Category: browsers

I’m a big fan of using nightly and pre-release versions of browsers; not for day-to-day use, but to find out what new features are on their way. Obviously this is made a lot easier when detailed changelogs are provided.

Firefox do a great job of this with their website The Burning Edge, which gives fortnightly (more or less) lists of changes in the latest trunk builds, and Opera’s Desktop Team Blog does likewise on a semi-regular basis. The Internet Explorer team have done a good job of documenting all the changes in IE9 with the Platform Preview Release Notes.

The notable exception seems to be WebKit. I’ve looked around but I can’t find any site which gives an overview of changes in the nightly builds. I could subscribe to the RSS feed of their Trac, but it would be a nightmare trying to find the interesting features amongst all the technical changes. The Surfin’ Safari and Planet WebKit aren’t any help.

So does anyone know how to find this information for WebKit? I can’t believe it doesn’t exist.

Update: As if by magic, look what I found just a day later: Last week in.. WebKit and Chromium!

The latest nightly releases of what will become Firefox 4 have implemented a couple of experimental new CSS features. The –moz-calc function allows calculations on length values, and the :-moz-any selector permits grouping of simple selectors.

If you have a nightly build of Firefox you can see a little demo I’ve put together of them in action.

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I’m writing about the CSS3 Multi-column layout module and I notice that WebKit supports a series of proprietary properties: –webkit-column-break-after, –webkit-column-break-before, and –webkit-column-break-inside. However, despite the documentation saying that they’re implemented in Safari 3+, I can’t seem to get any of them to work.

Has anyone reading this ever seen an example of these in action? I’ve searched for demos but have found nothing. If you know anything about this, please leave me a comment; your help would be gratefully appreciated.

The Opera team have released a very early preview of their next browser, which features an updated version of their Presto rendering engine. Opera 10.5 will support CSS transforms and transitions, so I’ve updated the demos on my old post, Anime with CSS and WebKit, to reflect that.

Last month the W3C released a working draft of the File API, which defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and programmatic ways to read files. The Firefox team have already implemented much of it, and have released a series of impressive demos on hacks.mozilla.org, which you can see if you have a recent beta of Firefox 3.6 (or a nightly trunk build).

The four demos shown to date display different (although related) aspects of the API, showing first multiple file uploads, then a drag and drop upload interface, next adding progress information (although this doesn’t work for me), then reading EXIF data from a JPEG image. You can imagine how these combined would be used for native drag and drop uploading to Flickr, for example.

The File API plays a big part in integrating the browser more tightly with the OS, particularly when combined with the drag and drop functionality, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the other browsers implement this. Congratulations to the Firefox team for their work on this, and hacks.mozilla.org for some great demos.

In the first part of this post I gave a potted history of the differing syntaxes, and provided an overview of how that affected linear gradients. In this second part I’m going to look at radial gradients.

Here the syntaxes diverge slightly more, with WebKit requiring more values than Mozilla; while that adds some flexibility, it also increases the complexity.

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