Firefox Shiretoko Web Browser

Call to Discuss Your Project subscribe to the blog rss feed

Shiretoko Web Browser - New Features

Added Friday 01/08/2008

Firefox have released an alpha of the new 3.1 web browser called Shiretoko which is promising to have some really great features. I don't normally bother with alpha releases past reading the occasional preview but this looked interesting enough to install and have a play with. So what better way to get a feel for it than to write my first blog post for Totally and do a bit of testing with the latest browser technology?

One of the best things about the new browser is the continued HTML5 support. I'm still not sure if this is a blessing or a curse for those of us in the web development industry. But the new standards will be a much needed upgrade from HTML4 which is nearly 11 years old now. I just hope the new standards will go hand in hand with concepts like 'best before' dates for all browsers. This could be a huge step forward for both security and standards.

I knocked up a quick test based on the W3 guide and A List Apart's HTML5 article to see how it looks and it's pretty good. Have a look at the source code here and the screenshot below of how it renders in Shiretoko (as well as some other current browsers). It instantly looks more manageable as the XML-style syntax allows you to name containers without the div and span tags. If you combine this with a template engine or your favourite framework it should make templating and managing views a lot easier than in previous versions of HTML.

HTML 5 Screenshot

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the next generation of browsers. I'm sure we'll notice huge improvements in CSS and Javascript support in the next few years, not to mention the complete overhaul in how audio and video media is displayed. There's also lots of nifty features like the canvas tag that are due to be widely implemented. I'm not sure how far Firefox have taken their HTML5 support in this release as it's not even a concrete standard yet (and probably won't be for some time) but I'll be looking into the media objects and CSS features in future posts.

There's been a few improvements on the new Firefox 3 'awesome bar' too. You can now use wild card characters to filter history searches to either specific domains or page titles. One of the main issues users had with the new URL bar was it often bought back a lot of irrelevant results due to searching the page names as well as the addresses. This has gone some way to fixing that.

Another new feature is the tab switcher. Rather than just skipping to the next tab when you CTRL + Tab, Shiretoko has a nice little preview box allowing you to quickly scan though you tabs until you find the one you want. It's a nice little bit of eye candy even if the underlying functionality hasn't changed much.

Firefox 3.1 tab switcher

So there you go, a lot of progress and some exciting features. It's not really practical to use for daily tasks at the moment as the most useful extensions such as Firebug and the Developers Toolbar haven't been upgraded. HTML5 is also only in the draft stages but the browser companies are already chomping at the bit to cater for it. Hopefully this kind of interest will speed up the W3 publication process a bit and we can have a nice new standard in the next few years.