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This is a re-post from Rob Cambell’s personal weblog. Firebug 1.5 is the first release that will work with the upcoming Firefox 3.6 and also also works with Firefox 3.5. It’s currently in beta and will be available before the release of Firefox 3.6.

As of this minute, Firebug 1.5 is sitting comfortably in its third beta and available for download. This version is shaping up to be our best release yet and initial reports have been very positive regarding its stability, UI improvements and new features. So let’s take a look at some of the new features.

Improved Net Panel accuracy

One of the problems with Firebug’s Net panel in the past has been inaccurate timings. Because Firebug is entirely written in JavaScript some network and UI activity could block Firebug during long operations and cause the timings displayed there to be less than accurate. This has finally been corrected with the landing of a new service called the http-activity-distributor. For more details on the implementation and use of the newly-improved Net panel, see Honza’s blog post on the topic.

New Break Functionality

In Firebug 1.4, we introduced the concept of “break-on-next” to the Script panel. This was a “pause” button sitting between the inspect icon and the Console tab. In 1.5, we’ve extended this concept to the Console, HTML and Net panels to allow more exciting types of breaks.

In the Console, we’ve replaced the mini-menu Break-on-Errors option with the pause button. The reasons for this possibly contentious change was it made for a more consistent use of menus and the break button. Now, to enable Break on Errors, select the Console panel and hit the pause button. You’ll see that familiar glow to indicate that it’s waiting for an error. Now whenever an error occurs on the page, you’ll be dropped into the script panel at the line where the error occurred.

The HTML panel’s break button is a little different. This is the Break-on-Mutation feature. When this is enabled, whenever a bit of JavaScript modifies an HTML element, you’ll be taken to the Script panel and the modifying code while be highlighted. Related to this, you should be able to see modified HTML occurring in real-time in the HTML panel with affected elements and attributes being highlighted as they change in the page.

Finally in the Net panel, the break button acts as a Break-on-XHR button. This is intended to help debug AJAX apps by allowing you to halt the debugger during an XmlHttpRequest send. As in the other break types, you’ll be transported to the script panel when an XHR object fires off its request and you’ll be given the option to copy the message.

John Barton and Honza have written a great interactive demo page describing these new features on getfirebug.com.

Mixed Development

• We made a few tweaks to the UI in this version. We replaced the “Off” label with a single “power” button (or window close button on Mac) as promised during the last release.
• Kevin Decker added the search panel originally intended for version 1.4 with some nice options.
• Persist option on Console and Net Panel. Save your data!
• Improvements to the Inspector.
• Still more to come. Between now and final release we plan on hunting down a few more bugs to make this even more stable. Feel free to download and give it a try.

Firefox 3.6b1 is now available for download. As usual, this is a beta release so the usual warnings about eating your data and burning your house down apply.

If you download and run this beta you will get updates as we make them available – once every 1-2 weeks or so. To keep up with things as they land in the betas, please follow us on the @mozhacks twitter account.

Many add-ons have not been updated for 3.6. To help us test if add-ons are compatible consider installing the Add-on compatibility reporter. It will let you run add-ons that are listed as incompatible and gives you the chance to report if add-ons appear to be working OK. This is our first attempt at crowdsourcing compatibility and if you’re feeling adventurous you should try it out.

Here’s what’s new and notable in 3.6 Beta vs. Firefox 3.5 that might be of interest to web developers:

• We now support file-based Drag and Drop so you can Drag and Drop files from your desktop in the browser. Mixed with the File API (mentioned below) this can make for a very powerful set of features for people building photo and video uploaders or anything else that wants to import data.
• @font-face now supports the WOFF format.
• We support multiple background images for background-image.
• You can now specify the background size via -moz-background-size
• We now specify a very powerful pointer-events property that lets you control whether a particular element can receive events.
• You can now specify an algorithm to render images via the image-rendering CSS property.
• Poster images now work for video elements.
• Support for a new geolocation feature that will return an approximate address for your location.
• Support for orientation events.
• …and a lot of other great stuff. For the full list, have a look at the Firefox 3.6 for developers page which has everything on it.

Here’s the list of things that we will support by 3.6 final, but aren’t in this beta:

• Support for CSS gradients is in this beta, but we’re changing it due to negative feedback on the current syntax.
• We will support the <input type=”file” multiple> so you can upload more than one file from the same file upload control.
• We have support in 3.6 for a new version of the File API draft spec but that spec is out of date and our docs aren’t complete. There’s an IDL entry for the FileRequest object, but it’s likely to be renamed to FileReader based on feedback. We’ll try to keep people updated as we release updated betas.

This demo is from our good friend Ryan Seddon who came up with a demo that seems deeply appropriate for this week, given our focus on the future of fonts on the web.

If you’ve ever been editing a page and wanted to know what a particular font looked like without having to upload files to a web server and update CSS (so tedious, that!) then this demo is for you.

He’s come up with a demo that shows what’s possible when you’ve got downloadable fonts, drag and drop and editable content. (If you want to know more about drag and drop we suggest you read his excellent overview of using drag and drop to do file uploading.)

From Ryan’s description:

Font dragr is an experimental web app that uses HTML5 & CSS3 to create a useful standalone web based application for testing custom fonts, once you visit it for the first time you don’t need to be online to use it after the initial visit. It allows you, in Firefox 3.6+, to drag and drop font files from your file system into the drop area. The browser will then create a data URL encoded copy to use in the page and render the content in the dropped font.

You can either read the full description, which contains a lot of useful technical information about how the demo works, or you can view the demo below. Either way, it’s nice to see the excellent HTML5 support in Firefox 3.6 coming together with everything else we’ve added to bring a lot of new capabilities to web developers and users.

Thanks, Ryan!

This article was written by John Daggett. John is a Mozilla contributor and has been working hard with font creators and web developers to improve the state of fonts on the web. This article is a high-level overview of whats different and shows some examples of WOFF in use. A full list of other supporting organizations can be found at the official Mozilla Blog.

In Firefox 3.5 we included support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts. In Firefox 3.6 we’re including support for a new font format – the Web Open Font Format, or WOFF. This format has two main advantages over raw TrueType or OpenType fonts.

1. It is compressed, which means that you will typically see much smaller download sizes compared with raw TrueType or OpenType fonts.
2. It contains information that allows you to see where the font came from – without DRM or labeling for a specific domain – which means it has support from a large number of font creators and font foundries.

The WOFF format originated from a collabaration between the font designers Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming with help from Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew. Each had proposed their own format and WOFF represents a melding of these different proposals. The format itself is intended to be a simple repackaging of OpenType or TrueType font data, it doesn’t introduce any new behavior, alter the @font-face linking mechanism or affect the way fonts are rendered. Many font vendors have expressed support for this new format so the hope is this will open up a wider range of font options for web designers.

Details on Differences between TrueType, OpenType and WOFF

First, compression is part of the WOFF format so web authors can optimize the size of fonts used on their pages. The compression format is lossless, the uncompressed font data will match that of the original OpenType or TrueType font, so the way the font renders will be the same as the original. Similar compression can be achieved using general HTTP compression but because compression is part of the WOFF format, it’s simpler for authors to use, especially in situations where access to server configuration is not possible.

Second, the format includes optional metadata so that a font vendor can tag their fonts with information related to font usage. This metadata doesn’t affect how fonts are loaded but tools can use this information to identify the source of a given font, so that those interested in the design of a given page can track down the fonts used on that page. Fonts in WOFF format are compressed but are not encrypted, the format should not be viewed as a “secure” format by those looking for a mechanism to strictly regulate and control font use.

Note: until Firefox 3.6 ships, users can test the use of WOFF fonts with Firefox nightly builds.

Examples

Below is a simple example that shows how to construct an @font-face rule that links to a WOFF font. To support browsers that only support direct linking to OpenType and TrueType fonts, the ’src’ descriptor lists the WOFF font first along with a format hint (”woff”), followed by the TrueType version:

/* Gentium (SIL International) */
 
@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.woff) format("woff"),
       url(fonts/GenR102.ttf) format("truetype");
}
 
body {
  font-family: GentiumTest, Times, Times New Roman, serif;
}

Structured this way, browsers that support the WOFF format will download the WOFF file. Other browsers that support @font-face but don’t yet support the WOFF format will use the TrueType version. (Note: IE support is a bit trickier, as discussed below).　As WOFF is adopted more widely the need to include links to multiple font formats will diminish.

Other examples below demostrate the use of WOFF formatted fonts but each example has been constructed so that it will work in any browser that supports @font-face, including Internet Explorer.

A font family with multiple faces

Using a Postscript CFF font

African Language Display

Below is an example of how downloadable fonts can be used to render languages for which font support is usually lacking. The example shows the UN Declaration of Human Rights, translated into two African languages, and how these render with default browser fonts vs. with a downloadable font suited for rendering these languages.

Note that in one of these examples that the font size goes from a 3.1MB TTF to a 1MB WOFF font and in the other from a 172KB TTF to an 80KB WOFF file.

Another Postscript CFF font

An example in Japanese

Working With Other Browsers

Firefox 3.6 will be the first shipping browser to support the WOFF format so it’s important to construct @font-face rules that work with browsers lacking WOFF support. One thing that helps greatly with this is the use of format hints to indicate the format of font data before it’s downloaded; browsers that don’t recognize a given format simply skip data in a format they don’t support.

Internet Explorer, including IE8, only supports the EOT font format and only implements a subset of the @font-face rule descriptors. This makes creating cross-platform @font-face rules that work with IE especially tricky. One solution is to make different rules for IE:

@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.eot);  /* for IE */
}
 
@font-face {
  font-family: GentiumTest;
  /* Works only in WOFF-enabled browsers */
  src: url(fonts/GenR102.woff) format("woff"); 
}

One minor downside of this is that IE doesn’t understand format hints and doesn’t parse @font-face URL’s correctly, it treats format hints as part of the URL, so web authors using the @font-face rules above will see the following in their access logs:

GET /fonts/GenR102.eot HTTP/1.1" 200 303536
GET /fonts/GenR102.woff)%20format(%22woff%22) HTTP/1.1" 404 335

IE successfully pulls down and uses the EOT version of the font but also tries to pull down the WOFF font with the format hint included in the URL. This fails and doesn’t affecting page rendering but it wastes valuable server resources. For more discussion, see Paul Irish’s blog post for one interesting workaround.

Another problem is that IE currently tries to download all fonts on the page, whether they are used or not. That makes site-wide stylesheets containing all fonts used on site pages difficult, since IE will always try to download all fonts defined in @font-face rules, wasting lots of server bandwidth.

Further Resources

Documentation

Latest draft WOFF specification
Original blog post on using @font-face
CSS3 Fonts working draft
MDC @font-face documentation

Tools

Jonathan Kew’s sample encoding/decoding code
woffTools – tools for examining and validating WOFF files
FontTools/TTX – Python library and tool for manipulating font data
Web-based font subsetting tool

General @font-face Examples

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing
Example layout using Graublau Sans
Examples of Interesting Web Typography
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Font Resources

Font Squirrel
10 Great Free Fonts for @font-face
40 Excellent Free Fonts by Smashing Magazine

One new feature that we’re including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for web pages to access machine orientation information if it’s available. As you can see from the demo above you can use it to figure out if the machine is moving and what direction it’s facing.

Using the API is very simple. All you have to do is add a simple event listener:

window.addEventListener("MozOrientation", function(e) {
                        /* 3 values: e.x, e.y, e.z */
                        }, true);

Originally built as something that we would include for our upcoming mobile browser release, we’ve made it available on desktop systems as well. Many modern Macbooks and Thinkpads contain devices and drivers that expose this information. We’ve added support for Linux, Macs and some Thinkpads where drivers and devices are available. (Note, on some Macbooks detect the orientation information backwards – we’re working on that.)

You can find more information on two posts by Doug Turner and an update on documentation for orientation from Eric Shepherd.

Paul Rouget has this and some other demos up in one of his posts.