What You Can Expect in Firefox 1.1

The upcoming Firefox 1.1 is not just a new version of Firefox. It means a lot of great new features and underlying state-of-the-art technologies.
Here's what you can expect in Firefox 1.1.

Noticeable Features

• Sanitize
  Sanitize is, perhaps, the most well-known feature in Firefox 1.1. It provides instant an instant wipe of all privacy and personal data at ease. It can empty out the browsing history, cookies, the cache, saved form information, and other privacy data. You can also choose what to wipe.
• Improved tabbed browsing
  1. If you view an image in a tab, the tab icon will be a thumbnail of the image.
  2. You can now drag-n-drop to reorder tabs without installing any other extensions. When you drag a tab around, a purple arrow will point out where the tab will be placed.
• Blazing speed back/forward
  Previously, Firefox re-renders the page when you go back or forward. Now it caches rendered results and show them directly when you go back or forward. Although this is convenient, it is considered experimental and unstable.
• FTP behavior on failure of anonymous login
  By default, if you don't specify the username and password for Firefox to log on a FTP site, and tries to login as anonymous. Previously, however, if it fails, it only displays an error message. Now it can ask for the username and password.
• Report broken website wizard
  If you spot a site that seems broken in Firefox (e.g. layout screwed up, broken forms, unexpected JavaScript behavior etc.), you can report it right from the Help menu. This brings out the Report Broken Site wizard, which guides you through easy and simple steps to report a "evangelism" issue, rather than going through the vanilla and thought-to-be-too-complicated-for-newbies-and-end-users interface of Bugzilla.
• New Options dialog
  Codenamed "PrefWindow V", this new Options dialog provides ease of configuration and follows multiple human interface guidelines (to be specific, GNOME and Aqua). It features smooth transition effects (fade and resize), and provides organized navigation.

Inside those dialogs

• Managers Are Searchable
  Now both the cookie manager and download action manager are searchable, to be more exact, filterable.
• Update Notification
  The update notification is improved, and will encourage users that are unaware of security issues to update. Here is a screenshot:
  

Under the Hood

• Advanced Graphics
  Firefox 1.1 supports both advanced bitmap and vector graphics. It supports <canvas> to draw out advanced bitmap graphics and SVG, which is a W3C specification providing resolution-independent scalable vector graphics.
• XForms support
  Firefox 1.1 will support XForms, a standard by W3C, and in the future will replace the current deprecated HTML <form> element.
• Site-specific CSS rules
  You can now use the rule @-moz-document to define site-specific CSS rules.
• More support on CSS3 and 2.1
  Now Firefox implements more CSS2 specifications, for example quotes nesting and counters. More CSS3 features are supported too, including :only-child, columns, overflow-x and overflow-y, cursors (including URI values), outlines, and a custom -moz-outline-radius.
• URI encoding persists as UTF-8
  URIs are now all requested in the UTF-8 encoding, which gets rid of the problems of URIs containing special characters and accessing the local filesystem.
• Translucent XUL windows
  This makes transparent windows possible in Firefox.
• Big extension improvement
  You can:
  • Have extensions outside the profile and application extensions directories.
  • Install extensions by dropping an XPI into the profile or application extensions directory.
  • Uninstall an extension by simply deleting its folder from the profile or application extensions directory.
  • Install extensions on Windows by setting a value in the Windows registry