Firefox 3.5 and the Evolution of the Browser Toward HTML5

Firefox 3.5 introduces a wealth of new features which represent a huge step forward for developers and the introduction of important HTML5 functionality in the #2 browser.

Here are some highlights:

1. Implemention of the W3C standard Geolocation API.
2. HTML5 audio and video tags.
3. Downloadable fonts support.
4. Improved CSS support, including text-shadow and moving to the standard opacity property.
5. Native support for JSON.
6. Implementation of the localStorage and "workers" concepts from Google Gears.
7. Improvements to canvas support.
8. Rendering improvements and a faster JavaScript engine.
9. Private browsing.

There's much more to explore in Firefox 3.5 for developers, most of which are truly relevant. If you are developing for the web today, these are features that you will likely be using within the next year.

Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate 1)

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is here.

At the time of this posting, I was still getting Beta 4 as the download. Here are the RC1 download links:

• Firefox 3.5 RC1 Mac
• Firefox 3.5 RC1 Windows
• Firefox 3.5 RC1 Linux

I've been trying to run various iterations of 3.5 for some time with mixed results. The last iteration, Firefox 3.5 Preview, had issues with my places database and filled my hard drive with endless attempts to recover that file.

I'm really looking forward to having pulloff tabs, navigable source code and better javascript performance (erm, all the Google Chrome features that I love with all the Firefox plugins that I depend on to make my development life easier).

UPDATE: I looks like the issue that I was having with places.sqlite corruption in Beta 4 has been fixed. Big sigh of relief.

Google FINALLY releases Chrome Mac Beta

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/beta/

Seems that they've moved the tabs to the bottoom of the browser window to throw off the Safari UI team. Drawing from Safari's extraodinary tab innovation, they made it so only a 3 pixel by 3 pixel square in the top left corner is active for dragging tabs around. For the coup de grâce, completely eschewing process isolation, if a tab's process dies Mac Chrome now Sad Macs the OS.

Update 2009-06-10: Mac Chrome is now available (fo' realz) and even in its early form is quite usable. http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac

2008 Election Results from Google

Can Haz ColorZilla?

Yes you can!

I have been waiting for the excellent ColorZilla extension for Firefox to update for quite some time now and was bummed that even though Firefox 3 had gone final that it still hadn't been released. After some digging today I found out why. The ColorZilla extension was rev'ed and the FF3 compatible version is ColorZilla 2.0.

Download it here:
ColorZilla 2.0

More from the developer:
Alex Sirota

Firefox 3 RC2 now out

The latest release candidate has shipped. The URL for the download is the same as before:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

More info:
Firefox 3 (Release Candidate 2) Release Notes
Mozilla Wiki - Releases/Firefox 3.0rc2

State Of Ajax from Google I/O

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[I'm cross-posting this from my Tumble Log because I think it's such a great presentation.]

Slide 146 is Epic: “Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet Explorer.”