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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.

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

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

Chrome: Back to Firefox

Posted by James | Filed under Web

photo credit: ronin691

After a day of using Google Chrome, I’ve gone back to using Firefox 3. My biggest complaint with Chrome is the lack of extensions (although it has been noted that these could appear in future). I find it much harder to do my job without Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, et al.

I was perturbed by Google’s EULA for the browser, giving Google potential rights to everything posted via the browser, however they have since modified this to alleviate users’ fears.

I’ve also been put off by a couple of issues I’ve read about/discovered:

A flaw in the version of the WebKit browser engine Chrome uses allows an attacker to use a Java carpet-bombing attack, whereby a user can be tricked into launching an executable Java file.
Typing ‘:%’ into Chrome’s omnibar crashes the app hard, taking all tabs down with it. So much for tab process isolation!

However, I love the V8 Javascript engine:

It achieves great performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code, rather than to a bytecode. Thus, JavaScript applications will run at the speed of a compiled binary.

photo credit: themaxsons

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Tags: Browsers, Chrome, google, java

Read more | Comments (0) | September 5th, 2008

Add To Reader for Ubiquity

Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Web

Just wrote a basic “Add to Reader” verb for Ubiquity.

ubiquity

If you don’t know what Ubiquity is then watch the video.

Ubiquity is going to be awesome for Firefox power-users. One of the best things about Firefox is the extension eco-system and Ubiquity is going to make writing extensions much easier.

UPDATE: Modified my script to no longer require the type of feed, it will now just pick the first one it finds. Future ideas include listing the feeds available and allowing the user to choose one before adding it.