{"id":10356,"date":"2009-11-06T20:45:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T18:45:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-11-06T20:45:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-06T18:45:00","slug":"firefox-beta-ups-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/10356-firefox-beta-ups-challenge.html","title":{"rendered":"Firefox beta ups challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years Firefox was without a doubt the most innovative browser available to PC users. But over the past year or so new releases of Firefox have proved to be less than exciting. But now, with the release of Firefox 3.6 the developers are keen to prove they are still cutting edge.<\/p>\n

Although the release of Firefox 3.6 was more than a month later than originally planned the release product makes it worth the wait. Many of the features that were originally expected to be released in the 3.5 version of Firefox have now been included in version 3.6. We look at some of the key features added to Firefox 3.6.<\/p>\n

Personas<\/p>\n

Personas are graphical images – themes – that can be added to Firefox to customise the appearance of the browser. To date personas have been available to users as an add-on. With Firefox 3.6 Personas are built-in and users can choose from a wide range of Personas from https:\/\/addons.mozilla.org\/en-US\/firefox\/personas\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Speedup<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mozilla is constantly working on bettering its Javascript performance and now with Google pumping out ever faster versions of its Chrome browser, Firefox is working extra hard. In addition Firefox has also been working on faster startup and shutdown of Firefox, something that is much needed.<\/p>\n

Geolocation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Firefox 3.5 introduced the first attempts at adding geolocation support into the browser. This meant that web developers could use standard tools for determining where a user was physically – if they allow it. In Firefox 3.6 geolocation has been improved to return not only an estimated longitude and latitude for a user but also an estimated physical address. Initial testing of this proves to be remarkably accurate.<\/p>\n

Orientation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Accelerometers built into laptops and mobile phones are no longer new. But now Firefox has the ability to use these accelerometers to work out which way a PC is facing. Using this ability developers will be able to create mapping applications, for example, that are more location aware than ever.<\/p>\n

Full screen video<\/strong><\/p>\n

The HTML5 “video” tag first introduced in Firefox 3.5, now has new capabilities in Firefox 3.6. One of these is full-screen video viewing. In previous versions of Firefox users could use an add-on to view native videos in full screen mode. With Firefox 3.6 users can simply right-click on a video to view it in full screen mode. The advantage with using the HTML5 video tag is that it embeds the video natively in the page.<\/p>\n

Web Open Font Format<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other big change in Firefox 3.6 is the new support for WOFF, or Web Open Font Format. Web Open Font Format is an open standard for including fonts in web pages. Previously a limited set of fonts could be called on in designing web pages. The WOFF standard makes it easier to expand this range of fonts. The WOFF format is compressed and no quality is lost in including fonts in a web page. Although most browsers don’t yet include support for WOFF, with Firefox leading the way it is likely that most will over the coming months. The result will be an expanded range of options for web developers looking to create more attractive web pages.<\/p>\n

Tab previews<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the new features included in Firefox 3.6 but not enabled by default are tab previews. When enabled tab previews adds an extra button to the tab bar. Clicking on this brings up mini previews of each of the tabs open at the time. Tab previews is a great visual way of quickly switching between pages. To enable the previews users need to enable both of the previews options in the about:config advanced settings box.<\/p>\n

Firefox 3.6 discussion<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The makers of the Firefox browser are keen to show they can still be cutting edge with the beta release of version 3.6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}