14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 16 Aurora comes with plenty to like for regular users, but developers are equally treated. The latest Aurora release brings a brand new developer tool, Firefox's suite is getting better and better.
Quite a few CSS3 features have been un-prefixed in this latest release, meaning that they work as intended and the implementation should be considered both final and stable.
Web developers have had a lot of new tools and capabilities at their disposal in recent years. HTML5, CSS3. WebGL, Websockets and so on and so forth.
But one problem was that all of these had to be standardized and browsers had it implement support in a standards-compliant way that was also stable and reliable.
This meant adding a prefix in front of the properties to make sure developers knew they were targeting the Mozilla or the WebKit implementation of that particular feature. Slowly but surely, these features are getting ready and the prefixes are being removed.
In Firefox 16 Aurora, several major CSS features are now considered stable. CSS3 Animations, CSS3 Transitions, CSS3 Transforms, CSS3 Image Values and CSS3 Values & Units are now unprefixed.
There have been some changes from the -moz- implementation, so developers using any of these features and wanting to drop the prefix have to first check out the final specs. Mozilla has a nice list of some of the changes.
IndexedDB is now considered "Candidate Recommendation" and has been unprefixed in Firefox. IndexedDB is a major component of the set of tools which enable developers to create modern and powerful web apps.
Also new in the latest Aurora is the Developer Toolbar, part of the developer tools suite. The toolbar enables quick "command line" access to plenty of features and data while also providing shortcuts to the Web Console, the Inspector and the new JavaScript Debugger that was introduced in Firefox 15.