Web Browsers And Packages

Release: 2010-02-05
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Mozilla Web Browsers including Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla 1.9.2, an open-source, Crystal Level web platform provides Gecko, the layout engine, and SpiderMonkey, the scripting engine. These engines provide robust cutting-edge web-standards support for web browsers and a solid platform for cross-platform applications. Mozilla Gecko has support for:

• HTML 4.01 (HyperText Markup Language);
• HTML 5 'Subset';
• HTML 5's <meta charset="">;
• ' named character reference;
• contenteditable and spell checking support (but not spellcheck attribute);
• canvas element (Mozilla 1.8+)
• HTML 5's audio, video and source elements;
• WAI-ARIA adds support for Accessible Rich Internet Applications;
• Cascade StyleSheets (CSS) level 1, Visual & Interactive and Paged level 2.1 provide a realistic way to add presentation and layout to your document structures;
• Some main and experimental CSS level 3 features;
• The ability to style and script with unknown markup (A Flow-level element bug prevented full support but has now been fixed in Mozilla 1.9);
• For image support we have GIF89a, JPEG, PNG, Icons (.ico, .png, .jpg, .gif), BMP (Windows Bitmap), XBM (X Bitmap) and as of Mozilla 1.8, SVG 1.1
• Document Object Model (DOM) level 1 (HTML, XML), most of level 2 (Core, HTML, XML, Views, Stylesheets, CSS, CSS2, Events, MouseEvents, HTMLEvents, Range and some Traversal, UIEvents and MutationEvents) and a little of level 3 (XPath, fragment of Core and Load & Save), Bits of DOM 5 HTML expose the document to scripting interaction;
• JavaScript 1.8.2 and ECMAScript for XML (E4X) extends user interaction for handling the extra power of XML (Mozilla 1.8+) (JavaScript 1.5 originally, 1.6 & E4X in Mozilla 1.8, 1.7 added in Mozilla 1.8.1 and JavaScript 1.8 in Mozilla 1.9)
• Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for data-interchange and Web Workers support;
• GeoLocation support;
• Selectors API allows an easier way to access parts of the DOM using CSS-like selectors;
• In Mozilla 1.8 there was the MozStorage which allows Mozilla-based applications and the Session Store API for Mozilla-based Extenstions to both to use the embedded SQLite database engine to store information;
• Also in Mozilla 1.8, to compliment cookies and Mozilla's storage, Web Storage's sessionStorage, the old Mozilla globalStorage and as of version 1.9.1, the current Web Storage's localStorage is supported. These allow local database performance and capacity with SQLite to store information beyond the abilities of cookies for webpages and web applications;

Canvas feature support includes:

• Stroke and fill colours;
• Rectangles;
• Paths;
• rgba/hsla colours;
• Mozilla-specific Text;
• Canvas Text (as of 1.9.1);
• Shadows;
• Linear and radial gradients;
• Patterns;
• Translations, rotation and scale;
• Bring in pixel images;

CSS level 3 features supported includes:

• hsl(), rgba(), hsla() functions;
• Namespaces Module, most of Media Queries;
• opacity (Mozilla 1.7);
• -moz-border-radius and -moz-box-sizing;
• as of 1.8: -moz- version of CSS3 Columns;
• ::-moz-selection pseudo-element selector, :enabled, :disabled and :checked UI states, :root, :not, :last-child, :only-child, :empty selectors and the :target selector;
• As of 1.9.1: text-shadow, -moz-box-shadow and Structural pseudo-class selectors (like :nth-child, :first-of-type, etc);
• CSS 2D Transforms using -moz- prefix;
• @font-face At Rule with multiple src values, local() and format() functions (support for TrueType and OpenType fonts);
• With version 1.9.2 Multiple Background Images are supported, -moz-background-size, image-rendering, -moz-linear-gradient, -moz-radial-gradient and support for the Web Open Font Format (.woff) with @font-face;

Native Media format support:

• OGG Video (Theora);
• OGG Audio (OGG Vorbis);
• Wave Audio;

SVG support includes:

• Groups;
• Stroke and fill colours;
• Basic shapes (Rectangles, Rounded Corner Rectangles, Lines, Circles, Ellipses, Polylines and Polygons);
• Paths;
• Opacity;
• Text;
• Hyperlinkg;
• Linear and radial gradients;
• Translations, skews, rotation and scale;
• Bring in pixel images;
• SVG (at least 1.1) Filters;
• CSS support;
• Scripting support;
• Scripted animation;
• SVG integrates with webpage (true transparent background);

Plus in the realm of XML:

• eXtensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 with Namespaces & XML-Stylesheet Processing Instruction (PI);
• XML Base (xml:base) attribute to help with relative links;
• eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) 1.0, 1.1 (without Ruby Annotation) and Basic 1.0;
• Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) 2 to express math and sciences expressions on the web;
• Most of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 for ultimate 2-dimensional vector image display (Mozilla 1.8+) (does not support declarative animation – only scripted animation);
• RSS and Atom news feed support (Mozilla 1.7+);
• XML Events for current and future script event handling (Mozilla 1.8+);
• eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) 1 & eXtensible Path Language (XPath) 1 allows the ability to convert document structure into other document structures;
• (Simple) eXtensible Linking Language (XLink) 1 provides linking between general XML documents;
• eXtensible Pointing Language (XPointer) Framework, Element Scheme, Xmlns (namespaces) Scheme for pointing to parts of XML documents (Mozilla 1.4+);
• Mozilla's own eXtensible User Interface Language (XUL) & eXtensible Binding Language (XBL) provides a rich proprietary platform for building Web Applications.
• Limited XML Document Type Definition support only to process Entities in the Subset, chrome: and program dtd folder

provides a powerful platform for experiencing the World Wide Web.

Mozilla 1.9 passes the Acid 2 Test which tests Cascade Stylesheet (CSS) support. More about the Acid 2 Test from the Web Standards Project (WASP).

Mozilla 1.9.2 also clocks 94 out of 100, failed 6 test and one test took 32 attempts, from the Acid 3 Test which tests DOM, scripting, HTML, SVG and various other technologies for Web 2.0. More about the Acid 3 Test from the Web Standards Project (WASP).

In order to allow users to navigate and use interactive webpage features using the keyboard (part of making webpages accessible) Mozilla based UserAgents provide the following: On MS Windows and Linux/Unix platforms you can tab through links and form controls in general. On Apple Mac OS X you can tab through form text boxes only by default. In order to tab through links and form controls in general you need to switch the Full Keyboard Access System Preference to All Controls. (Full Keyboard Access is in Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences then Keyboard Shortcuts tab.)

Mozilla Firefox , Flock , SeaMonkey , Camino , Epiphany (Mozilla Edition), K-Meleon

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