Firefox 17 for developers

Firefox 17 shipped on November 20, 2012. This article lists key changes that are useful for not only web developers, but also Firefox and Gecko developers as well as add-on developers.

Changes for Web developers

HTML

CSS

DOM/APIs

JavaScript

WebGL

SVG

No change.

MathML

  • The parsing of the align attribute on <mtable> elements has been updated to treat optional spaces more correctly.

XUL

  • XUL key element supports "os" modifier which is Win key (Super or Hyper key) (Firefox bug 778732).

Network

  • Removed the non-standard feature XMLHttpRequest.onuploadprogress which was deprecated in Firefox 14.

No change.

Developer tools

  • Change JSTerm's $ helper function from getElementById to querySelector() (Firefox bug 751749).

User Agent

The Gecko part of the user agent string changed. The build date (which hadn't been updated since 2010) was removed, and the Gecko version number was put in its place instead. So Gecko/20100101 -> Gecko/17.0. This may affect you if you are doing user agent sniffing.

Changes for add-on and Mozilla developers

Interface changes

nsIInputStream

The available() method returns 64-bit length instead of 32-bit (Firefox bug 215450).

nsIDOMWindowUtils

The sendMouseScrollEvent() method has been replaced with sendWheelEvent() (Firefox bug 719320).

nsIFilePicker

The open() method, to open the file dialog asynchronously, has been added and the show() method has been deprecated (Firefox bug 731307).

nsIScriptSecurityManager

The checkLoadURIStr() and checkLoadURI() methods have been removed (Firefox bug 327244).

nsIRefreshURI

The setupRefreshURIFromHeader() method has a principal parameter added (Firefox bug 327244).

New interfaces

None.

Removed interfaces

None removed.

See also

Older versions