Developer notes for FireFox 2.0

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Tuesday, October 24. 2006

Posted by Ilia Alshanetsky in PHP

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Developer notes for FireFox 2.0

Unless you've been living under a rock you probably know that Firefox 2.0 was released today. Although, it seems that someone one on the Mozilla's team is definitely living in a cavern since the official siteis still linking to FireFox 1.5.

From a developer perspective Firefox 2.0 introduces a number of interesting features, which are explained in detail on the Firefox 2 for developers site . The thing that attracted my attention was the support for OpenSearch standard pioneered by A9 (Amazon), something IE7 also supports. The nature of this feature allows you to "push" your own site's search into the browser's search list for the searchbox, thereby providing a neat and consistent way to find content for the user.

This is surprisingly simple to do as you can tell from the excerpts taken from FUDforum code (yes, the next release will have support for this feature) which you can find at the bottom.

The other very handy addition to Firefox (something Safari had for quite some time) is the integrated spellchecker. However, the spellchecker by-default will only spell check text found within the textarea tag and not offer spelling suggestions for text inside <input type="text">. Fortunately, Firefox provides the means of telling the browser to spell check those as well via the spellcheck="true" attribute that can be added to the input tag or even the encompassing div and span tags. The same tag with the "false" option can be used to prevent spell checking of otherwise checkable form elements. As with the other option, this attribute will be found for relevant input boxes in the next FUDforum release.

CODE:

This first block is a link entry that should be located inside your block indicating to a browser that your site supports OpenSearch and where the definition XML file can be found.
How to add OpenSearch Support to your Site

PHP:



<?php header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8"); ?>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"> 

        <ShortName><?php echo htmlentities($FORUM_TITLE); ?> Search</ShortName> 

        <Description>Search <?php echo htmlentities($FORUM_TITLE); ?> Messages</Description> 

        <Image width="16" height="16" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">/favicon.ico</Image> 

        <Url type="text/html" template="<?php echo $WWW_ROOT; ?>index.php?t=search&amp;srch={searchTerms}&amp;eld=all" method="get"/> 

</OpenSearchDescription>

This next block, found inside open_search.php is the description of the search and a provider of the URL where the site's search mechanism can be found. The {searchTerms} token will be substituted by the user entered keywords. You also can use the optional element to provide a url to a favicon.ico image that will be used to put a little identifying mark next to the search option.

And this is all it takes, now when users visits your site they'll have an option temporarily added to their search engine list, which will be your site. At this point they can choose to use or even remember it for future use, allowing them to run searches on your site without having to visit the site first.

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JRB Technology on : Developer notes for FireFox 2.0

A FireFox 2.0 sneak preview has been released by the firefox team. The new 2.0 distribution has a variety of new features including a new look, built in phishing protection, better search capabilities, better tabbed browsing and more. After so many Internet Explorer security issues, man people decided to switch to firefox, making it [...]

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dactar on :

If someone in Mozilla's team live in a cavern, he's a wise man. Firefox 2.0 is not officialy released. Its disponibility by ftp seems to be for mirroring and packaging purposes, nothing more, nothing less. A good and quite old method where networks are happy.

David Salisbury on :

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2006/10/the_antirelease.html

Not released yet.

Ilia Alshanetsky on :

Once the official binaries are available to the public it may as well have been released. The bird has flown the nest, while I understand they are holding off on the official announcement, to let the mirrors catch up, the release is out. Saying its not out is not going to change a thing. It was already on Slashdot, BBC and god knows how many other news sites have already carried the story.

David Salisbury on :

Actually, it appears they may have released as the firefox main page points the the Fx2 download.

Still, there's been no mention of it on any blogs...

BOLK on :

http://www.beltzner.ca/mike/archives/2006/10/23/its_not_like_were_ashamed.html

kae verens on :

adding the "spellcheck" parameter is interesting - it means that FireFox could be on the slippy slope to proprietary standards. (btw - as I write this, I find that "FireFox", "btw", "slippy" and "spellcheck" are marked as incorrectly spelled).

adding the spellcheck parameter to an element could break the page's W3C compliance. I haven't heard much lately about W3C standards, but I'm sure someone will have something to say about it.

this page is quite wide, btw, because of your tags. I'd recommend you add the following to your css:
pre{width:90%;margin:5px auto;overflow:auto;min-height:30px}

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