about:mozilla » Firefox 3

Localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:48:08 +0000

Seth Bindernagel has posted the localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2. The string freeze is going to be on Thursday, October 30 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time), which is just over two weeks from now. Code freeze will be Tuesday, November 4 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time). If you did not make Firefox 3.1 beta 1, we would love for you to participate in this next beta release. We have a goal of releasing a fully localized beta, so please let us know what we can do to help you get into the second beta. For more information and links to the localization team tools, please see Seth’s weblog post.

Clearing up confusion about Geolocation in Firefox 3.1 beta 1

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:30:56 +0000

Chris Blizzard has written a post that tries to clear up some of the confusion that has emerged around the Geolocation functionality that is included in Firefox 3.1 beta 1. The three points he covers are: First, out of the box, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 doesn’t include any back-end providers of location information; Second, we don’t know what we’re going to include with Firefox 3.1 for location information; Third, the browser is providing location information, not information about where you live. Blizzard’s blog post goes into detail on each of these points and is worth a read if you’re unclear about the Geolocation feature as it currently exists in Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

Add-on developers: It’s that time again

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:25:16 +0000

Justin Scott writes, “With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed [at the Mozilla Developer Center]. 3.1.b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.” For more information you should check out Justin’s blog post.

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:18:50 +0000

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform that are scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for this release can be followed at the Planning Center, as well as in the mozilla.dev.planning discussion group, and on IRC in the #shiretoko channel.

New features and changes in this release include: web standards improvements, added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to, improved control over the Smart Location Bar, support for the new video and audio elements, the addition of the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms, and improved support for offline applications.

More information about these features are available in several places including the Mozilla Developer Center’s Firefox 3.1 for Developers article, and in the Web Tech blog’s Overview of features for Web Developers post.

Color profile support changes

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:56:45 +0000

Bobby Holley has been refining Mozilla’s color management backend, working to improve performance and polish the feature so it’s ready for “prime time”. These efforts have clearly paid off, as color profile support has now been turned on by default for tagged images in the latest Firefox nightly builds. In this context, “tagged images” are any images displayed in the web browser that have an embedded ICC color profile — in other words, images that contain the information needed to do a specific and accurate color transformation. Bobby’s post goes into all the technical aspects of these changes in detail, and also discusses why color management hasn’t been enabled for everything at this time. Percy Cabello has also posted about these changes over at Mozilla Links.

nsITraceableChannel, Intercept HTTP traffic

deb — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:52:00 +0000

Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (”new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator”) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.

Polishing Firefox

deb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:31:07 +0000

In an effort to improve the level of Firefox’s visual and interactive polish, Alex Faaborg will be posting a short list of top-priority user experience bugs every Monday morning between now and the Firefox 3.1 launch. He writes, “These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3’s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect.” The team could use some help getting these bugs finished up and closed off, so if you have the time and are interested in helping out, you are encouraged to dive in and get started. Additionally, if there are polish issues that drive you nuts, Alex asks that you file bugs for those and leave a note in the comments of his post.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 now available

deb — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:58:57 +0000

The second alpha version of Firefox 3.1 is now available for download. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, and it is important to note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 introduces several new features to the browser, including: support for the HTML5 “video” element, initial support for web worker threads, support for dragging and dropping tabs between browser windows, a new selector to create areas of Aero-style “glass” in XUL, support for new CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties, performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support.

Please note that this alpha release of Firefox 3.1 does not include the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine — TraceMonkey is available in nightly builds and is currently disabled by default. For more information see the TraceMonkey wiki page.

If you’re planning to download and test Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2, you should first read the release notes and the Firefox 3.1 for developers article. More information and download links are available in the DevNews release announcement.

TraceMonkey vs. V8: JavaScript performance results

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:07:30 +0000

JavaScript is an increasingly vital aspect of web browser performance since many web applications (web mail, online word processors, and so forth) rely heavily on complex JavaScript programs for their core functionality. In the past year, JavaScript performance has gone through somewhat of a renaissance, with massive strides being made by JavaScript developers working on several different projects. The two most recent developments come from Mozilla and Google — Mozilla’s new TraceMonkey engine that is part of Firefox 3.1 development, and Google’s new V8 engine that is part of the Google Chrome beta.

Brendan Eich has run some performance tests, and has posted the results of the head-to-head showdown in which he pitted the engines against each other using the SunSpider test suite on Windows XP and Windows Vista (Google Chrome is not currently available for either Mac or Linux). Brendan writes, “[TraceMonkey] win[s] by 1.28x and 1.19x respectively,” but adds that SunSpider is “one popular yet arguably non-representative benchmark suite.” He finishes by pointing out that “this contest is not a playoff where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point,” going on to sketch the rough outlines of the approach the team is taking to further improve TraceMonkey performance.

Brendan’s complete test results and commentary are available on his weblog. Further information about TraceMonkey and JavaScript performance is available through web posts by Mike Shaver, Andreas Gal, and John Resig.

Drag and Drop is here

deb — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:33:33 +0000

Neil Deakin has posted a development update about the inclusion of the HTML5 drag and drop API in Mozilla nightly builds. “This is the API that IE and Safari have supported for a while. Now Firefox will support it as well so you can create content in your web pages that can be dragged and dropped elsewhere. The same API is also used for Firefox extensions and XUL applications.” For more information, including examples about how to make things draggable, see Neil’s weblog post. Drag and drop documentation is available at the Mozilla Developer Center.