What is new in Firefox Shiretoko Alpha 2?

By Davey Winder
Saturday, 06 September 2008 18:45

Open Source

You wait ages, well minutes, for a new open source web browser client then a bunch all come along at once. So what's new in Firefox Shiretoko Alpha 2 then?

It doesn't seem that long ago that Firefox 3.0 was thrust upon a waiting world, mainly because it was only back in June I would imagine.

Firefox 3.0.1 soon followed, and as I reported earlier not to the wild applause of all its users.

Now Mozilla has officially announced Firefox Shiretoko Alpha 2, or the developer milestone testing release of Firefox 3.1 if you prefer. The big question being what is new?

The relatively small answer could easily have been nothing that exciting really, were it not for one thing: HTML 5 video support.

In and of itself, the whole video thing is probably the most hyped and certainly the most highly-anticipated features of the forthcoming HTML 5 specification. Not least because it allows for far more compelling video manipulation than Flash can at the moment.

In particular such things as the ability to manipulate the video playback using JavaScript and gain direct access via the Document Object Model to video elements are likely to appeal to web developers.

The release of Google Chrome with its super-speedy rendering V8 JavaScript engine means that any new version of Firefox will go under the microscope as far as JavaScript handling is concerned.

Firefox Shiretoko Alpha 2 does not disappoint in that it allows intensive JavaScript to run in the background, preventing UI hang, courtesy of its Web Worker Threads support.

Sadly, the much hyped TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is not included in this alpha release as it remains under development. Still.

Otherwise it is all little nudges forward:

You can now drag and drop tabs between browser windows

Ability to make use of Aero "Glass" in XUL

Support for CSS 2.1 properties: ::before and ::after, and white-space:pre-line

Support for CSS 3 properties: -moz-border-image, word-wrap: break-word, text-shadow, box-shadow and column-rule

Performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support

Firefox Shiretoko Alpha 2 can be downloaded here.