An Early Look At Internet Explorer 9

The Microsoft Internet Explorer Development team has made a post on their blog about the next instalment of the Internet Explorer Saga (rumoured to be the last Redmond based browser to bear the name Internet Explorer). Unfortunately there is no alpha build available with this post for us to play with, just the usual spiel telling us about how good IE9 is will be might be, and how it compares to the “latest” (as of 18/11/09) builds of other more popular browsers.

Full of “how are javascript engine is better than your javascript engine” talk, there isn’t much about the features it will include, or a reason why they dont just release a version 8.* will all these updates rather than just going for version 9, but it does highlight their focus on improving CSS support (including rounded corners), its defiantly worth a quick read and also a bookmark for those of you not already subscribed to the RSS feed.

You can find the post on the IE Developer Blog

Fonts….coming to a site near you

Just thought i would make a note to say Fonts are finally here….no more putting up with arial, being funky with verdana or stuck with times new roman…. as Firefox 3.1 continues to be flooded with features we have been waiting an age for, P0RN mode, faster javascript, html 5.
We are finally getting the ability to use what ever font we wish, as part of our website designs, as long as its a public font of course.

Firefox 3.1 allows us to use the CSS3 rule @font-face, allowing us to specify a font not necessarily installed on a visitors system. The rule alerts the visiting browser a non-standard font is required and is given a location it can download the font into the temp files to display the website as intended.

Syntax

@font-face {
  font-family: <a-remote-font-name>;
  src: <uri>;
}

Example

  <style type="text/css" media="screen, print">
    @font-face {
      font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold";
      src: url("http://developer.mozilla.org/@api/deki/files/2934/=VeraSeBd.ttf");
    }

    body { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold", serif }
  </style>

More details on this can be found over at the Mozilla Dev site , they have also publised a list for developers with all the features being added to 3.1