thoughts on mozilla

Paul Rouget has an article up on Mozilla Hacks about the CSS3 calc() feature that will be coming in Firefox 4.

From the article:

Firefox will support the CSS calc() value, which lets you compute a length value using an arithmetic expression. This means you can use it to define the sizes of divs, the values of margins, the widths of borders, and so forth.

This work is tracked in bug 363249. While some of the needed patches have been landed by Mozilla Corporation engineer L. David Baron, the feature only works in a small set of cases at the moment. Baron promises that the more interesting work is “still to come.”

While we all know Mozilla’s distaste for H.264, it’s been much less clear where Mozilla stands on other web standards that developers wish to use. Specifically, SVG Fonts have long been something Mozilla has not implemented as part of its Firefox web browser. This, of course, despite being part of the Acid 3 test, which Firefox has yet to pass.

In a blog post tonight, Mozilla Corporation Manager of Layout, Robert O’Callahan outlines his reasons why Firefox will not support either SVG Fonts or the popular WebSQLDatabase, which itself is not a standard, but has become fairly integral to mobile web applications.

Not supporting SVG Fonts is one of the first times Mozilla has flat out said “no” to a standard that other browsers support and one which has been at W3C Recommendation status since January 2003.

Of course, it’s especially interesting to see Mozilla not implement WebSQLDatabse, given how far behind it has fallen in the mobile browser race. I’d expect to see Mozilla catching up as quick as possible and implementing even better features (or improvements to features) at a faster rate than Webkit.