Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1

The next version of Firefox is already available as Alpha, and contains some interesting changes for web developers. The download is being made available for “testing purposes only” and contains some CSS3 support, like overflow-x and overflow-y properties, multi-columns (I couldn’t get this to work), more cursor styles, or the :only-child pseudo-class. Rounded corners will be possible as well.

Also, according to the release notes, DHTML now performs faster than before (in my experience, Internet Explorer is many times quicker than Firefox in handling DHTML). I could verfiy this using the HypnoMovement DHTML site which in Deer Park runs much faster than Firefox 1.0. It even seems faster than Internet Explorer, but just not as smooth – it looks like frames of the animation are skipped.

Last not least this Firefox Alpha ships with SVG* (Scalable Vector Graphics) and Canvas support. Support for XForms is available as an extension.

What still has not been fixed and remains a major bug for now is you cannot search through textareas. This is especially annoying for wiki and blog users, and it’s sad to see the Firefox team hasn’t reacted to this particular bug report yet (it had already been filed before the final 1.0 release).

*If Internet Explorer still ships with VML, IE’s proprietary vector markup language, there may be the possibility of creating a cross-browser vector graphics wrapper which outputs either SVG (for Firefox) or VML (for IE).

[Via Slashdot.]

Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1 by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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