Robert O’Callahan is a full-time employee of the Mozilla Foundation and has been contributing to Netscape which became the Firefox browser since 1999.

Mozilla has a development team of 5 people in Auckland, New Zealand, led by Robert.

What is coming up with Firefox 3?

Animated PNG

This is one of the restrictions at the moment, you can use animated .GIF’s but these have no alpha channel.

Support for SVG

SVG is a scalable vector graphic which is a image file format which is scalable and supports certain other functionality you won’t get from a JPG or GIF.

Canvas

Will support 3D graphics natively in the browser.

Typography

Must better support for advanced typography such as ligature and kerning which will automatically be applied on Mac and will be applied on Windows on text over a certain size. This is a big thing, as nearly all web fonts look terrible on Windows when you make the text size bigger, say for a title.

MathML

Built in support for MathML which is an XML mark up language for displaying mathematical formulae.

Video in the Browser

Native support for video in the browser. No plug-ins required!This is all using open standards. This will be an HTML video element and extends to streaming video and audio as well and looks quite cool.

The overriding theme is that Mozilla want everything to be open standards and available to everyone. They also don’t want to restrict what’s possible, but then allow users to customise the browser, so they can still personalise their browser experience.

Other stuff coming up are; optional colour management, better DPI awareness, custom protocol handlers (so for example, all mailto: links open up in Gmail automatically as a new message), this includes creating your own protocols and handlers, tagging of bookmarks, automated malware detection to supplement the existing phising detection (based on a database maintained by Google).

Great presentation, thanks Robert.