Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is now out and its got what Mozilla claims to be ,”..a huge pile of new features for developers.” It’s a claim that I personally won’t argue against.
There is the geolocation spec support which is a JavaScript API that lets a web page query the browser’s location via JavaScript.(A neat idea though i’m still not so sure how this differs wildly from a simple IP geotargetting http header thing).
There is also support for a CSS property called CSS @font-face which lets designers specify specific true type fonts.
Then there are the HTML 5 elements – <video> and <audio>. Since the beginning of the web, embedding audio and/or video has also been an <embed> exercise. The new HTML 5 tags supported in Firefox 3.1 make it dead easy to include audio/video (though at this point it looks like the default is OGG (and not a Windows Media or QuickTime).
On the security front, Firefox 3.1 includes support for the W3C XHR (XML over HTTP Request) access control. Mozilla’s dev specs note that:
Web developers have long wanted to be able to get data from one site on another but same-origin restrictions
on many types of requests prevent many developers from mashing up
content. This new access control mechanism offers the ability for
servers, content and web clients to cooperate to make a lot of new
things possible on an opt-in basis.
But wait there’s more!
Tracemonkey – Mozilla’s superfast, Google Chrome trouncing JavaScript engine has finally landed! So Firefox 3.1 may well be the fastest Firefox yet.
Lots of stuff and I’ve barely scratched the surface –
