The latest Firefox 4 Beta has just been released. Here is a quick overview of the new features for web developers.
- Hardware acceleration for Windows Vista/7 (via Direct2D) has been activated. Demo and explanations are in a previous post (see screencast below).
- The Audio Data API is now available. See David’s blog post (see screencast below) and try the audio demo (better if WebGL activated).
- Firefox 3.6.9 and Firefox 4 will support
X-FRAME-OPTIONS
(a HTTP header to declare the web page as non-embeddable in an iframe). Read the details. - You can use another HTTP header,
Strict-Transport-Security
, to force your website to use HTTPS. I’ve talked about this feature before. - We now allow calling
click()
on ainput type="file"
(from a user action, like a click on another button). See the related Bugzilla ticket. - We also significantly improved our support of HTML5 WebForms: more inputs types (email, url, tel, search) new attributes (placeholder, autofocus), decoupled forms and different validation mechanisms. Details coming soon.
David’s Audio API demo:
(try the audio demo )
Myself about Hardware acceleration:
(try the hardware acceleration demo )
We need help!
Help us to improve hardware acceleration in Firefox: Install the Grafx Bot extension (read details and get the add-on ).
Firefox’s hardware acceleration interacts with a machine’s graphics hardware via DirectX or OpenGL, depending on platform. These interactions tend to be very sensitive to the graphics environment on the system (e.g., the specific video card(s) on the system, how much VRAM is available, the version of the video driver, the OS version, etc). In fact, there are so many permutations of the relevant factors that we can’t test them all internally.
Grafx Bot runs a suite of automatic tests on your machine that exercises interesting aspects of hardware acceleration (for about 5 to 20 minutes). At the end of the tests, you can send your results to Mozilla (with anonymous video configuration information), where the data will be collected and analyzed, and hopefully lead to bug fixes and more reliable code for hardware acceleration than we’d otherwise have.
We need help from the community, so we can get exposure on as many unique hardware environments as possible.
About Paul Rouget
Paul is a Firefox developer.
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