Firefox Nightly Gets Fullscreen Video, File Drag and Drop and More

Development versions of the Firefox web browser have picked up some very interesting features recently. Here you can grab the latest nightly builds for Windows, Mac and Linux

Full screen support for <video> tag

The video playback in Firefox now supports a full screen mode. Just right click on the video. Watch a tour of Firefox in Ogg Theora to test it out.

Pie-chart Progress Indicator

The new pie-chart throbber has been implemented so users don’t have to look in two places to get an idea of how far through loading a page Firefox is. Also means a few more users will be more comfortable turning off the status bar to unclutter the interface even further.

Updated WebGL support for 3D in Firefox

You can view some 3D demos here. You will need to go to ‘about:config’ and set ‘webgl.enabled_for_all_sites’ to true.

about:memory and about:support

Two new about pages have hit the nightlies. One gives you an overview of memory usage:

And the other is going to help people providing support over the internet. It even has a handy ‘Copy to Clipboard’ button:

New CSS background features

-moz-image-rect has been implemented, which allows you to slice a part of an image to use as a repeating background. This gets over the limitations of using sprites to reduce HTTP requests.

You can use it like this: background: -moz-image-rect(url(img.png), top, right, bottom, left)

-moz-background-size has also been recently implemented. This allows you to rescale the background images.

HTML5 File Drag and Drop

Instead of using the clumsy <input type=“file” /> tag, we now have support for picking up a file, and dropping it straight on the browser. Read more about the drag and drop implementation here.

Other notable changes recently:

• Mac now has proper full screen support
• Opening a new tab from a page will open next to the current tab, instead of right at the end of the tab bar (this was a personal bug bear of mine)
• CSS gradient support