Firefox 3.6 is out. Go download it! If you need a reason, here’s a few things you’ll love about Firefox 3.6.
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Firefox 3.6
Category: Mozilla
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Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.6
To be honest Firefox 3.6 is a little lighter on Features than Firefox 3.5. It’s more about refining and improving than bells and whistles. Here are the things I feel are really noteworthy.
User Centric Features
UI Speed – Many things in the Firefox 3.6 UI have gotten faster. For example startup time has been improved thanks to various optimizations. My personal favorite is the awesomebar is now asynchronous, if you don’t know what that means, just trust me that it makes things feel faster if you have a slow hard drive like in a laptop.
JS/Video Speed Improvements – TraceMonkey, the fast JS engine has gotten some tweaks to improve performance even further. Seeking in <video/> is now much faster than it was in Firefox 3.5.
Focus – UI geeks will note that Firefox has had a few issues regarding focusing elements. Thanks to some refactoring it’s vastly simplified and improved.
Personas – Firefox has always supported theming, but it’s a complex process to build a theme and it’s prone to breaking as the UI evolves between versions. Personas is a light weight system to customize the look of the browser’s chrome.
Plugin Update Notification – A big cause of Firefox crashes, and security issues actually aren’t related to Firefox directly but plugins. Firefox can now notify you when you need to update a plugin helping you to keep your system as stable and secure as possible.
Full Screen For <video/> – Firefox can play native <video/> but thus far had no method to go full screen. Apple may want you to pay for “Pro” for full screen but with Firefox 3.6 you get it at no extra charge.
DLL Blacklist – To improve security/stability Firefox now has a DLL blacklist and can prevent other DLL’s from interfering with Firefox. This is Windows only at this time.
Opening Links In New Tab Position – When you opened a link in a new tab in previous versions it opened in a new tab on the far right, with lots of tabs open this created confusion as you may have several different tabs open on various things your doing. Now this will result in the new tab being created to the right of the current tab. If you don’t like this behavior you can set tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth it.
For Developers
-moz-background-size – This is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve wanted to do this a few times in the past.
Poster frame for <video/> – Poster frames are now supported for <video/>. It’s a small bit of polish but will hopefully benefit design and perhaps even SEO down the line.
Web Open Font Format (WOFF) – Imagine an open font format that supported compression and meta data. Now imagine that a lot of font foundries have expressed support for it. WOFF!
async attribute for <script/> – It’s simple enough, the async attribute is now supported. Those who care about performance have wanted this for a long time.
Using Files from Web Applications – This is a huge step towards making web applications first class citizens. Hopefully we’ll see support for this in Google Docs at some point (one of the apps I think could best make use of this).
HTML5 Parser – Firefox 3.6 ships with an HTML5 parser, though it’s disabled for now by default. To enable set html5.enable to true.
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The Jetpack Debate
I’ve generally found Jetpack to be pretty cool. It’s easier to develop and I’m fairly familiar with both “traditional” extension development and jQuery so it seems natural to me. However I generally agree with Daniel Glazman’s blog post on Jetpack. I’ll even agree that closures can make code more difficult to read, though I think I’ve mostly adapted to it at this point.
Jetpack reminds me more of building JS “widgets” than extensions. I’m not sure I see the advantage of moving away from XUL which really isn’t “hard” for 98% of things (though XUL <wizard/> has admittedly made me say WTF a few times) to HTML unless some sort of portability were gained, but that doesn’t seem very likely at least right now. I haven’t seen any indication of intent either. XUL has the advantage of making good UI seemingly easy while HTML really doesn’t, though I’ll admit HTML5 is changing that.
The biggest problem I see with Jetpack is that too much of it is designed around existing needs. The problem with this process is that it’s always playing catch-up. The best extensions are disruptive and do things nobody ever thought of, or even thought possible. Looking at the Jetpack JEP list I see pagemods and toolbar. The kicker is these are “implementing” and “planning” respectively right now.
Things like jetpack.slideBar, jetpack.music and especially jetpack.lib.twitter make me feel a bit concerned. Why? Because they encourage too much conformity, and too many twitter client Jetpacks.
When developers are given such a sterile environment that’s intended to promote experience and stability it ends up inadvertently creating monotony and stalling innovation. If you want proof look at the iPhone. There are indeed some great apps and I say that as an iPhone user myself, but for each great application there are 1,000 that aren’t worth the price (which is often free). Many are just cookie cutter apps with a companies logo on them. Google used one undocumented API for a feature Apple didn’t think of providing a documented API for, and it was news worthy. While Jetpack distribution isn’t limited in the same way that iPhone apps are with the App Store the design questions still remain.
To quote Adblock Plus author Wladimir Palant:
…Jetpack has to support Adblock Plus, not the other way around. As it is now, Jetpack isn’t suitable for complicated extensions.
That’s the wrong order.
Microsoft is joining the W3C SVG Working Group. Presumably that means there’s some interest in SVG for IE or Silverlight or both. I wonder what led to the change of heart.
I pretty much wrote off any chance of SVG being mainstream in 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was previously somewhat of a SVG pusher, but Macromedia obviously is the home of Flash. As expected the SVG love dried up. The gap that Adobe filled was adding support for SVG to IE. If IE supports it natively that’s a game changer.
Gecko already has decent support for SVG. WebKit has support for a while. Opera has support as well. Without analyzing in too much detail there should be a subset that’s usable across current browsers and hopefully IE by the time IE 9.0 ships.
I must admit given the choice I’m still more interested in Microsoft supporting <canvas/>, but no word on that as of yet. I’m still hopeful.
Hooray for web standards!
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Firefox On Bing
Bing’s background of the day today was a Firefox.
And again a few days later:
Here’s an interesting DOM test-case I ran across inadvertently yesterday.
For the purpose of this post assume the following markup:
< !DOCTYPE HTML>
<HTML>
<!– i broke the DOM –>
<head>
<meta HTTP-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Testcase</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Something</p>
</body>
</HTML>
If I use document.documentElement.firstChild I don’t get consistent behavior. In Firefox and IE I get the <head/> element, which is what I was initially expecting. In WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and Opera. I get the HTML comment which I wasn’t.
I just noticed that Google is now serving it’s homepage with an HTML5 doctype:
< !doctype HTML>
I suspect this might have changed when they launched that new fade effect. I also noticed they are doing so when using the new YouTube “Feather” beta. This shouldn’t be too surprising considering their involvement in the HTML5 specs and developing a web browser and announcing it’s moving away from Google Gears.
Of course the pages don’t validate, and don’t really take advantage of much HTML5 features (that I’ve seen at least). But it’s a step in the right direction. With modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari becoming more popular it’s slowly becoming a reality.
I was curious what browser detection in various JS libraries look like. While we always try to avoid doing browser detection, it’s sometimes a necessary evil. Here’s what I found.
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5 Years Already?
Has it been 5 years already? The landscape has certainly changed since 2004.
I think it’s finally accepted that something can fight back against Microsoft. Size doesn’t guarantee market share on the Internet. In the pre-www world you had to convince a few managers to buy your product and you can be installed on 10k systems. Home users typically used what they knew from work. In 2009 even offices are becoming more accustomed to letting employees use what they feel works best (though not all there yet, easier system re-imaging is helping here). Home users put whatever they want on their computer. The focus is clearly shifting more and more towards the user and making their experience better.
Where will things be in another 5 years?
I noted in January that WhiteHouse.gov relaunched for the Obama administration using a closed source infrastructure (it was using ASP.NET on IIS 6.0) running a proprietary CMS.
It has now relaunched using open source Drupal. Also interesting is that it’s no longer broadcasting any headers regarding it’s server. Considering Drupal is by far better tested on a Unix OS andApache, I’m wondering if they dropped Windows Server/IIS 6.0 in favor of some sort of Linux and Apache. I can’t find any hint at what they are using.
It’s noteworthy that Drupal was already used on recovery.gov and has been used in politics by way of CivicSpace for the Dean campaign in 2004.
Via Drupal it’s still using jQuery (verison 1.2.6). It’s also now using RSS rather than ATOM for feeds, which I presume is by way of the switch to Drupal rather than an intentional effort.
Another interesting change is they tweaked the doctype from XHTML Transitional to XHTML+RDFa.
Pretty much everything else is still the same including the design. Analytics is still done using WebTrends (holdover from the Bush administration) and Akamai still sits in front of their servers.
For CSS hackers: They still choose conditional CSS for IE compatibility.
Their pages don’t fully validate anymore, though there is no terrible markup either.
Video is still done using Flash, maybe they’ll consider adopting HTML5 video. They could do so and fallback to Flash. The latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome could take advantage of it today. The rest of the browsers would get the Flash experience. That would be the next major step in opening up. Mark Pilgrim has a good primer if they need.
Edit [9/26/2009 @ 1:45 PM EST]: Tim O’Reilly confirms it is indeed running on LAMP, specifically Red Hat Linux with Apache, MySQL and obviously PHP. Apache Solr is used for search.