Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox 4 Beta 1 Shines On HTML5

Posted by timothy on from the acknowledge-over-repeat dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Firefox 4 Beta 1 and sees several noteworthy HTML5 integrations that bring Firefox 4 'that much closer to taking over everything on the desktop.' Beyond the Chrome-like UI, Firefox 4 adds several new features that 'open up new opportunities for AJAX and JavaScript programmers to add more razzle-dazzle and catch up with Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and other plug-ins,' Wayner writes. 'Firefox 4 also adds an implementation of the Websockets API, a tool for enabling the browser and the server to pass data back and forth as needed, making it unnecessary for the browser to keep asking the server if there's anything new to report.'"

3 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Firefox 4 didn't catch up in canvas speed by dionyziz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interestingly, Firefox compares poorly to other browsers when it comes to heavy rendering in "canvas". Here's a demo I made that allows measuring the speed of rendering in FPS (frames per second).

    http://dionyziz.kamibu.com/3d/heli/

    Chrome 6: 31 FPS
    Opera 10.60: 46 FPS
    Safari 5.0: 25 FPS; visually poor results
    Internet Explorer 9: 19 FPS
    Firefox 4.0 Beta 1: 19 FPS

  2. Re:Its too bad the UI got messed up by Kaboom13 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.

    Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.

  3. Re:Acid test still not 100/100? by BZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Those remaining 3 points are SVG Fonts.

    Opera and Webkit implemented (very brokenly, in at least Opera's case) a small subset of SVG 1.1 Fonts; basicallu just enough to pass Acid 3. We don't particular want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3). On the other hand, support for the full specification in a UA that also supports HTML is ... very difficult. SVG fonts are just not designed with integration with HTML in mind. Once you put an in a glyph, all sorts of issues arise (both in terms of the spec being underdefined and in terms of the behavior being very difficult to implement no matter what the spec said).

    One of the previous commenters here linked to Robert O'Callahan's post about this, which covers the issues pretty well.

    At this point, the SVG working group has decided that SVG Fonts will no longer be a core part of SVG but will be a separate specification, and that it might need some serious work if anyone is ever to implement it in full.