in broken
UI layout. Vista introduced "DPI virtualization" requiring you to declare and
provide explicit support for variable dpi in your application. Otherwise it is
run at 96 DPI and raster scaling is applied. This prevents any UI layout
issues but results in a a blurry image. I guess Apple uses the same approach:
if your app has no explicit support, it runs under raster scaling.

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mh-
yeah, no. Just downloaded it.

<http://i.imgur.com/pbGvv.png>

whole thing looks like this.

~~~
melling
Has it been fully implemented? The bug says that it's resolved.

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674373>

~~~
cpeterso
In Mozilla's bug workflow, RESOLVED FIXED means the fix has been checked into
Firefox's Mercurial trunk (the "mozilla-central" branch), but the fix won't be
available for testing until the next Nightly build. VERIFIED FIXED means QA
has tested the Nightly build and confirmed the bug has been fixed.

------
yottabyte47
Firefox is at v18? Last I knew it was at v5. Guess they didn't waste any time
in their quest to catch up with Chrome.

~~~
azakai
That joke never gets old, let's keep saying it every time a Chrome or Firefox
version comes out! (Or like here, just because a Chrome or Firefox version
number was mentioned in a random article.)

~~~
shocks
Joke aside, this whole rapid release thing is irritating when it requires me
to restart my browser all the time.

~~~
azakai
No browser AFAIK has the ability to patch a running process (it's very hard to
do in general, but there are some ways to do it to a linux kernel for
example). So you must restart to actually run the downloaded updates. Which
means until you restart, you are running an unpatched browser which might have
known exploits.

~~~
tedunangst
If each tab is a separate process, they could be upgraded one by one. You
could even signal to each tab that it should open all links in a new process.
Browsers are probably the app you could most easily transparently upgrade.

~~~
kevingadd
Not correct. Multiprocess browsers like Chrome don't actually run an entire
browser in each process (that isn't realistically possible) because the
individual tabs need to collaborate for the proper functioning of things like
caches, cookies, etc.

~~~
tedunangst
If. If I can restart a web server without restarting memcache and have a new
process handle new requests while the old process handles existing requests,
it's clearly possible for a browser to change its rendering engine for new
tabs.

~~~
ars
The rendering engine, sure, but what about the rest of the browser? Cache,
Cookie, Prefs, bookmarks, etc.

Browsers are not just rendering engines.

