Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Firefox 1.5 Released

Firefox 1.5 final release is out. Unfortunately, the “search in textareas” bug is still not fixed. It has been introduced around the 1.0 release – including a Bugzilla entry – and it’s still there, and it’s still incredibly annoying (in particular for bloggers and wiki users). Luckily though, the missing image tool-tips introduced in the last Firefox final (where neither alt-text nor title-attribute would work) have been fixed now.

The most dramatic new feature in this release is native support for SVG. While in the works for quite a while now the feature was never available as default setting before. SVG – short for Scalable Vector Graphics, a sort of “standards” Flash – indeed needs some revitalization. In Internet Explorer, you needed to download an Adobe plug-in so far. Maybe native Firefox support will help SVG spread?

A quick try with a very old SVG I created shows the vector graphics render fine, but the JavaScript renders in completely different ways. Check this file in Internet Explorer along with ASV (the Adobe SVG Viewer) to see how it was intended back then. Note that Firefox is also a little more picky than IE/ASV about accepting correct content types only. And it’s not that I think cross-browser SVG development will be impossible – quite the oppositve, I’m almost sure it will be possible – it’s only that a quick test shows that it won’t come for free, and it won’t just work without additional debugging.

[Thanks Cal.]

Firefox 1.5 Released by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)

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