If you have yet to see what the new Firefox will be able to offer, this link includes a video and a break down of the new features. As quick overview, FF4 will now have support for SVG files used as images and SVG filters in CSS, animated transitions and transformations allowing for the animation of CSS properties. These features are in addition to the CSS 3 specifications, and in addition to the extra HTML 5 support that Firefox 4 will support. Very cool. Everything in the video is possible because of hardware acceleration, and there are some cool transitions and cool new ways to think of interacting with a website. If you’re interested, you can download the current beta of Firefox 4.

If you’re not familiar with SVG files, they are scalable vector graphics. They are essentially a text file the describe how to create a vector image or graphic. Because they are text files they are VERY small, and because they are vector they scale no problem. Other browsers have already allowed SVG files as background images in CSS. Firefox was the last bastion preventing wider use of SVG in CSS. We should start seeing them used more often in place of jpeg, gif, and png. They will not completely replace jpeg and png image types since browsers can’t handle very complex svg files very well.

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