Firefox 3 support, WebUI Studio Service Pack 2, and more.

I have just realized that it has been almost 1.5 months since my last blog post. That must be due to the overwhelming busy in the preparation for the TechEd event that we attended last month. Well, “roller coaster” season has passed, and we’re now back at the full speed heading to our next target.

In case you are not aware, Mozilla has recently released Firefox 3.0. While it promised some cool features, and nice enhancements in DOM and CSS area, it contains a dozens of breaking and regression. It’s not so surprising, as we have constantly experienced the breaking from one major version to another. For instance, the onblur event is no longer working properly. Another example, FireFox no longer recognizes <font face=”Webdings”>. It doesn’t even work if you put it in the style of DIV. So what does that mean? Say bye-bye to imageless solution that used Unicode font to display nice Web icons.

Despite of several breaking changes in FF3 that affect our products, we have tested that 95% of major functions are working as expected. You might, however, notice several minor layout issues such as shrinked column header in WebGrid and weird sorting indicator. But, nothing to worry – as we have planned the Firefox 3 support to be steadily availabe in this month’s hotfix (or possibly inclusion in Service Pack 2).

On the other hand, we have also aware on several new browsers release such as IE8, although still in beta. There is also Opera 9.5 – finally – after a long beta. Fortunately, unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera are much better in maintaining compatibilities and less regression. I personally have tested our UIs on both IE8 and Opera 9.5 — both worked flawlessly.

WebUI Studio.NET 2008 in Internet Explorer 8 (note: Emulate IE7 is turned off).

WebUI Studio.NET 2008 in Opera 9.5.

Finally, just before landing to our next target for 2008 R2, we plan to release Service Pack 2 for WebUI Studio.NET 2008 R1 by sometime next week, which includes all latest hotfixes, several nice enhancements in WebAqua, WebScheduler and WebGrid, plus some cool samples.

Best Regards,
Jimmy.