The Incredible, Rotating Firefox
October 13th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder10 Comments and 375 Reactions
Actually, it’ll only be rotating if you use it on a laptop that has a built-in accelerometer, similar to the one found in the iPhone. But still, the fact that the new version of Firefox (3.6) can recognize your screen orientation and adapt accordingly is awesome and signifies that we’ll see more and more accelerometer-equipped lappies in the future.
Oh, and it’ll also fuel more Apple Tablet rumors. Why? Because you can’t really imagine this feature being too useful on a regular laptop. It’s much easier to imagine it on a keyboardless, thin, compact device which you can easily turn into a vertical position.
This new feature was announced by Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard. “One new feature that we’re including as part of Firefox (
) 3.6 is support for web pages to access machine orientation information if it’s available. Many modern MacBooks and ThinkPads contain devices and drivers that expose this information. We’ve added support for Linux (
), Macs and some ThinkPads where drivers and devices are available,” he said.
It’s nice to see a flashy, innovative feature like this announced for Firefox; its recent iterations have been more about bug squashing and stability. To see what Firefox plans for 2010., check out this post.
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