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This is the second issue of about:hacks, the Mozilla newsletter for web developers. You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive news from the Mozilla Developer Network. If you don't want to receive this newsletter, you can easily unsubscribe.
In this issue...
Firefox 3.6 Released Firefox 3.6 was released on Jan 21st and has already been downloaded more than 37 million times! It features a faster JavaScript engine, faster DOM performance and a bunch of new HTML5 features. Highlights for web developers include support for the WOFF font format, new CSS features like gradients and multiple backgrounds, drag and drop, File API, device orientation, and more. Want to see the full list? Look at our Firefox 3.6 for Developers page on developer.mozilla.org. We hope that you took the time to test Firefox 3.6 on your web sites before the release. If you didn't, it's not too late to let us know about issues. Here are a few problems that we've seen in the wild so far: - We've seen a couple of issues with the FCKEditor component, used widely on the web. It apparently doesn't handle dates after 2009 properly (this is the first major browser release in 2010, a new decade!) and it also has some problems with document.readyState.
- People who had the YSlow extension installed saw crashes with Firefox 3.6. YSlow has been updated to version 2.0.6 to fix the issue.
- Some Facebook apps were broken by a change we made to comply with the upcoming HTML5 standard. We updated element.getElementsByTagNameNS and document.getElementsByTagNameNS to no longer case-fold when doing tag name lookups. (We strongly suggest that you only use lower-case tag names for many reasons, including this.) For more information, please see this note from Henri Sivonen about what's changed. Facebook has since fixed the issue in their code, but other sites may also be tripping over this.
We're looking for feedback on any developer-facing regressions you've seen in 3.6 from 3.5. You can leave comments on this blog post. Firefox for the Nokia N900 with Weave Sync Late last week, we made our first release of Firefox for Mobile devices. Our first device, the Nokia N900, is a device you can buy and use in many parts of the world. We're now working hard on bringing Firefox to Android and Windows mobile phones. Firefox for Mobile also includes Weave Sync, letting you synchronize your history, bookmarks, and passwords between your mobile devices and your desktop machines. This means that the experience you have with the Awesomebar on Firefox is also available on the N900. As a web developer, you might be asking yourself what you need to do to support Firefox on these new mobile devices. Well, it turns out, very little right now. From a web developer's standpoint, Firefox for the N900 is the same as Firefox 3.6: it's the same code. It includes the same HTML5 features as the ones you get on desktops, downloadable fonts, as well as full support for add-ons. Over the next few newsletters you can expect us to talk more about both mobile and Weave. In the meantime, take a look at the Develop for Mobile page to keep up with the latest news for mobile developers. Developer Tools: Firebug 1.5 released Firebug 1.5 is now available on addons.mozilla.org. Firebug 1.5 features include an enhanced inspector, more accurate net panel timings, break on HTML mutation or XHR, and many others. You can learn more about the new Firebug at the getfirebug site, which boasts a brand new design by Neil Lee. If you're new to Firebug, you will also find a screencast by Rob Campbell, which covers the Firebug basics. You can also check out this collection of posts to take a more in-depth look at Firebug 1.5. There are a few known issues that the Firebug team is working on. For example, you should make sure to update your Firebug extensions like FireQuery and FirePHP. Also, note that 64-bit Firefox builds on Linux crash with Firebug 1.5. You can find more information about these issues on the Firebug weblog. We'd love to hear what you think of the new Firebug, so please post your comments on the Hacks blog, and if you've encountered any issues with Firebug 1.5 using Firefox 3.6, file a bug. Demos An HTML5 image editor and uploader
With emerging support for HTML5 coming to many modern browsers, we've decided to show off what Firefox can do, and what the future of the web looks like. Firefox has some of the best support of all the browsers for HTML5 including Drag and Drop, support for the File API, support for the Cross Origin Resource Sharing (often called Cross-site XMLHttpRequest) and full support for the HTML5 application cache. Paul Rouget has put together a great demonstration on the Hacks blog of what happens when you combine these capabilities into a single application. He created an HTML5 image editor and uploader. This full application allows you to lightly edit an image and then send the edited image to Twitpic via their API. The demo includes a screencast and a high-level description of how the demo works and the technologies that it uses. Even better, look at the code to learn how to take advantage of these new Firefox 3.6 features. WebGL Demo This second demo is about the emerging WebGL standard. With only a very early draft standard, people are starting to build some amazing demonstrations. People who have experience with Google Map's street video will find this demo interesting as it shows how you can use WebGL to map textures and look around as you "drive" through a scene. You can find the full description, with code, on Benjamin DeLillo's weblog, or watch the video directly. To view the demo, you need a webgl-enabled build from nightly.mozilla.org and you must enable the config option for WebGL. To keep up with what's going on with WebGL, follow the community at planet-webgl.org or have a look at our WebGL center on developer.mozilla.org. Behind the Scenes Firefox Release Timeline After Firefox 3.6 We've been getting a lot of questions recently about what we're going to do after Firefox 3.6. Press articles have been written that claim that we're not doing a Firefox 3.7 release and will instead be focusing all of our efforts on Firefox 4. This isn't true - we still plan on delivering a Firefox 3.7. However, we will make some subtle but important changes to how we plan on delivering technology to users and web developers. We want to find ways to improve the lives of our users and improve the web faster than we do today. Mike Beltzner explains these ideas in a blog post in greater detail. If you're interested in our post-3.6 release plans it's worth reading his post in its entirety. Really, read it to the end. Experimenting with Sound and Light Firefox is an open source project and as such, people often use it as a platform for doing things that go beyond the standards to learn what works and what doesn't. Take sound, for example. There's been a lot of interest lately in APIs that would allow you to process sound directly in the browser with JavaScript. David Humphrey has been blogging about his experiments with a sound API for Firefox (and, by inference, for the web as well.) David is a professor at Seneca College outside of Toronto, Canada, and has a long history of working with the Mozilla project and bringing his students into open source projects as part of their training. David's work is not just about bringing sound to the web. He's using sound APIs as a way to connect communities. Another, somewhat related project, is to bring the Processing language to the web. Processing is a language that's used by artists and programmers to create everything from artwork to interesting visualizations. The processing.js project seeks to bring that power to the Open Web through the HTML5 canvas element and JavaScript. This work is bringing three communities together: sound hackers, processing hackers, and web developers. Together they are creating some pretty amazing things. For a great example, have a look at David's post titled Experiments with Audio, Part VIII. In that post he shows a demo by Al Macdonald that takes the audio track from an open video and then overlays a processing-based visualization that shows the tone and activity of whalesong over the video. This is done in real time in the browser - the data isn't post-processed. What this shows is that sometimes the most interesting technology comes from experimentation and learning. The best and most interesting things often come from putting together people who never would have thought that they would have had anything to teach one another - but they do. New on MDC The Mozilla Developer Center (MDC) is a central destination for documentation for web developers. As a reminder, here's our page on what's new in Firefox 3.6. If you're interested in features that might be included in a later version of Firefox, you can also check out a new page listing upcoming Firefox features for developers. MDC also now offers an extensive set of articles and demos on WebGL, the in-progress specification to bring real-time 3D graphics to the web. The article Getting started with WebGL will teach you how to set up a WebGL context. You will also find cool demos, such as an illustration of how to animate textures, which maps an Ogg video onto the faces of a rotating cube (see the article and the demo). To try it out, you need to run a trunk build of Firefox and to set the webgl.enabled_for_all_sites preference to true. Hacks Blog redesign There has never been a better time to rediscover the great articles and demos we've published at the Hacks web developer blog. We have completely redesigned the web site to make it easier to search, navigate and share all the great content you've come to expect from Mozilla Hacks! About:hacks feedback In each issue of about:hacks, we'd like to answer one of your questions. Please tell us what you think of this newsletter and what you'd like to see covered next time. |
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