What’s new in Aurora 6?

The most notable addition to this new Aurora are the <progress> element, window.matchMedia API, better APIs for binary data, Server-Sent Events as well as the return of WebSockets.

Aurora 6 has been published last week and can be downloaded from firefox.com/channel.

The <progress> element





This element can be used to give a visual cue of something in progress in the page. System progress bars are being used, which means that users of MacOS and Linux will see something different than what is pictured here.

matchMedia

window.matchMedia() is the javascript equivalent of CSS Media Queries.



Binary data APIs improvements

XHR2 responseType and response attributes allow getting the response from an XHR in the form of efficient Blob or ArrayBuffer.

FileReader.readAsArrayBuffer() allow reading files and get the response as an ArrayBuffer.

BlobBuilder allow concatenating multiple blobs as well as text and ArrayBuffer into a single Blob.

Expect to see even more improvements in this area in Aurora 7.

Server Sent Events

Server Sent Events are a mean for a server-side script to generate client-side events accompanied with data.



Messages generated on the server-side with a text/event-stream mime-type and consist of a list of events data.

data: data generated by the server data: this line will generate a second event

WebSockets are back!

WebSockets can be used to create an interactive communication channel between a browser and a server. They are already used to build “HTML5” chats, multiplayer games, and much much more.

Note that this API will be temporarily namespaced in prevision of upcoming changes to the specification.

Other Interesting Additions

Learn about what’s new in Aurora 6’s user interface on blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases and let us know what you think.