Firefox 3 Brings A Number of Changes to Our Online Behaviour

The new version of Firefox, Firefox 3, has a host of surprising enhancements over its predecessor and brings some innovative features to the browsers world.

New browser provides a plethora of goodies for users – better bookmark management with “places” (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places), cleaner and feature-rich toolbar, and better memory management. At the same time, the support for developers have received a significant boost due to higher support for CSS 2.1, and faster javascript execution capabilities.

If you know about Google Gears, you must have already been familiar with this new way of doing web applications. The basic objective of the whole effort is to enable web users to work on a web application smoothly be it online or offline. This requires browser to know and identify the status (as online or offline), and should be able to communicate with the server. On the other hand, there should be adequate provision at the browser-end to cache resources to use in the offline mode of browser.

There is a great improvement in the support to SVG with the new version of Firefox. Now, the you can draw texts on canvas using non-standard APIs (supported by Firefox). Moreover, APIs are available to work with micro-formats.

Firefox 3 supports animated PNG (APNG). This basically compensate the need for web designers who were using animated GIF and are moving away to PNG. The best aspect of APNG is that it is backward compatible so that an old decoder can ignore the animated portion and will display a single image.