You want porn? I'll give you porn.

posted by pete on April 30th, 2009

This link is suitable for any situation or environment; however, you might find yourself aroused if you look at it:

Firefox 3.5 for Developers

Please keep in mind that this document doesn’t even bother to mention the new native JavaScript code compiler or the Webkit-rivaling CSS3 support, both game changers in their own right.

Everyone is going to have their own pet favourites, here are mine:

• HTML5 AUDIO and VIDEO tags with support for Flash-free media embedding
• local storage database API plus offline resources
• drag and drop between sites
• @font-face aka downloadable fonts
• media-dependent CSS stylesheets
• CSS transforms and new selectors
• multi-threading via DOM workers
• a geolocation API
• a native JSON object
• a trim() method (I wish I was joking)
• Object.getPrototypeOf() (extend your Array and .clone() it, too!)
• ICC colour correction (whaaa?!)
• HTML5 text support in CANVAS
• defer for SCRIPT elements

There are earth shattering things in that list, but I saved the best until last. The money shot?

• cross-domain XHR

Now, it should be said that this is a beta of a minority web browser, and that only people developing highly targeted applications will be able to use this stuff with any reliability or consistency. It could well be a decade before this stuff is the norm on the public web, and that’s a crying shame.

True cross-domain XHR and a native JSON object would finally enable the mashup culture that web developers have been championing for years. This should remind us that we can never let up the pressure on MSFT to mothball IE6 and IE7 in the name of human progress.

We’re one critical update away from shrinking our average CSS by 50%.