This is a nice idea: Opera have separated their widgets from the desktop browser, allowing them to be run as standalone applications. They are cross-platform and standards compliant. You can download a Labs release to try it for yourself.
Firefox 3.6 has become the latest browser to support the CSS3 background-size property (although the first to do so according to the latest W3C spec.).
Using it is pretty simple:
div {
background-image: url('image.png');
-moz-background-size: 80%;
}
This, along with multiple background-images, is going to go a long way towards cleaning up mark-up and prettifying the web.
Firefox 3.5 was released earlier today, and joins Safari in supporting the @font-face rule with OpenType and TrueType font families, allowing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are correctly licensed, of course).
One slight drawback of the technique is the blank space that’s displayed as the new font is loaded into the browser; this is especially unnecessary for users who already have that font natively on their system.
The way to get around that is quite simple; use local() to check if the font is on the user’s system first.
To much fanfare (the blowing of their own trumpets), Opera today announced Unite, a new service which lets you use the browser as a personal file server and social space. I haven’t had more than a passing glance at it yet — my URL is home.stopsatgreen.operaunite.com, if you’d like to see if I’m available — but it certainly looks interesting. Useful? I’m not sure yet.
Last night Microsoft announced the release of the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, which is no doubt very similar to the final release version. You can download it from microsoft.com/ie8 (notes on upgrading).
Webmonkey have a nice round-up of the new features, so I won’t bother repeating that; instead, here are my first impressions after an hour or so’s use.
After two days of commotion regarding the Internet Explorer team’s decision to include a standards opt-in in the next version of their browser, Mozilla’s John Resig has noticed something rather important in an exchange on IE’s Chris Wilson’s blog; namely:
Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5).
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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