I’ve spent the last 3 weeks traveling in Asia for Mozilla and W3C business. On May 20 to 24, my team was in Taiwan for a series of meetings on Platform Rendering (Layout, Graphics, and Media.) It’s always an enlightening experience for me when I spend time with such a talented group of people: I’ve pasted the calendar we followed for the week, below. The links point to raw notes from the sessions (where available.

The Gecko Layout Engine added Graphite Smart Fonts support starting in Firefox 11. The Mozilla Firefox documentation for Graphite is still under construction but already contains lots of useful information for Web Designers and Developers. The number of people who will benefit from Graphite is the small subset of the population that reads and writes with lesser-known scripts that require complex ligatures and rules for glyph substitution. In other words, we expect this work will appeal to a rather small underrepresented percentage of the web who communicate using uncommon writing systems.

Paint Flashing is now in the official Release channel starting in Firefox 11. I posted a new add-on that let’s you enable Paint Flashing with one click: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-paint-flashing/ This tool is useful for quickly inspecting how Firefox renders your web pages as it visually indicates how much screen area is being painted after the page layout is computed.The source code for the add-on is also posted.

One of the Gecko Layout & Rendering team’s main responsibilities is the continuing development of CSS in Firefox. I recently modified the CSS style system to allow nested rule parsing. This bug fix taught me a lot about the CSS parser and how styles cascade through the rest of the Layout engine. It took me a little while to set up a dev environment, understand the bug, write tests, get the code written, reviewed, and checked in.

As promised, I’m going to call out Firefox Layout & Rendering code changes that my team has been working on. This bug fix from Bas Schouten (as reviewed by Robert O’Callahan) was one of those light-bulb code changes that have really advanced my understanding of the Gecko Layout Engine’s graphics code: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=574190&action=diff This check-in implements “Paint Flashing”, a diagnostic tool that shows when the browser is invalidating (or repainting) a screen region that has changed.

One of the key goals for the Firefox Layout & Rendering team is to improve performance for web applications. Web apps nowadays push the graphics rendering stack in ways that rival console games. To that end, our existing rasterizer was hitting its limits in terms of the sheer volume of data we now push through it on a a regular basis. Switching out a shipping application’s raster engine is a big deal that requires a lot of scaffolding.

Firefox 7.0 shipped today. While I can’t take any credit for any of it, my team deserves all the praise. They’ve been hard at work on reducing memory all over the product. I’ve had a few people complain to me about “pork” in Firefox and we’re making some big changes to cut the fat. It’s interesting how getting a new job just means new complaints from the same cadre of “stakeholders.