Firefox 18 release notes for developers
Firefox 18 was released on January 8, 2013. This article lists key changes that are useful not only for web developers, but also Firefox and Gecko developers as well as add-on developers.
Changes for Web developers
>HTML
- The
reversedattribute of the<ol>element is now supported (Firefox bug 601912). - The
crossoriginattribute of the<link>element is now supported (Firefox bug 786564). - The
allowfullscreenattribute of the<iframe>has been implemented and its prefixed predecessormozallowfullscreenis now deprecated.
CSS
- The
min-widthandmin-heightnow uses theautokeyword as initial value (This has an effect only on flex items as it resolves to0, the previous initial value, for other items). (Firefox bug 763689) - The cascade has been updated: now author
!importantrules override CSS animations. (Firefox bug 783714) - The
backgroundshorthand property now recognizes CSS3background-sizeproperty specified inside. (Firefox bug 570326) - Initial support for the CSS Flexbox Module has been landed. It is disabled by default but can be enabled by setting
layout.css.flexbox.enabledto true (Firefox bug 666041).
DOM/APIs
navigator.mozPayhas been landed. (Firefox bug 767818)window.devicePixelRatiohas been landed. (Firefox bug 564815)- The OS X backend for
window.navigator.batteryhas been implemented. (Firefox bug 696045) MozBlobBuilderis removed. Developers need to useBlobconstructor for creating aBlobobject. (Firefox bug 744907)- The
visibilitychangeevent and the Page Visibility API has been unprefixed (Firefox bug 812086). TextDecoderandTextEncoderhave been added. Note that the implementation and spec of these evolved and have been changed in Firefox 19 (Firefox bug 764234).HTMLMediaElement.srchas been separate in two properties: the standardsrcproperty, dealing with strings, and the prefixedmozSrcObjectproperty, dealing with media streams (Firefox bug 792665).- Support for transferable objects has been added.
- The
Screen.lockOrientation()method now supports anArrayof strings as argument (Firefox bug 784549.
JavaScript
- Harmony's (ECMAScript 2015) Direct Proxies have been landed (Firefox bug 703537). Warning: the implementation contains a couple of known bugs, missing features and misalignments with the current state of the spec. Do not rely on it for production code.
- The ECMAScript 2015
contains()method is now implemented on strings. This is unfortunately not compatible with Mootools 1.2, which expects different behavior fromcontains()on strings but does not ensure it. Newer versions of Mootools fix this issue; sites should upgrade their Mootools version to something newer than 1.2.
WebGL
- The prefixed version of the
EXT_texture_filter_anisotropicWebGL extension, "MOZ_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic" has been removed (Firefox bug 790946).
SVG
>MathML
>XUL
>Network
- Quality factors ("q-values") are now clamped to 2 digits (e.g., in HTTP
Accept-Languageheaders) (Firefox bug 672448). - The
ALLOW-FROMsyntax of theX-FRAME-OPTIONSHTTP Response header is now supported (Firefox bug 690168).
Developer tools
>Changes for add-on and Mozilla developers
>Interface changes
nsIStreamListener-
The 4th parameter (
aOffset) ofonDataAvailable()method changes tounsigned long long. (Firefox bug 784912) nsIUploadChannel-
setUploadStream()supports over 2GB content-length (Firefox bug 790617) nsIEditor-
addEditorObserver()has been removed, usesetEditorObserver()instead,removeEditorObserver()no longer takes ansIEditorObserverparameter (Firefox bug 785091) nsIHttpProtocolHandler-
http-on-modify-requestobservers are no longer guaranteed to be called synchronously duringnsIChannel.asyncOpen(). For observers that need to be called duringasyncOpen(), the newhttp-on-opening-requestobserver topic has been added. See (Firefox bug 800799) nsIProtocolProxyService-
The
resolvemethod has been removed. Now, only theasyncResolvemethod can be used. See (Firefox bug 769764)
New interfaces
Removed interfaces
The following interfaces have been removed.
nsIEditorObserver
See also
- Firefox 18 Beta Release Notes
- Aurora 18: HiDPI & Touch Events (Mozilla Hacks)
- Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 18 (Add-ons Blog)