Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is out

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is out and with it comes a huge pile of new features for developers. While those of you who follow Mozilla’s web-tech blog might know about some of them. Together with the release of the first beta of 3.1 a short summary of the bigger features can be found in the related posting.

• Geolocation


• @font-face


• Video and Audio support


• XHR enhancements


• TraceMonkey

There are several other features that are scheduled for Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and are partially implemented in the beta 1 already. Mozilla will talk about more once Beta 2 is available. Some of the things you can expect are Worker Threads for JavaScript, new graphics, SVG and CSS capabilities and probably other things as well. The Firefox 3.1 for Developers page is the full source for new stuff that’s coming for 3.1.

Ubiquity 0.1.1 Released!

The Ubiquity-Team just released the first patch for Ubiquity, which fixes a
lot of bugs and offers a few new features. Feel free to check out the release notes for more information.

Release 0.1.1 is a minor update to Ubiquity that includes one thing that sucks, a few new features, and a bunch of bug fixes. All commands that were written for Ubiquity 0.1 should still work fine with this new release.

The thing that sucks is that the latest version may break your current
subscriptions, and you may have to unsubscribe from them and then
resubscribe to them to get them to work again.

The new feature that lets you choose whether you'd prefer to have commands you've subscribed to be auto-updated or manually updated. Currently, however, there is no good way to manually update command feeds—to do so you'll need to unsubscribe to the feed and then resubscribe to it. In the future, there will be notifications for changes to commands and a more humane manual update method.

There's now links to view the source of command feeds in the about:ubiquity page. For manually updated feeds, clicking on the link will show you the version of the feed that your browser is using.

See a List of bug fixes here.

These things I believe.

Jono DiCarlo at Mozilla Labs documented his feelings about user interface design in a great post titled These Things I Believe.

[...]
Is change good or bad?
Change has a cost. Change disrupts the user’s habits. Change forces the user to learn something new.
Sometimes the new UI is so much better than the old one that the change is worth the cost.
Sometimes it isn’t.
The trick is knowing when change is worth it.
[...]