Mozilla Firefox 3.6

The Firefox team is focusing on startup performance, JavaScript performance, lightweight themes, and a few new features for developers. Firefox 3.6 is expected to arrive Nov 2009.

After that, Firefox 3.7 will boast a revamped user interface, a WebGL implementation and ongoing speed and responsiveness improvements.

Safari 5?

Safari 4 was just released, and we have not heard any official statement from Apple what features Safari 5 will include, but looking at WebKit we can see what core browser technologies are being developed. WebKit has added geolocation support, HTML 5 draggable, and HTML 5 forms patterns and required attributes. What directly user visible changes will Apple make? We will have to wait and see.

Internet Explorer 9?

The next version of IE is still quite a ways out (3 years if you look at the release time-frame of IE 7 and 8 ) but it’s expected to boast many new HTML 5 features including native video and audio playback. Internet Explorer 9 should be quite a feature packed release with HTML 5 goodness, better performance, and improved standards support.

Opera 10.10

Opera 10 was just released this month but the team is working on Opera 10.10 with Unite. So far we’re waiting to hear more from the Opera team about what they are working on.

Google Chrome 4

With Google Chrome 3 being released, the Chrome team and external developers are hard at work making the browser cross platform with support for OS X and Linux. User end features include bookmark synchronization, extensions and surly will include more JavaScript performance enhancements.

Metatunnel by FRequency - WebGL Demo

Overall the competition looks quite healthy and browsers are being enhanced to be the Operating System of the future.

What key enhancements has Google added for developers? Well Chrome adds support for new features in WebKit:

• JSON.parse for securely parsing json data
• HTML 5 hashchange event
• Canvas support for the HTML 5 canvas text APIs
• -webkit-border-image CSS3 attribute
• HTML 5 channel messaging
• HTML 5 Input element types for Text Fields (tel, url, email, and number)
• HTML 5 Forms pattern and required attributes
• HTML 5 draggable element implementing the current spec
• JavaScript getBoundingClientRect and getClientRects to find the position of an element
• HTML 5 Video tag with support for Theora and H.264 video codecs
• HTML 5 Web workers

For users, Chrome add support for custom themes, similar to Firefox’s personas but is more complete by changing the look of the toolbar and the browser pages (new tab page, etc.). See the Google Chrome blog for more info.

Download Google Chrome beta.

Estimated Release Date: 2009?

New WebKit features:

• Geolocation API including suspend/resume. This has been in the iPhone browser since last year
• HTML 5 draggable element implementing the current spec
• HTML 5 Forms pattern and required attributes

On top of expected HTML, CSS, and JavaScript improvements, Apple will surly tweak the web browser again to build the most usable web browser. It could be a long time before we see Safari 5, or they may release an incremental Safari 4.1. Further details will come as now we can only speculate.

Estimated Release Date: June 2011

Update: Apple has indeed released Safari 5 with a tun of new HTML5 features and performance improvements, and a year ahead of my estimate; check it out at the Safari What’s New page.

Customizable Speed Dial in Opera 10

The vastly improved web standards in the Presto 2.2 rendering engine include:

• CSS3 web fonts with the @font-face attribute. Demo
• Transparency with RGBA and HSLA:  hsla(240, 100%, 50%, 0.5);
• The Query Selectors API that is standard in Firefox, IE, and Safari: document.querySelectorAll(".alert");
• Web fonts in SVG
• Fully passing the ACID 3 test with 100/100
• Inline spell checker (very handy)
• Many other features

It looks like this release is absolutely packed with new features and improvements and in many ways is catching up to the major players and surpassing them in other ways.

Estimated Release Date: September 2009

Download Opera 10 rc

In May 2009 Microsoft asked users for feedback about what features they want in the next IE, but so far has not announced any definite plans. To recommend a feature, go to Microsoft Connect.

The second thing we know is that Microsoft has been reading the HTML 5 spec and recently posted feedback on the public W3 mailing list. This indicates they are interested in building HTML 5 features into their next web browser; although, at this point its anybodies guess as to what they would implement. We await more information.

Estimated Release Date: 2012?

With Mozilla Firefox 3.6 the team is shifting to a shorter release schedule, so enhancements reach users sooner. It’s quite likely we’ll see more incremental releases, including Firefox 3.6 which is scheduled for release just six months after Firefox 3.5.

The next version of Firefox will be faster because of improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and because of a focus on improving startup time performance. An asynchronous location bar and improved scrolling on Windows should also provide a noticeable speed improvement. The next version will feature the Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine.

UI changes include tab previews of other open websites when you use the CTRL-TAB keyboard shortcut (currently you must turn it on with the browser.ctrlTab.previews config option), and lightweight themes that don’t require a restart.

CSS3 Features for web developers:

• -moz-background-size

• gradients: -moz-linear-gradient() and -moz-radial-gradient()

For a concise list of changes, see the Firefox 3.6 for developers wiki page.

Estimated Release Date: January 2010 Update: according to a draft roadmap, release date is set for November 2009.

Download Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1