FireFox 3.5
I have to say, open source is great, and one of the most known open source projects is FireFox. FireFox is IE’s biggest competition, and I have to say even with IE8 finally pushing IE in the CSS/XHTML standards direction, FireFox is pushing beyond with its implementation of technologies like SVG and CSS3. In FireFox 3.5 a lot of great new features are pushing in, including but not limited to a <video> tag, that’s right a native tag to allow adding video’s to the page in a clean method. FireFox 3.5 is also pushing in a few more CSS3 attributes like border shadows and border images to name a few, I for one think CSS3 needs to be pushed MORE by modern browsers and the W3C, because it’s going to improve web markup 10-fold. As far as the SVG side goes, FireFox is currently the browser pushing it the most (cough IE pick up where your lagging behind!), and for those of you who are not familiar with SVG I’ll explain. SVG or Scalable Vector Graphic is basically what the name implies, a Vector Graphic which mean’s based on computer calculations rather then pixels like a bitmap image (jpg/png/gif), which makes it great for web design because you can have a TINY svg that grows substantially and NEVER loses quality. What this mean’s for us Designers/Developers is that we can cut the file size of such things like logo’s and use them in many places with just 1 file, because we can set the size in the code, and not have to worry about distortion. Now, don’t think for one second that’s all I have to say about FireFox 3.5, in fact one KEY thing about FireFox 3.5 is its faster page rendering, yes they are a tad behind Google Chrome and Webkit based browsers (Safari for windows), BUT finally FireFox is addressing the need for faster Javascript rendering, which intern also mean’s pages load hella quick compared to previous versions. This ladies and gentlemen, is the main thing that SHOULD have been in 3.0, no offense but for once FireFox had to sit down with its pen and paper and take notes from another browser (Chrome), which isn’t a bad thing considering that was Google’s doing. That being said, FireFox 3.5 (Currently in its final Beta stages) will definitely be a MUST upgrade for anyone, and for those of you still using IE, please… Get to using FireFox, its by far a better browser and its FREE?!