New Features in Firefox 3 (part 1)

February 22nd, 2008   Filed Under CSS, Javascript, Technology, browser  

Hot and Cool features in Firefox #1

Right now firefox 3 is in its beta stage and the beta 3 is being pulled currently by the developers to test. Till now I didn’t find any thing which should say its a firefox bug.
Today I am going to present you some of the most discussed features and changes of firefox 3.

HTML: If you have ever come across the character set problem in Firefox; Be happy its fixed. For those who didn’t know this, I will explain a bit. Let us say you have a particular character set for a page declared. Now if you have a frame or an iframe in your page, let us say from a third party or from your own resources which needs to show a different character set .. it used to inherit the character set from the parent. For a long time, FF was not releasing any patch for this. Thank god somebody reported and its fixed now.

Javascript: Now Firefox supports javascript version 1.8. But as always, I am so skeptical about the usage. No body will forget Internet Explorer not having javascript 1.8 and hence how many people develop web apps and sites to run only on Firefox? But surely some of the features keeps the browser aside from others and may be considered for this. Let’s go ahead. Know more about javascript 1.8

Online/Offline events: Now I came to know the Google’s idea of having Gears at the place. Since FF was developing this feature Google Gears has clubbed this and two more features from FF and made it a plugin for all the browsers a user have. Although its not a bad idea. Egoistic Microsoft wouldn’t have done this at all. O.K. so let me tell you this feature in detail: This feature lets you know when the connection with the internet/intranet is available/unavaialble. This saves you from writing your own rings and eylets to check the connection availability. Very useful for offline apps capability. It is a property which sits in the navigator object and can be accessed by the syntax ‘navigator.onLine’ and the possible values are “ONLINE”/”OFFLINE”. The events can be fired from document, window or document.body. That means on the body tag you can write ononline=”” or onoffline=”” and from event attaching javascript you can write window.ononline or document.onoffline etc.

Cross-Site-Ajax: Yeah.. now thats possible. No need to use friendly iFrames(good name, no hifi technology). The W3C’s implementation guidline for access control states the control over who-can and can-not request from a browser. For example if I have a web service and I want my subscriber to use my service through ajax, I need to implement this: Access-Control: allow <jayanthsharma.com> on your page/servlet header. Now my subscriber can use my data to do mashups or whatever way he wants to present the data. No idea when IE will have the same capability. Untill then we may just endup by saying, “You must use Firefox 3 to access this site” … not a good statement though.

CSS Changes: FF3 now have alternative stylesheet support. This I read as a recommendation by W3C way back in 2000 or 2001. The new CSS implementation have some cool features, I’ll just discuss few of them:
a) rgba() and hsla(): red,green,blue,alpha and hue,saturation,luminosity,alpha. Whoot photoshop users. Time to celebrate!!
b) kerning and ligatures for text: Again its a feature from image editors like photoshop. It now supports the kerning and anti-aliasing for your text to look as good as in Photoshop. A bit slower process but worth having in the browsers. I don’t see the time away when banner ads can be designed using browser capabilities(Adobe has to purchase mozilla).
c) Hyphenation: Again something like photoshop. This feature was too much awaited for years. Now you can have a single string continuous which will ultimately break if there is no space horizontally. But what about previous versions? Can’t do anything about it… (booohooo) It will take at least 2 years to forget about the current browsers I presume.

Protocol Handling: There is a cool and certainly bad feature this time in FireFox 3. This features allows you to specify the protocol handler. For example if you have declared a protocol handler the “mailto” protocol like this:

navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”, “https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=%s”, “GMAIL”);

and suppose you have a tag in your page like this:

<a href="http://www.vivekpohre.com/wp-admin/%E2%80%9Dmailto:vivek.pohre@gmail.com%E2%80%9D">Vivek Pohre</a>

Then instead of having his preferred email client a user will be thrown to the gmail application. Can’t digest this amore.
This list isn’t quite exhaustive. For more information, check out CSS Improvements in Firefox 3.

There is a lot more in Firefox 3 .. the other parts I would publish in subsequent posts.

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