While Port80 Software develops server-side tools dominantly, we pay a lot of attention to client-side happenings, particularly the release of new browsers. Yesterday, FireFox 2.0 Beta 1 -- code name “Bon Echo” -- came out, and it was interesting:
http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2006/07/12/firefox-2-beta-1-milestone-released/
Honestly, we didn't see lots of things to make us go “Wow” with this new browser. Sure, it has some new UI features for security and usability, but we get excited about new features to build upon. Yet, despite the media indicating there was zero of interest to developer/network types, we did see a few things:
- The w3compiler team noted that there is some new JavaScript goodness debuting in FireFox 2.0 (and yes, compiler 2.0 will be released this year, fans -- sorry for the delays...):
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.7
There’s a “Wow”: we can act just like Lisp programmers with let statements and do more OOP style programming in JS.
- Microsummaries were kind of interesting to us:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries
- In the end, we were most interested in the efforts made to work on client-side sessioning and offline storage:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#scs-client-side
Combine that with Ajax, and we are getting towards a serious “Web-browser-as-software-development” platform. However, it is likely there is some fun thinking about security as well.
The schedule (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Schedule) suggests a Q3/Q4 release but you never know if it will happen. However, the planning guides also suggested JPEG 2000 was going to be in this release, but we don't see any mention there. Meanwhile, it's 2006, and we still don't have our new support JPEG format for faster and better Web images... better call it JPEG 2010 at this rate. Well, I guess we could complain about PNG even, but at least IE is going to get that straight now in IE7 -- so maybe just maybe we can save some image bandwidth some time soon.
Cheers,
Port80ians sweltering in the balmy July weather