Gecko’s new image cache

“She said I should talk more about my cat; that people like that sort of thing here. I didn’t know I still had a cat. Explains a few things.” - I don’t think it’s the real Christopher Walken, but Twitter’s cwalken is pretty hilarious.

“Is there some ‘particular’ reason why people are dragging their feet on this fix? This is something that really should have been a choice from day one, and it’s taken a year since it was reported for someone to even look at implementing an on/off setting? This seriously brings into question the competency of some Firefox developers.” - Mozilla bug 423756. I forget how you’re supposed to catch flies again. Was it bile and vitriol?

DirectWrite and Direct2D text and 2-D graphics rendering landed in the latest nightly builds of Firefox. The feature is available to Windows Vista and Windows 7 users who enable the Firefox pref. Give it a try and report any problems to Bugzilla.

A Mozilla Developer Preview of improvements in the Gecko layout engine is now available for download. This release includes CSS transitions, SMIL in SVG, WebGL, HTML5 History, Core Text on Mac, PERFORMANCE & more This is a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform, intended for DEVELOPERS and TESTERS only.

5 years ago an amazing community of people came together to bring the world a better Web. Built for today's user with Tabbed Browsing, Add-ons, and more, Firefox is the preferred browser for more than 1/4th of all Internet users. Join with the Mozilla community in celebrating all we've accomplished in these 5 years and all we will over the next 5

I favorited a YouTube video: Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.

I favorited a YouTube video: Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.

Today, I cut my finger at work while chopping some vegetables. I grabbed the nearest rag I could to stop the bleeding and put it on the cut. I didn't know the rag had just been used to clean up a lemon juice spill. FML

Now that I’ve finally checked bug 466586 in to the mozilla-1.9.1/Firefox 3.5 development branch, I consider the design of Imagelib’s cache finished. I planned on blogging about this a while ago, but other problems distracted me.

When I joined the Mozilla Corporation’s gfx group in February of 2008, I was tasked with what seemed like a simple job: create a hashtable-based cache for imagelib, so it no longer had to use necko’s memory cache. (The work to implement this new cache was tracked in bug 430061.) While this seemed like unnecessary reimplementation, I was assured by Stuart and Vlad that necko’s memory cache was meant for an entirely different class of object, and that the large images stored in it were crowding out those objects (such as pages loaded over SSL).

Over the course of Mozilla’s 1.9.1 branch development, I’ve made a number of pretty important changes to Gecko/Firefox’s image library. I plan on blogging more about those changes in the future, but in a nutshell, instead of using necko’s memory cache to store decoded images, imagelib (libpr0n) now uses its own hash table, eviction criteria, and resurrection methods to cache decoded images.

Chris Blizzard tagged me, and this is as reasonable an introduction to Planet as any other. I’m Joe Drew, otherwise named JOEDREW! \o/ (apparently by Deb originally, but these things take on a life of their own). I currently work on imagelib in the Mozilla Corporation’s graphics group, out of MoCo’s Toronto office. I plan to blog about pictures on the open web; the exploits of Jeff Muizelaar, my partner in (graphics) crime here in the Toronto office; and non-Euclidean geometry.

Here are the rules for this particular meme