Mozilla

Recently, we have seen good discussion on the W3C Web Storage specification. There has been some recent push back on the use SQL, in particular “SQL as SQLite defines it”, in the specification. Counter proposals have been popping up using JavaScript-ish APIs, many using JSON. Some of the APIs store the data as a JSON document or blob, even using the HTML5 localStorage/globalStorage system to persist the data. BrowserCouch and TaffyDB are two nice examples. Both are very JavaScript-oriented, client-side and offer some very nice functionality.

We released Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 for Maemo! Go read Stuart’s announcement for a good overview of the release. Be sure to watch Madhava’s video walkthrough too. Like Stuart, I am now using Fennec as the default browser on my N810 tablet. We have reached a solid milestone for performance and stability.

While I was on vacation last week, the newest official XULRunner was spun up and has now been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.7 matches the Firefox 3.0.7 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.7 are related to security fixes. There are some cookie and XHR fixes in there too. You can also look at the full list of fixed bugs.

I previously reported that we found a memory-related problem in the Fennec Windows Mobile pre-alpha release. Bug 477956 was the primary place to track our efforts to fix the problem. However, it became clear that porting jemalloc to WinCE was the best way to handle the situation, so bug 478044 became the bug to watch. As you can see, we are in the process of getting the fix reviewed and landed.

When we released the Fennec pre-Alpha for Windows Mobile, we hoped it would help us find bugs that didn’t show up on our test devices. We knew there would be problems lurking around so we wanted to get a preview version into the hands of more testers. The good news is we found a showstopper! The bad news is the browser is basically useless for many people.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.6 matches the Firefox 3.0.6 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.6 are related to security fixes. You can also look at the full list of fixed bugs.

Felipe Gomes has been busy. We talked on IRC a short time ago about adding a gesture engine to Fennec. He made a video of the current version. The results are very cool. His work is being tracked in bug 476425. The engine is currently packaged as an extension, so you can play with it yourself. Just pull from Felipe’s repository and put the code inside your extensions folder in your profile.