Mozilla prepares new features for website developers

The news appeared on a new site for Firefox 4 developers , foreshadowing a lot of good for those of us with limited traffic: the IndexedDB interface will allow Web applications to work even without a network connection. The HTML IndexedDB standard proposed as an add -on is one of a collection of technical solutions that open new horizons for programmers and web developers.

IndexedDB will put some pressure on Adobe Flash Player, as is his competitor. One of the reasons to show interest in this innovation is the resumption of access and, possibly, the improvement of offline editing of Google Docs. In addition, there is a noticeable increase in the performance of some sites, in particular, due to more complex caching.

When a little earlier, in early May, Mozilla announced its plans for Firefox 4, including the desire to release a new version in November, they decided not to support IndexedDB. Now Mozilla is a bit optimistic about IndexedDB, although it leaves room for maneuver.

“Our team continues to work both on implementing support for IndexedDB technology and on its specification, working with Microsoft and other companies,” said Firefox Director Mike Beltzner. “The work is progressing rapidly, and significant progress can be seen in the specification over the past two weeks. We are still striving to incorporate it into Firefox 4, believing that the quality of the specification and implementation will be able to satisfy the needs of web developers who create applications that use client-side storage. ”

Firefox faces increasing competition from Google Chrome, but its use continues to grow, and at least for new sites, the browser was able to guarantee those things that failed to guarantee Internet Explorer: in particular, responsibility to the developers.

IndexedDB is one of a number of technologies that developers should be aware of. Mozilla mentioned some of the innovations before, but now a more complete list is available. Let me remind you of the main technologies of the fourth Firefox:

• WebM Google had not yet announced its open source video standard for the Internet when Mozilla completed its own on May 11th. Although this did not come as a surprise, WebM did indeed appear on the list of innovations in Firefox 4. Some web development-oriented applications have already included WebM support in their product builds.
• Multitouch. iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad do not work with Firefox, but there will be an increasing number of touch and multi-touch phones, including Google Android.
• WebGL. This technology uses the OpenGL ES 2.0 interface to create 3D graphics on the Internet, but Google is working on a technology to overcome the limitations of computers that only have Windows Direct3D drivers. Google is also working on a higher-level 3D interface based on its O3D plugin.
• WebSockets This is an HTML feature to improve browser-server communications.
• HTML5 parser. The HTML5 specification, although not complete, is already leading to better interpretation of web pages and Mozilla is switching to a new parser to complete this task. The HTML5 parser is faster than its predecessor and can display SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) among other page elements.
• SMIL (Synchronous Multimedia Language Integration) can be used to animate work at home and steps on the heels of Flash from Adobe Systems.