Cairo beats Safari?

As highlighted recently by Jeffrey Zeldman, Firefox text rendering lags behind that of Safari, or rather Gecko lags behind WebKit. This is because at present, Gecko browsers use the older Quickdraw graphics library, originally developed for OS 9, rather than Quartz, or the more recent Core Image libraries. Its been the main reason I prefer Omniweb or Safari over Camino/Firefox, text just looks SO much crisper and smoother.

Things are about to change however, as the switch to the Cairo graphics library in Gecko browsers will allow them to use Core Image on the OS X platform. There is already a developer release of Firefox 3.0, codenamed Gran Paradiso with Cairo enabled. You can also grab a latest trunk build of Camino, which also uses Cairo.

The improvements are already easy to see. My personal rendering bugbear has been the sub navigation on Amazon, which always renders roughly, particularly in Gecko. Compare these screenshots:

Not only is Gecko with Cairo improved, it actually looks better than WebKit!. Looking at the example that Zeldman used, italics are MUCH improved also:

It’s early days so there will be plenty of bugs, especially as the Mac platform is behind Windows and Linux, who’ve had Cairo enabled for about 6 months now. Testers are needed for OS X, so if you can lend hand, so please do grab a build and get reporting those bugs.

Tags: cairo, graphics, mozilla, text

Thunderbird

Following on from the branding of Firefox, comes the new logo for Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird. When Stephen Desroches sketched out the orginal idea for Firefox back in December, he had in mind how this affects the other applications, and Thunderbird was sketched out too:

After Firefox 0.8 came out, I started work on fleshing theses sketches out, trying various bird types. Early on we decided to keep the envelope metaphor, and include a globe. At this point I couldn’t find any reference to a real Thunderbird, so I didn’t have a starting point. I tried a few approaches:

Tags: design, logos, mozilla

coming soon

Tags: mozilla

branding firefox

Shortly before Christmas, I had an email from a chap called Steven Garrity, who works for Silverorange, and runs a blog called ‘Acts of Volition’, in which he publishes a radio show on regular basis. (really worth a listen BTW). He asked if I would like to join a recently created Mozilla branding team, with the immediate aim of producing a new logo identity for the Firebird browser, soon to be renamed firefox (Ben Goodger has written up the reasons and process for the name change). The branding team came into being after Steven wrote an article recommending changes to Mozilla’s existing branding. I jumped at the chance, and today Firefox 0.8 is finally released, and the work is no longer confidential.

Tags: design, firefox, logos, mozilla