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Anonymous 15:36
Firefox 7, based on Gecko 7.0, will ship in the third quarter of 2011. This article provides links to information about the changes that affect developers in this release. Nightly builds of what will become Firefox 7 are currently available on the Nightly channel (that is, mozilla-central).

Note: Items listed here are tentatively slated for Firefox 7; however, they may be held for a future release if testing shows they're not ready by the time Firefox 7 is due to ship. Please keep an eye on this page to stay up to date on the plans for Firefox 7.


Changes for web developers:

  1. HTML

    • The HTMLHeadElement profile property has been removed, this property has been deprecated since Gecko 2.0. (see bug 664544 )
    • The HTMLImageElement x and y properties have been removed. (see bug 587021 )
    • The HTMLSelectElement add() method before parameter is now optional. (see bug 182279 )

  2. Canvas improvements

    • Specifying invalid values when calling setTransform(), bezierCurveTo(), or arcTo() no longer throws an exception; these calls are now correctly silently ignored.
    • Calling strokeRect with a zero width and height now correctly does nothing. (see bug 663190 )
    • Calling drawImage with a zero width or height <canvas> now throws INVALID_STATE_ERR. (see bug 663194 )
    • toDataURL() method now accepts a second argument to control JPEG quality (see bug 564388 )

  3. CSS

    • text-overflow is now supported.
    • The -moz-orient  property has been fixed so that <progress> elements that are vertically oriented have appropriate default dimensions.

  4. MathML

    • XLink href has been restored and the MathML3 href attribute is now supported. Developers are encouraged to move to the latter syntax.
    • The top-level <math> element accepts any attributes of the <mstyle> element.
    • The medium line thickness of fraction bars in <mfrac> elements has been corrected to match the default thickness.
    • Names for negative spaces are now supported.

  5. DOM

    • The File interface's non-standard methods getAsBinary(), getAsDataURL(), and getAsText() have been removed as well as the non-standard properties fileName and fileSize.
    • document.createEntityReference has been removed. It was never properly implemented and is not implemented in most other browsers. (see bug 611983 )
    • document.normalizeDocument has been removed. Use Node.normalize instead. (see bug 641190 )
    • DOMTokenList.item now returns undefined if the index is out of bounds, previously it returned null. (see bug 529328 )
    • Node.getFeature has been removed. (see bug 659053 )

  6. JavaScript

    • The Function.arity() function has been removed; use Function.length instead.
    • The JSON parser has been re-written for improved speed and compliance. This includes a fix for bug 572279 .

Changes for Mozilla and add-on developers:


Note: Firefox 7 requires that binary components be recompiled, as do all major releases of Firefox. See Binary Interfaces for details.


JavaScript code modules


FileUtils.jsm

  • New method openFileOutputStream() opens a file output stream, the non-safe variant, for writing. (see bug 662253 )

User experience changes

  • Extension options can now be displayed inside the Add-on Manager for both restartless and traditional extensions.
  • The destination of downloads is now remembered on a site-by-site basis. This data can be accessed using DownloadLastDir.jsm.

Changes to the build system

  • The ActiveX embedding API is no longer built and support has been removed from the build system. Supporting interfaces have also been removed, see Removed interfaces.

Interface changes

  • inIDOMUtils has two new methods, inIDOMUtils.getChildrenForNode() which returns a list of child nodes of a node and inIDOMUtils.getUsedFontFaces() which returns a list of font faces used in a range. (see bug 467669 )
  • The nsIMarkupDocumentViewer_MOZILLA_2_0_BRANCH interface has been merged into the nsIMarkupDocumentViewer interface.
  • nsINavHistoryObserver methods with URI parameters now require a GUID as well.
  • nsITelemetry has a new method, nsITelemetry.getHistogramById() which returns a histogram by its ID, and a new attribute, canRecord which when set to false disables recording of telemetry statistics. Telemetry statistics are no longer recorded when in Private Browsing Mode. (see bug 661574 and bug 661573 )

New interfaces

nsIDOMFontFace
nsIDOMFontFaceList

Removed interfaces

The following interfaces were implementation details that are no longer needed:
The following interfaces were removed as part of the removal of the ActiveX embedding API:
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