Firefox 3 – Plays Well With Others
Mozilla endeavors to promote open standards, while at the same time, create a better Web, even if it means using the “other guys” specifications and DOM extensions. Here is a summary of features added to Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) that either implement a good open specification or someone else’s DOM extensions – for the betterment of the Web:
WHATWG Web Applications (link)
- Experimental
<a ping>support (bug 319368, current spec). - You can now register web applications as protocol handlers using the
navigator.registerProtocolHandler()method. - Online and offline events are now supported, allowing applications and extensions to detect whether there’s an active Internet connection available or not. See navigator.onLine
- The
getElementsByClassName()DOM method is now supported (bug 357450). <canvas>elementtransform()andsetTransform()methods support (bug 365886, current spec).contentEditablesupport (current spec).Drag and Drop events are now supported (bug 375681).Whoops, not quite yet! (bug 356295)- Focus management APIs (
activeElement&hasFocus) are now supported (bug 337631, current spec). - Offline resources is in progress (bug 367447 and dependencies, current spec)
Internet Explorer DOM Extensions (link)
clientTopandclientLeftDOM extensions are now supported.elementFromPointDOM extension is now supported (bug 199692).oncut,oncopyonpaste,onbeforecut,onbeforecopyandonbeforepasteDOM event extensions are now supported (bug 280959).getClientRectsandgetBoundingClientRectDOM extensions are now supported (bug 174397).- The
HttpOnlycookie extension attribute is now supported (bug 178993).
Yes, some of the Internet Explorer extensions are also WHATWG specs.
Not Invented Here? Not a problem 
Noel Grandin said,
October 11, 2007 @ 1:28 am
what a nice change from the early Mozilla days when I used to log requests for IE interop issues and get the response “that’s an IE thing, we only do the DOM standard here”.
Sylvain said,
October 11, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
For the Internet Explorer DOM Extensions part, I would add the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect new DOM element methods.
Ant Bryan said,
October 12, 2007 @ 12:13 am
I’d personally like to see Metalink support in Firefox.
It’s a decent open spec that lists things like mirrors and checksums in an XML file, to be used by download programs. It’d probably be pretty trivial to implement, because the under the hood stuff is already in place. There’s already a great Addon that shows it off, and a bug in bugzilla but no love.
Mark Finkle said,
October 13, 2007 @ 12:05 am
Sylvain – Done. Thanks.