This week there has been a lot of buzz about the forthcoming Firefox 4 web browser, which Mozilla promises will be "super duper" fast, powerful, and empowering.
The discussion began when Mozilla released an early product plan for Firefox 4, which outlined several planned improvements for developers. The most notable of these include a new HTML5 parsing engine, better push-state Ajax interaction, and support for touch and gesture events.
HTML5
Firefox 3.6 is already one of the most HTML5-capable browsers available, but that won't apparently stop Firefox 4 from getting a completely new HTML5 parsing engine.
In the past, browser developers like Mozilla, or even Microsoft, were in some ways left to their own devices when it came to parsing HTML.
"Before HTML5," wrote Henri Sivonen in a post for the Mozilla Hacks Blog, "HTML specifications didn’t say how to turn a stream of bytes into a DOM tree. In theory, HTML before HTML5 was supposed to be defined in terms of SGML. This implied a certain relationship between the source of valid HTML documents and the DOM. However, parsing wasn’t well defined for invalid documents (and web content most often isn’t valid HTML4) and there are SGML constructs that were in theory part of HTML but that in reality popular browsers didn’t implement.
"The lack of a proper specification led to browser developers filling in the blanks on their own and reverse engineering the browser with the largest market share (first Mosaic, then Netscape, then IE) when in doubt about how to get compatible behavior. This led to a lot of unwritten common rules but also to different behavior across browsers."
But the HTML5 specification does provide parsing guidance, and Firefox 4 may be the first browser to implement it. The new parsing engine has been turned on in Mozilla's nightly build, so you can see how the new HTML5 parsing algorithm manages some of your sites or projects.
This new engine should make Firefox 4 very fast.
Push-state Ajax
Push-state or server-push Ajax is a technique that enables a server to push updates or changes to the browser for re-rendering without a client-side request. Although Mozilla did not say how much support for this technique would be improved, it could be good news for developers, since this technology may help to enable more desktop-like applications for the web.
Depending on how Mozilla implemented push-state Ajax, it could open the door for a number of new ecommerce services.
Touch and Gesture Events
Seemingly recognizing that touchscreen devices like the HP Slate, Microsoft Surface, or popular Apple iPad will become more ubiquitous, Mozilla will also give Firefox 4 more support for touchscreen events, potentially making it easier for developers to build in support for these devices.
Is Mozilla Changing Fast Enough?
Even with the freshly-minted announcement about Firefox 4, several sites, including TechCrunch, have reported that Firefox co-founder Blake Ross, does not believe that the browser can compete and will likely lose its market share in the next three-to-five years.
"I’m pretty skeptical," Ross wrote in a Quora post. "I think the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly."
Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which all make web browsers, can make rapid decisions about browser functionality and invest significantly to make things happen. Mozilla, presumably, does not always have those sorts of luxuries.
