Adobe released the first beta of AIR 2.0

Adobe AIR 2.0 includes an updated version of the Webkit rendering engine which should add support for some HTML5 elements and CSS transforms, transitions and animations. I did a quick check to see what is supported and noticed the following:

Present:

• CSS Animations
• CSS Transitions
• CSS 2D Transforms
• CSS Gradients
• CSS Masks
• CSS Reflections
• HTML5 Canvas

Missing:

• CSS 3D Transforms
• CSS Fonts
• CSS box-shadow and text-shadow properties
• HTML5 Offline Application Cache
• HTML5 Local and Session Storage
• HTML5 Database Storage
• HTML5 Video

Although 2D transforms are supported they look pretty ugly compared to the same effects in Safari. It looks like the transforms are done without proper interpolation and anti-aliasing.  In their current state I would almost say that transforms are unusable. One thing I also noticed is that large text is also not anti-aliased, which makes it look quite bad compared to desktop browsers.

Wednesday, 18 November 2009