The Mozilla project has released the second alpha of Gran Paradiso. Like Alpha 1 it is not much about Firefox but a testing vehicle for a large number of changes to the underlying Gecko rendering engine.

Some important changes have occured that affect the rendering of partially downloaded content (XML and wbe pages as well) and the calculation of particular dimensions and positions of web pages elements. Enhanced support for Mac widgets and the new Cairo rendering engine is included as well.

This release passes the Acid2 test, designed by the Web Standards Project to try a browser’s standards support level with a very complex web document. Alpha 1 was a huge improvement but still presented a couple of artifacts in the Acid2 result.

The changes are of most interest for web developers and designers but end users will benefit of stronger support for web standards and better response times and performance.