Naepalm

When I started working at Mindfly almost a year ago (only about 20 days to go until I hit that mark, yay!) we were just starting to implement moving into CSS3 styles on objects and really focusing on the differences between browser capabilities. We're all aware, whether it be through rants on this blog, on our personal blogs, or through very frustrated tweets, how much of a pain Internet Explorer 6 is when it comes to making websites functional in such an old browser. And, when I say functional, I mean just that. We don't even demand that our sites look the same (in fact, we often insist that they don't), but merely just work in that poor dying horse of a browser.

That said, this blog post isn't about ranting about IE6, no matter how easy it is to do.  What I really want to talk about is the fact that yesterday, Firefox 3.5 came out.  Here at Mindfly, we've been waiting with baited breath to see it (not only be a faster browser, which is their big selling point) implement some of the quirky things that other browsers have put into play or that they're taking onto themselves.

For some time now, we've been working with things like rounded corners that function in CSS3, but do not validate for CSS2, nor work in all browsers such as Internet Explorer.  However, with IE8 coming out a few months back, Safari 4 shortly before that, and now Firefox 3.5 yesterday, I really feel like browsers are moving forward into a new era of making my life easier.  Despite the fact that IE still doesn't support rounded corners.

I've been talking about typography for some time now and our options with it.  At first it was image replacement, @font-face, and sIFR.  More recently I discussed the awesome use of cufon.  Now I'm going to take a step back and say that thank heavens Firefox 3.5 has introduced support of @font-face.  Legality issues aside, as that's a can of worms on it's own, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer (amazingly) users will now be able to view sites that use @font-face with no extra work included through javascript or flash.  There are rumors that Opera 10 will also be supporting this.  If you want tips on how to put @font-face into your site, Kyle has written a great blog post about it.  I am reminded, unfortunately, that one of my favorite browsers - Chrome - is not supporting @font-face.  Yet.  We can only hope that Google will implement it in the future (it can't be that hard, can it?  Safari is a webkit browser as well!).

What are some of the other things that Firefox is implementing for us designers out there?  You can get the full list at developer.mozilla.org, but my three favorites are:

1. Text Shadow: No longer will we have to use image-replacement to get text shadows in Firefox!  Huzzah.
2. Box Shadow: Since Safari and Chrome both support box shadow, it's nice to see Firefox jumping on the bandwagon and making it easier for us to add nice little shadows to items on our sites that aren't text.
3. CSS Transforms: let me just say this (as it's only one of many) - :nth-child!  If all browsers supported this, my life would be complete.  I can't even count the times I have to select item 9 in a list of 13.

I'm looking forward to the chance to play around with all the new features and see how sites will render across browsers now and in the future.  I also have to give Mozilla a thumb's up for their continual work to allow us to easily make sites look gorgeous in their browser.  Between their support of plugins like firebug, the web developer toolbar, and colorzilla, I can't imagine trying to build a website without them.