Anne van Kesteren

Firefox nightlies now build with SVG

Firefox nightly builds now have SVG support. (Look for builds with the string -svg- in them.) Currently Linux is not build with SVG; both the Mac and Win32 are.

If you are using an older version of Windows it might be that you get a warning message. Also note that native SVG support is disabled by default. To enable it you need to follow some steps.

Have fun! You can try your build with some nice SVG samples or you can run it through the W3C SVG test suite.

Although in the current nightlies SVG is disabled it might be that native SVG support in Firefox 1.1 will be enabled by default. Another update: it appears the patch attached to this bug has been checked in; Firefox now builds with SVG and has support for it enabled by default. This seems like a good thing with the only downside that authors might think to ‘know’ how SVG works, while it actually is a bug. (For example, try width:200 in Internet Explorer.)

Comments

  1. Is it full SVG? Opera 8 now has SVG Tiny built-in.

    Posted by Chris Hester at

  2. Hmm... are there still non-svg nightlies? The Mac one is a week out of date, but the Windows one is from today.

    Posted by dolphinling at

  3. That's cool. At least better than SVG Tiny which is really tiny... :-|

    Posted by minghong at

  4. That's cool. At least better than SVG Tiny which is really tiny...

    This "better" SVG has serious problems with the tiny animation: http://www.opera.com/features/svg/ and also with a gzipped svg: http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.svgz :P

    Posted by quiris at

  5. Yeah, and Opera does not support CSS in SVG. Both Mozilla and Opera are targeting for SVG Tiny partly, but are also implementing features of full.

    Posted by Anne at

  6. Hurray! Steps forward.

    Posted by Hayo at

  7. ACK, things are getting better now. Assuming IE7 follows soon, full SVG support will let us conjure on another level.

    Posted by Jens Meiert at

  8. quiris, of course, as it is unfinished. You shouldn't be comparing a final version of Opera with a nightly version of Firefox. That's totally unfair.

    Anyway, Mozilla is aiming at full SVG 1.1 support, and currently already supporting lots of elements that Opera doesn't support (and doesn't support lots of elements that SVGT supports yet). Take a look of their comparison of an overview.

    Posted by minghong at

  9. I downloaded an SVG enabled build a week back though this improves things somewhat.

    Shame we have to wait for Microsoft before many of the less technical savvy will get the benefits.

    Posted by Robert Wellock at

  10. This "better" SVG has serious problems with the tiny animation: http://www.opera.com/features/svg/

    And similarly Opera has serious problems with this regular SVG animation. This is just the output from CorelDraw, not doing anything special.

    Heh :).

    Anyways, I'm sure that with some tweaks it will be possible to create SVG images which work in at least to major browsers. Great!

    ~Grauw

    Posted by Laurens Holst at

  11. Laurens, of course it doesn't work because SVGT doesn't support DOM scripting. There are 2 types of "animation" in SVG: 1) simple animation using animation module (available to all variations of SVG); and 2) DOM scripting using the scripting module (available in SVG 1.1 only).

    So be careful when you talk about SVG animation. ;-)

    Posted by minghong at

  12. quiris, of course, as it is unfinished. You shouldn't be comparing a final version of Opera with a nightly version of Firefox. That's totally unfair.

    Ok, ok. I know, the Mozilla SVG support still needs a lot of work and of cause I know the Mozilla SVG progress is really important for the future of WWW so I am rooting for Mozilla :) I hope the SVG 1.1 support will be amazing and it will make Opera Software develop entire SVG standard support also ;)

    And similarly Opera has serious problems with this regular SVG animation.

    I am aware of SVG Tiny profile limitations. The animation uses CSS which as Anne mentioned above is not supported by Tiny profile.

    Posted by quiris at

  13. Actually, the animation works. Maybe you should look at the link next time :). What I was talking about is that I see a big black blob instead of a blue blob with a face. But that’s because the SVG output used is not tiny profile, I guess. Still, it’s weird, because I don’t think it uses anything special.

    Anyways, I think it’s a bit silly to actually complain about this development. The implementation is still not finished yet, so it is obvious that some things don’t work entirely yet. And Mozilla’s implementation of SVG is currently only better than Opera’s insofar that the specification it is aiming to support has a greater number of features. No-one said that Mozilla’s current implementation is better, I think.

    By the way, Firefox now has SVG enabled by default as well.

    ~Grauw

    Posted by Laurens Holst at

  14. Laurens, yeah, I noticed that when my bugmail arrived this morning, or actually, when I retrieved it from the server. I edited the post one more time to reflect this.

    Posted by Anne at

  15. Is this using cairo for the rendering yet? (I assume not, since the Linux builds don't have SVG enabled.)

    Posted by Anonymous at

  16. No, there are experimental available with Cairo enabled, but Mozilla 1.8 (Firefox 1.1) will not be Cairo based. 1.9 will be which offers very cool things like a ‘save this page as PDF’ button.

    Posted by Anne at

  17. Cool! I wrote a client side javascript script to generate sparklines of the fly… It relied on the Adobe plugin up til SVG support in Firefox! Javascript SVG Sparklines

    Posted by Jesse Andrews at