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Firefox 3 Alpha 2 Released

Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Open Source, Web

Mozilla has officially released the second Firefox 3.1 alpha. This release includes support for the WHATWG’s HTML 5 “video” element.

Mozilla has been planning the 3.1 roadmap since before the launch of Firefox 3. Version 3.1 is expected to provide a strong incremental improvement and will include many of the features that were deferred for various reasons during the 3.0 development cycle. The developers are refining the user interface for tabs and tagging and are also working on on important backend improvements to boost compatibility with emerging web standards like CSS 3 and HTML 5.

The latest alpha—codenamed Shiretoko—includes support for the new video element, one of the most highly-anticipated features of HTML 5. The feature didn’t make into the main tree in time for Firefox 3, but now it’s a high priority feature for the 3.1 release.

The HTML 5 video element offers some unique capabilities that can’t presently be achieved with Flash-based video players. For instance, it enables web developers to more seamlessly intersperse video with other web content, manipulate video playback with JavaScript, and access video elements directly through the document object model (DOM).

One of the most compelling demos shows translucent videos playing inside of SVG frames that a user can drag and resize. The demo is implemented entirely using standards-based web technologies and shows how web developers could soon deliver rich interactive video content without Flash.

Another significant feature that landed in this alpha release is support for web worker threads, a new scripting capability that allows computationally intensive JavaScript to be run in the background so that it doesn’t cause the Firefox user interface to hang. This feature and the significant JavaScript performance boost brought by the new TraceMonkey engine (which is still under development isn’t included in alpha 2) will give developers the ability to leverage client-side processing to create web applications of unprecedented sophistication.

Other, minor features were added in alpha 2 as well, including much-improved support for dragging tabs between windows. Dragging a tab from one window to another in alpha 2 will no longer cause the page to reload. This means that users can seamlessly move tabs between windows without disrupting page state or the contents of web forms.

Firefox 3.1 is shaping up to be an impressive release. The latest features in alpha 2 build on the intriguing user interface changes and visual tab switcher that were added in the previous alpha. Users can download the new version from the Mozilla web site.

Tags: firefox, firefox 3.1, html5, mozilla, shiretoko, tracemonkey, WHATWG

Read more | Comments (0) | September 8th, 2008

Google releases Open Source Crypto

Posted by James | Filed under Code, Open Source, Security, Web

photo credit: gruntzooki

Google has released “Keyczar”, a cryptography toolkit that supports encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms.

Why Keyczar?

Cryptography is easy to get wrong. Developers can choose improper cipher modes, use obsolete algorithms, compose primitives in an unsafe manner, or fail to anticipate the need for key rotation.

Cryptography is a common problem for web programmers, and Google aims to alleviate some of these issues by giving programmers a simple API for these functions.

Keyczar abstracts some of these details by choosing safe defaults, automatically tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple programming interface.

Keyczar is designed to be open, extensible, and cross-platform compatible. It is not intended to replace existing cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, PyCrypto, or the Java JCE, and in fact is built on these libraries.

To download Keyczar and for more information, please visit the Google Code project and discussion group.

[Via] Google Online Security Blog