My contributions to today’s Firefox release
31 January, 2012 § 20 Comments
Today (1/31/2011) marks the release of an update for Firefox that defaults add-ons to compatible, introduces native web developer tools, implements CSS3 3D transforms, and adds native support for elements to be rendered in fullscreen. Of the aforementioned features, I contributed a tiny amount toward the fullscreen support for Firefox 10.
Conditional Forward button
The User Research team at Mozilla performed a heatmap study to find what user interface features are used the most within the web browser. One of the findings was that the forward button is very seldom used. The forward button is only enabled less than 10% of the time, except this button consumes valuable screen space 100% of the time.
Firefox 10 introduces the “conditional forward” button. We have unified the back/forward navigation controls and address bar. When the forward button is disabled, it hides behind the back button, only to reappear when it is actually useful.
This change removes some of the visual noise in the main toolbar, as well as unifying the navigation mental model. The address bar shows the location and the back-forward button modifies the location, so it is only logical to visually align these two controls.
We also understand it is impossible to please everyone. If this feature is too much change for you, you can customize your toolbar and place a toolbar item between the back-forward buttons and address bar and the conditional forward button feature will be turned off.
DOM Fullscreen API
Firefox 10 introduces the DOM Fullscreen API. This API allows websites to request page elements to be rendered in fullscreen. This feature will provide necessary capabilities for HTML5 video to compete with Flash as well as an immersive environment for HTML5 games.
For Firefox 10, I implemented the document.mozFullScreenEnabled API. This boolean lets a website know if the feature has been enabled and the fullscreen request has the potential for being granted. For security reasons, iframes lacking the mozallowfullscreen attribute will not be granted fullscreen access.
For more information, see the “Using full-screen mode” article on the Mozilla Developer Network.
HTML5 Video Statistics
If you’re a web developer or just curious to see debugging information about the video you’re watching, you can now right-click on the video and choose “Show Statistics”. The statistics will overlay the video and update as the video plays.
This feature uses the statistics API that Chris Pearce implemented for Firefox 5.
Mentored Bugs
I helped mentor Matthew Wein (my brother) on fixing his first bug in Firefox. Matthew added the capability for frames of HTML5 video to be saved to disk. Simply right-click on an HTML5 video and choose “Save Snapshot As…” to save the current frame to disk.
If you’d like to get started in an open source project that reaches over 400,000,000 people, I’ve got a nice list of bugs that I’d be more than happy to help you out with.
JAWS 
Couldn’t we have a simple “about:config” entry to turn off the conditional forward button instead of having to resort to some non-obvious workaround to disable it? I’ve given it a try for a couple of days and find that the subtle motion near the tabs is far worse than the minimal amount of pixels I am giving up to just leave it there all of the time.
Yeah, that wouldn’t be a bad idea, although I don’t think we can do it until bug 677302 is fixed. Bug 677302 is about adding the ability to check preferences from within chrome-privileged CSS files (http://bugzil.la/677302).