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Firefox 16 Released: More HTML5 Support
Today Mozilla released the final version of Firefox 16, which includes a number of new tools for developers. "A number of HTML5 code has been 'unprefixed,' which means that Mozilla has decided it has matured enough to run in the browser without causing instability. The newly unshackled HTML5 includes CSS3 Animations, Transforms, Transitions, Image Values, Values and Units, and IndexedDB. Two Web APIs that Mozilla helped to create, Battery API and Vibration API, are also now unprefixed. These changes help keep Firefox competitive, but it also sends a signal to developers that Mozilla thinks these are good enough to begin baking into their sites. It's a strong endorsement of the 'future-Web' tech." Here's the complete change list and the download page.
What information does the CNET article contribute on this matter, exactly? Why not at least link to Google News? Why contribute to the Web becoming a pile of ads and sharing buttons? Why, Slashdot, why?
They're calling it quits? Or did you mean the "latest" version of Firefox?
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
Cue the whine brigade complaining that firefox is "Bloated". These are the same people that complain that firefox is behind the curve for not adding new features all the time.
Whatever your complaints, I still find myself coming back to firefox because of the addons. Chrome is getting better and many of the most popular ones are there - But it's still not there. Some addons have reduced functionality because of the more restrictive API, or they're not well developed enough yet for Chrome. The more obscure, but damn useful ones are pretty much firefox only.
I think there's something wrong with this version of Firefox. I just updated, and not a single one of my plugins was disabled because of incompatibility!
Maybe someone should make a "Firefox Nostalgia" plugin. It detects when firefox is updated, and generates a random "The following plugins have been disabled..." alert window.
"A number of HTML5 code has been 'unprefixed,' which means that Mozilla has decided it has matured enough to run in the browser without causing instability." - come on, how dumb is that? If there were a vendor-sanctioned CSS attribute or "HTML5 code" (or whatever, really) that was known to cause "instability" in one of the world's most widely-deployed and -used applications, trolls and/or crackers would make ABUNDANT use of that inherent weakness, prefixed or not.
Now, I don't know for sure how HTML5 "standardization" (if you can stomach calling it that...) actually works, but what I happen to have picked up is this: In reality, that kind of "prefixing" (extending the name of a soon-to-be-"standardized" identifier with a vendor-specific keyword) takes place because the vendor probably still works out implementation details, or isn't 100% sure if he wants to really do whatever the feature/thing is doing right now the way it is doing right now forever. It's some kind of "this is just a draft"-hint, like, for example, "X-"-prefixed HTTP and SMTP header data (used to be - they're abused for other, this-aint-in-the-official-standard-but-we-need-it-anyway-things today, of course). If using any of this causes the browser that implements it to crash or be otherwise unstable (and therefore potentially exploitable), that's a _grave_ bug, and certainly not something that any of the industry heavyweights (well, except for Apple and Microsoft maybe... hehe) would tolerate to occur in the wild for more than a few hours, until an appropriate patch is released.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
The command line feature looks very cool. It'd be even better if that could be controlled from outside Firefox, basically making Firefox scriptable -- for automated Firefox testing, Website testing, taking screenshots, etc.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I know WebSQL got scrubbed from the HTML5 spec a couple years ago, but during that time it got adopted in a usable way by webkit and opera. In the spec or not it's become the defacto standard for anyone doing HTML5 development for mobile devices, especially for use in off-line apps. Not only that, but at this point it's proven and reliable. I have a feeling it's going to be like H.264 vs WebM. The technical gurus will support one over the other due to ideological reasons, meanwhile the rest of us who are being paid to write things that work will continue going on using what works for us and our clients.
Right now WebSQL is supported on basically 99% of the mobile devices we see in our clients' hands. That includes iOS, Android, Blackberry, hell even Kindle and Nook. On the desktop it works on Safari, Chrome, and hell even FireFox with an extension.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It seems that they're working on it, just extremely slowly. If you open all of the bugs that those two depend on, these are the deepest roots. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742081 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784591 The latter was being worked with on Sunday, while the former is lagging with activity, last commented on 3 months ago. You should probably expect it to be fixed in about three years.
The vibration API could be useful for making web apps with notifications, I have no idea why a website or web app would need access to battery information. Since we already have location API's camera, video, and microphone API's, and WebGL (although most mobile browsers don't yet support it) webapps will soon be first class citizens thus breaking the walled garden (at least for online content, offline use is still a bit rough).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think it is time for Slashdot to limit all these Firefox "major" release articles. Because the team just be decided to be stupid with their number scheme, it doesn't mean every new number is really newsworthy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seriously. How hard is it to make or or work?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
webapps will soon be first class citizens thus breaking the walled garden
Apple has all but killed their initial commitment to web apps. They have one of the weakest mobile browsers on the market now. Worse, it inexplicably refuses to support things like WebGL (excepting in iAds, of course!)
It's a real shame.
I'd love to see a standard package type for web apps (something like a zip file with resources and a config file) with support across the mobile landscape. It would be great for both developers and users. I can see RIM, MS, and Google on-board, but it's unlikely that we'd see Apple join the party.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Apparently it's a low priority. Chrome's date, for example, is awful. Why can't a select a year independent of a month?! To get to 2008, I need to keep selecting the first item in the drop-down and open the drop-down again to get older month/date pairs -- over and over and over -- until it finally appears.
Color isn't all that great either, now that I'm thinking about it, just an ugly button with a colored rectangle.
I could style them, but there aren't exactly a ton of options there. Even if you could make dramatic changes to the appearance, does the default have to look like a half-finished VB project from 1994?
Others like time and datetime just don't work at all. These are the kind of things I would have expected to see supported by now in all major browsers.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I think of it as version 4.16, and everything makes sense again.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Chrome's built in flash player uses 80% cpu on a quadcore where as IE and Firefox use 30% via adobe's on plugin.
I welcome Firefox 16. I'm sorry I ever left you.
On the upside, pages with background colors will no longer flash white like they do in chrome. YAY.
Chrome is bad.
Followed by Firefox 64, which won't be quite as powerful as you hope :)
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun