Brennan’s Blog

I missed the release of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 last week. What's new?

• Improved SVG support (see more)
• Inline spell check for form fields (interesting)
• Client-side session and persistent storage (What does that mean?)
• Support for Javascript 1.7

SVG Support

I see a great deal of potential for SVG. It is a graphics system based on an XML format which can inline Javascript. And when you combine that with AJAX functionality you can do some amazing things. It is essentially a standardized replacement for Flash media. I cannot wait for SVG to be ready for prime time.

Inline Spell Check

This could be quite useful, but I hope it does not get in the way too much. I already find the auto-dropdown support in many form fields to be overly aggressive. I would like the browser to provide a fast and easy way to request suggestions instead of forcing them on me each time I start typing something which looks like a previous entry. I find I often have to leave the keyboard and move the mouse away a field just to reassign focus so I can take back control of what is happening within a form. I am picky about this sort of behavior, so maybe I am one of the few who actually find this recent feature a bit annoying.

Client-side session and persistent storage

Being able to go beyond the limited functionality of cookies has been the holy grail of web development for some time. Nikhil Kothari suggested an offline storage API in his Browser/Scripting Wish List. These concepts seem related. It would be extremely useful to break out of the disconnected Request/Response cycle of the HTTP protocol to reduce the redundant transfer of data, but it also adds some old baggage from the traditional application models. I do not want to see this taken too far. And however it is done, I expect the browser makers to create some cross-browser means of making this work so we do not have another few years of cross-browser hell.

Javascript 1.7

You can read up on What is New in Javascript 1.7. I am sure the standards for Javascript 1.7 have been around a few years so they have not been tainted by the rapid increase in popularity of AJAX. I find that Javscript support needs some maturity in the browsers for a while before the AJAX influences start to creep into future Javascript specifications. Keep an eye on this area. Javascript could eventually outgrow it's usefulness. I personally will stick with the sufficiently sufficient features of Javascript 1.5.

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