an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Firefox 3 is coming out tomorrow, the 17th – don't forget to download it! – and here's what I'm looking forward to the most:

1. THE Icon

   It's been announced that no other than the original creator for the beloved Firefox icon, Jon Hicks, has been working on a new one! I love his work so much, that I can only expect great things for this new version.

   
   

   UPDATE: Ops! According to this thread on Google Group mozilla.dev.apps.firefox, they dropped the logo for this release! As if postponing revealing µformats wasn't enough droppin'... :(

   
   

2. Extensions Add-ons

   With both a Microformats API, created by none other than Michael Kaply–from Operator's fame–and also SQLite available to extension developers, I'm hoping this version takes Firefox extensions and Microformats to the next level. If you're developing a toolbar for your service, it will be a piece of cake to grab µformats data from webpages and import them directly to your service. After writing a user-script for Operator, I'm certainly curious. If you're into Add-on developing, here's a tutorial on developing Add-ons for Firefox 3 using the Microformats API.

3. Anti-aliased border-radius and other CSS goodness

   You'll still have to use the Mozilla-specific property -moz-border-radius but at least the result will be far better looking than previous versions (2.x). Check the screenshot.

   
   
   And believe me, it makes a difference!

   
   You can check the rest of the CSS improvements by going through the list, but I, for one, am specially salivating for RGBA and inline-block. Too bad we-know-whom will take forever to catch-up.

4. Offline stuff

   Events and storage! What more can I say? I'm definitely going to check it out. With IE8 pointing towards the same, offline webapps will become hotter and hotter.

5. Reviving mailto links

   The ability to choose Web applications to handle special protocols, is going to greatly improve the experience of using webapps as a whole. Composing new mail messages by simply clicking on mailto: links, adding events to online calendars or contacts to online address books. It was a missing piece of the puzzle of online productivity tools. Me like-y.

Everything else...

It's not like the rest doesn't matter... The address bar, the phishing explicit warnings, the download manager, the add-on downloader straight from the browser chrome, quick bookmarking, native theme for MacOS, Vista and Linux... All awesome stuff! But if I had to pick out 5 items, those would be them.

I'm ready. Ship it!
Oh! And have yourself a merry Download Day!

If you want more, make sure you read the Field Guide!