Firefox 4 will speed up significantly and get inline SVG support

On the evening of June 30, Mozilla came to London in England to tell about the additions (“Mozilla Add-Ons”) and to show some new cool features of the upcoming Firefox 4.

Probably the most impressive (apart from the add-ons builder tool based on Bespin) were the following future features of Firefox 4:

→ display HTML5 video (<video>)
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→ painting on canvas (<canvas>)

→ manipulating images on canvas (pixel analysis, face recognition using opencivitas)

→ "green screen" technology (chroma key) in illustrations and video, achieved by pixel color analysis

→ HTML5 embedded in SVG (hooray!)

→ SVG as <img>

→ SVG as CSS background

→ SVG-filters, SVG-masks, SVG-contour trimming

→ SVG animation

→ inline SVG (i.e. SVG inside HTML5)

→ CSS3: selectors, @ font-face, 2D-transformations (transforms), transitions (transitions), shadows, gradients, calculations - calc (2em-10px)

→ API: geolocation, offline (IndexDB, localStorage, AppCache, FileAPI: reading binary content from a file, dragging files), web workers (web workers) and sockets (websockets)

→ a controller on websockets, launching a presentation from a mobile phone

→ WebGL

Some of these abilities were confirmed by demonstrations:

→ CSS3 filters and SVG masks on HTML5 video:



→ highly interactive video interface with SVG masks and transitions (transitions):



→ WebGL in Firefox 4 and on Android:



After that, Tristan Nitot announced some other elements of Firefox 4, especially future speed improvements.

As for the features of the Firefox core, we were told about:

→ TraceMonkey (new javascript engine)

→ Lazy Frame Construction

→ I / O reduction in the main application flow

→ Firefox Bootstrap Acceleration

→ hardware acceleration

→ GPU-rendering of text, images and video

→ using GPU to draw text

→ JIT javascript (JaegerMonkey)

→ HTML5 parser in a separate thread

→ more smart interface

→ rejection of modal dialogues

→ elimination of delays that interrupt the initial load

→ background update

A deeper account of everything shown is set out in the blog post on hot pursuit .