Firefox - internet browsers’ messiah
Firefox 3.0 was about changing our browsing experience and provide us with the most astonishing features that any browser can offer us. Major developments and improvements have been made on browsing modern and rich internet services:
- We got enhanced address bar - “awesome bar” - which intellectually offers you website you kind of want to visit
- We got advanced bookmarks handling engine - based on tags and “smart bookmarks”
- Incresed performance (I mean, noticable increased performance) and advanced interface design
With the new addition to 3.0 of major update - 3.1 we see accent on developers. We neither get fancy theme updates nor improved browsing experience (except for extended Tab Switching shortcut)
From previous post:
Looks like Firefox developing policy is to eliminate amount of Add-Ons and include the most of features by default. So happened with Ctrl+tab add-on that adds fancy way of switching the tabs. Although it’s current state pre-beta Ctrl+tab feature seems to be completely functional.
Ah, sorry, forgot to mention - Firefox 3.1 beta 1 has been released. And, as usual, developers team surprises as with their vision in browsing experience.
Developers based features
- <video>, <audio> tags support - now we can play audio and video files (in .ogg format so far) without any single plugin installed! Amazing, just as W3C has prescripted (HTML 5 new features or new specs by W3C)
- <canvas> - is now officially supported by Mozilla’s product, we can draw in browser without any Java implementation
- Firefox is making first steps to implement Google-gears like feature that allows browse through web pages while being offline
So, how the video and audio tags look like?
You can embed your video as simple as inserting <video> tag in your source file and defining which file to play.
I’ve got a few crashes using both <video> and <audio> tags, but it’s still early beta and crashes are part of developing and browsing process.
So it’s great to see Firefox team thinking about future trends and new specifications, as for now it seems that it’s the first development team that officially supports new HTML 5 features.
Interface improvements
As has been mentioned before, we got a renewed Ctrl+tab switched, which is almost Vista native look alike.
One more announced feature is that we can move tab from one Firefox window to another!
This feature was implemented soon after Google announced it’s browser Chrome, which allowed to move tabs freely - move aside from main browser’s window (as a completely separate window) and move from one window to another. But in Firefox you cannot create a separate window from a tab.
And again, crucial condition - you still cannot use your favourite add-ons and themes with your beta, you have to wait until add-on’s developers release updated version - the only reason that stops me from using new beta, which is as usual very good development product from Mozilla team.
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