Firefox gets a brand new HTML5 parser

As of tomorrow the new HTML5 parser will be available in nightly builds:

If you are still comfortable with testing, download a trunk nightly build tomorrow, run it, navigate to about:config and flip the preference named html5.enable to true. This makes Gecko use the HTML5 parser when loading pages into the content area and when setting innerHTML. […] There is also another preference called html5.offmainthread that defaults to true. If you suspect a thread collaboration bug, you can try flipping the pref to false to make all parts of the HTML5 parser run on the main thread.

FYI, this doesn’t mean that Mozilla will support any of the new HTML5 features any better, it will just mean that the HTML that it tries to render is parsed according to rules specified by the HTML5 spec. The result is that the DOM generated by the parser would be the same in all browsers that support these rules.

Wednesday, 18 November 2009