i am dustin diaz

Firefox 3.1 brings good stuff

The latest alpha release of Firefox came out today and they come bearing good fruit. First and foremost, they followed in the wonderful footsteps of Webkit and implemented querySelector and querySelectorAll. This means you can do native CSS queries. I'd likely wrap mine up in a simple $$ function as so:

JS native querySelector

var $$ = function(q, b) {

  if (b) {

    return document.querySelector(q);

  } else {

    return document.querySelectorAll(q);

  }

};

This allows you to pass in a second optional boolean parameter that denotes the function to only return the first matched result as a single node. Otherwise a standard nodeList is returned. Nevertheless a problem still remains is that you still get returned something that is "array-like" but not a real array. So we're still stuck with classic array conversion hacks:

Converting to an array

[].slice.call($$('ul > li:not(".selected"):hover'), 0).forEach(function(el) {

  el.style.color = 'red';

});

Border images

Border images can be fun if you need them. Although, the rounded corner craze seems to be dying down a bit. This would have been useful five years ago.

A better URL bar

Yes! A better, smarter URL bar, that enables you to make it behave like the old one. Check out these preferences in about:config. Notice how you can finally turn off title matching (albeit others think this is cool to leave it as the default setting).

Tabs!?!

I'm not sure whether tabs got better, or worse. First of all the introduced a tab switching overlay pane that behaves similar to app switching in OS's. Now when you hit ctrl + tab you get this overlay. I personally find it annoying when just trying to switch tabs... others... might like it. The only problem is, it breaks the tab switching model. ctrl + tab moves right; ctrl + shft + tab moves left. NOT SO in this case. Now when you move one over with ctrl + tab, then hit it again, it takes you back to the last one you were on rather than continuing to move to the right. (I took a small screencast to illustrate what I'm saying) This is bad. But, whatever. As long as there is a way to eventually turn this off.

And of course, Better support for "Web Standards"

I'm not really sure what this means. I didn't scour the release notes to see if this meant anything actually useful. Since they rewrote a large core of their layout engine, they are going through regressions, so this could just mean they fixed things that were already working, but broke with the latest public release of Firefox 3.

Overall

Things are looking good and I'm glad Mozilla has overcame leaps and bounds throughout the years from a once dominated by IE6 world. My current site statistics show Firefox at 63% over a 28% IE. Indeed, times are good.