Firefox3.5/Messaging

Overall

Firefox 3.1 is the browser that just keeps getting better and better. Faster, more secure, etc.

End-user

Three main end-user features:

• Private browsing mode
• Awesomebar privacy options and view options
• Windows XP + Vista updates

Developers

Main features for web developers:

• Video and Audio
• Geolocation
• Worker Threads
• CSS-SVG / External resource loading
• Native JSON
• Performance improvements for JS and DOM via TraceMonkey

Page for all features: Firefox 3.1 for Developers

Beta 1

• Delivery date approx Oct 15th. Code frozen now.

• Some developer features complete, many not done yet.

• Geolocation backend questions
  • How do we set up a static backend?
  • Do we have any examples, other than this?
  • Have to describe how this is different than geode
  • https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8420 - install to have a static geolocation static source
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_geolocation
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsIGeolocationProvider
  • whatismygeolocation.com to figure out what your location is
  • http://www.meer.net/~dougt/gps_test.html
  • http://www.meer.net/~dougt/flickr.html

• @font-face
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=En/CSS/%40font-face
  • Includes live sample
  • Only from same-origin (no support for document.domain)
  • Will eventually use access controls (i.e. cross-site xhr)

• Video/Audio is OGG-only
  • will add more backends, might be in 3.1 but likely to wait until after.
  • some unimplemented features as documented.
  • http://tinyvid.tv/ as example site
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element/Video
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element/audio

• XHR Progress
  • Now implement upload progress events
  • http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/progress/Progress.html
  • Old list of events:
  • 3.0: progress, uploadprogress, load, abort, error
  • 3.1: loadstart, progress, load, abort, error (uploadprogress still there but deprecated)
  • all those events are fired on the XHR.upload property and fire for the uploading
  • Demo of new features: http://mozilla.pettay.fi/xhr_upload/xhr_upload_demo.html
  • Could do this with the old uploadprogress event, but was non-standard, gave bad data about sizes (included headers, etc) and was tricky to use for starts and stops.

• XHR cross-site access control
  • http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/
  • Missing support for some redirects, but will be fixed in beta2

• TraceMonkey testing via config
  • http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/08/tracemonkey_javascript_lightsp.html
  • Have to set the javascript.options.jit.content preferences to on.
  • Where to file bugs?

Beta 2

• New stable platform for converting add-ons

• Worker Threads standard still shifting
  • http://developer.mozilla.org/web-tech/2008/09/04/web-workers-part-1/
  • Where is the rest of the standard?
  • http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/
  • Sheppy still needs to document, trying to get info from bent + others.

• l10n: Seth says that 62 languages could be participating in Beta 2.

• Video/Audio
  • Seeking works now, including rough duration
  • Metavid, wikipedia, other partners

• TraceMonkey

• CSS/SVG

• Private Browsing mode
  • http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2008-11-04/dont-leave-trace-private-browsing-firefox

• DNS pre-fetching
  • Pat knows this

• font-face
  • Uses access control or beta2?
  • Still not done on Linux.

• XHR cross-site access control
  • Did redirects get fixed?
  • Changes in the last couple of weeks
  • Need to get a rundown
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control - this is accurate but not thorough
  • Need some links on how to do this in php/django/other