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You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.
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The platform previews show the focus in IE9 on performance, interoperable HTML5 through same markup, and hardware acceleration. We’ve also posted here about the work we’ve done with add-on developers, and we shared some data about add-on performance and how we measure it.

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I recently demonstrated Test Driving Modern SVG using the SVG Dice sample currently on the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive site. While building this sample, I learned that both performance and interoperability for SVG are a subtle continuum and are not binary. Read more

Having recently come from the Plone world to join Mozilla, I am in the delicious but fleeting position to compare two major Python web frameworks with some pretension of familiarity. Through a series of articles focusing on specific features, I will compare the Zope family of frameworks (as they are used in Plone) with the Django framework, which is gaining popularity at Mozilla and currently runs support.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.com. Read more

Posted by Adam Mein, Google Security Team

Quite a few security companies and organizations produce vulnerability databases, cataloguing bugs and reporting trends across the industry based on the data they compile. There is value in this exercise; specifically, getting a look at examples across a range of companies and industries gives us information about the most common types of threats, as well as how they are distributed.
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When we first showed IE9 at the Professional Developers Conference last fall, we discussed how real world browser performance involves many different subsystems. Different websites use these subsystems in different ways, and to build a fast real world browser you have to start by understanding these overall patterns. This post provides an inside look at how these subsystems impact the performance of five real world websites. Read more

New week, and a new snapshot. :hat:

We have fixed the mail panel regression introduced with the previous snapshot, and improved on dialog modality on Mac. Read more

We have some sad news for the 0.1% of our users who are still on the PowerPC architecture.

Starting with the Next version of Opera, as of the next snapshot release (due sometime later today), we are discontinuing the PowerPC architecture on Mac and Linux. Opera 10.6x will be the last release with support for this architecture. Read more

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser, called “The Wilderness Downtown.” The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google.
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This week, Mozilla unveiled the newly redesigned Mozilla Developer Network, the latest incarnation of MDC. The website has evolved over the years and we recently decided to change the name from Mozilla Developer Center to the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to better reflect the developer segments that make up our community and provide a better platform for engaging developers in the Mozilla mission and our plans for pushing the open Web forward. Read more

The first IE9 Platform Preview unveiled IE9’s initial support of SVG. As explained previously, SVG is a vector image format managed by the W3C. The release of the third and fourth Platform Previews come with feature-complete SVG. Major additions include support for SVG gradients, patterns, clipping, and masking. These features are often used to create images with depth and texture and are typically found in more complex SVG files. Read more

A while ago, we talked about Force-TLS that lets sites say “hey, only access me over HTTPS in the future” and the browser listens. Well, this idea has been solidifed into a draft spec for HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and we’ve landed support for it into our source tree. Read more

As JavaScript codebases become larger and more complex, we start to miss the niceties we take for granted in general purpose programming languages. It would be really great to have a JavaScript module system. The CommonJS community has created a standard that Jetpack and Node.js use. Read more

This article is about a new HTTPS header: Strict-Transport-Security, which force a website to be fetched through HTTPS. This feature will be part of Firefox 4.

How do you type URLs?

Do you prefix them with http:// or https:// systematically? Or do you just type example.com and let your browser add http://, like most of the people do?

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The world’s best-selling magazine for web builders, .net (or “Practical Web Design” outside the UK) has opened voting for its annual .net Awards – Read more

In just two years, the number of women on the mobile Web has risen 575%, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report, published today. South Africa leads the world’s push for gender equality on the mobile Web, with women accounting for nearly 44% of mobile web users. Read more

How do we decide whether to implement a feature that isn’t included in a standards specification? Like all browser providers, we often have to make this decision. In this post, I’ll use some real-world JavaScript examples to illustrate some of the principles we use to deliver an interoperable browser when the standards specification isn’t enough.

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A nice bunch of fixes coming right up! :)

We are now using the same build number on all platforms. Read more

The Telenor Group and Opera Software announce a non–exclusive Global Frame Agreement aiming to stimulate rapid growth of mobile Internet services across Telenor’s business units. Telenor’s business units can co-brand, distribute and run the Opera Mini mobile browser across its mobile handset and subscriber portfolios. As a result, Telenor’s customers in all geographies will be able to enjoy a fast, affordable and user-friendly mobile web experience on their favourite handset. Read more

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This is a guest post by Markus Stange. Markus usually works on the Firefox Mac theme implementation, but this time he went on a small side trip through the Gecko layout engine in order to implement -moz-element.

In Firefox Beta 4 we’re introducing a new extension to the CSS background-image property: the ability to draw arbitrary elements as backgrounds using -moz-element(#elementID).

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