- June 30th, 2009, 10:24 am
#264991
"I always wanted to be the hero of all squirrels; I just thought it'd never happen" - Quack
It comes out this week.
http://www.slate.com/id/2221756/
http://www.slate.com/id/2221756/
This week, Mozilla will release Firefox 3.5, a long-awaited update that includes several fantastic new features, fixes a few niggling problems, and, best of all, adds a much-needed speed boost to a browser that has been looking a bit sluggish compared to its rivals. A few weeks ago, I began using pre-release versions of the new Firefox as my default on-ramp to the Web—and I've found it hard to beat.
Though I can't call it the world's fastest browser—Chrome and Safari are just as fast—the new Firefox is no longer a lumbering beast. It launches quickly, fires up complex sites like Gmail and Google Maps without any hiccups, and runs tons of open tabs without crashing (an ever-present possibility in earlier versions).
The best thing about the new Firefox is that it gives us a peek at the Internet of tomorrow. Since 2007, the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards body that sets common technical definitions for the Web, has been working on HTML 5, an update to the coding language that defines every page you visit online. Although the consortium has yet to publish its final specifications for the new standard, many browser companies have been incorporating features of the language in their latest releases. Firefox 3.5 offers the best implementation of the standard—and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language. In other words, Firefox isn't just an upgrade for your computer; it could well prompt a re-engineering of the Web itself.
The best way to appreciate what HTML 5 can do is to install the new Firefox and run the collection of demos put together by Paul Rouget, Mozilla's European evangelist and a Web developer extraordinaire. Rouget's pages show off one particular aspect of the new language—its facility with video, which has always been a second-class citizen on the Web. Today, most of the clips you encounter online require plug-ins that you have to install alongside your browser; when you go to YouTube, for instance, your browser calls on Adobe Flash, the platform that actually knows how to play the clip.
HTML 5 will alter this process. Firefox 3.5 allows designers to add videos that require no third-party plug-ins; the clips, which can be coded in the open-standard Ogg format, are processed by the browser itself. This allows videos to become just as interactive as every other part of a page: You can rotate a video while it's playing, have a clip show up in a circular frame rather than a square one, or have a video respond to data pulled in from other parts of the Web.
In this demo, for instance, the Web page studies the people who are walking into the camera's frame; when it spots someone it recognizes, it goes off to search for that person's Twitter status, and then superimposes the text in a bubble in the video above the person's head. Sure, that demo may not sound very useful—but it's just the beginning. Web developers have a habit of integrating new capabilities in innovative ways, and over the next couple years, as more people migrate to next-generation browsers, you can expect many of your favorite pages to begin to take advantage of these technologies.
"I always wanted to be the hero of all squirrels; I just thought it'd never happen" - Quack
- By thecomeback
- By Ill flame