Firefox 17 release notes for developers

Firefox 17 shipped on November 20, 2012. This article lists key changes that are useful for not only web developers, but also Firefox and Gecko developers as well as add-on developers.

Changes for web developers

HTML

Support for the sandbox attribute on the {{HTMLElement("iframe")}} element has been added. (Firefox bug 341604)

CSS

Support for {{cssxref("@supports")}} at-rule defined in CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 has been landed. It is disabled by default. Developers can try it by setting layout.css.supports-rule.enabled to true (bug 649740).
Support for the CSS Selectors Level 4 pseudo-class {{cssxref(":dir", ":dir()")}} allowing selection of elements based on their directionality has landed. (bug 562169)
Support for the newly specified isolate-override value of the CSS {{cssxref("unicode-bidi")}} value has landed (Firefox bug 774335)
Our prefixed implementation of {{cssxref("box-sizing")}} now takes into account {{cssxref("min-height")}} and {{cssxref("max-height")}}. One step closer to its unprefixing (Firefox bug 308801)

DOM/APIs

Support for {{domxref("CSSSupportsRule")}} interface defined in CSS3 Conditional Rules specification has been landed (Firefox bug 649740)
Support for {{domxref("WheelEvent")}} object and wheel event have been landed (Firefox bug 719320).
Support DOM Meta key on Linux again (Firefox bug 751749).
On {{domxref("HTMLMediaElement")}}, a new method, mozGetMetadata, that returns a JavaScript object whose properties represent metadata from the playing media resource as {key: value} pairs (Firefox bug 763010).
Support for {{domxref("Range.intersectsNode")}} has been added again; it has been removed in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox bug 579638.
{{domxref("Range.compareBoundaryPoints()")}} now throws a {{domxref("DOMException")}} with the NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR value when the comparison method is invalid (Firefox bug 714279).
{{domxref("Event.initEvent()")}} has been adapted to the spec: it doesn't throw anymore if called after the dispatch of the event, it is only a no-op (Firefox bug 768310).
The non-standard {{domxref("XMLHttpRequest", "XMLHttpRequest.onuploadrequest")}} property has been removed (Firefox bug 761278).
The method {{domxref("XMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders()")}} now separates them with a CRLF (instead of a LF), as requested by the spec (Firefox bug 730925).

JavaScript

String object now offers Harmony startsWith, endsWith, and contains methods (Firefox bug 772733).
The String methods link() and anchor() now escape the '"' (quotation mark) (Firefox bug 352437).
Experimental support for strawman ParallelArray object has been implemented (Firefox bug 778559).
Support to iterate Map/Set (Firefox bug 725909).
Disabled ECMAScript for XML (E4X), an abandoned JavaScript extension, for web content by default (Firefox bug 778851).
__exposedProps__ must now be set for Chrome JavaScript objects exposed to content. Attempts to access Chrome objects from content without __exposedProps__ set will fail silently (Firefox bug 553102).
for...of loops now work in terms of .iterator() and .next() (Firefox bug 725907).

WebGL

The {{domxref("EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic")}} WebGL extension has been unprefixed. Using "MOZ_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic" will present a warning from now on. The prefixed name is going to be removed in a future release (Firefox bug 776001).

SVG

No change.

MathML

The parsing of the align attribute on {{MathMLElement("mtable")}} elements has been updated to treat optional spaces more correctly.

XUL

XUL key element supports "os" modifier which is Win key (Super or Hyper key) (Firefox bug 778732).

Network

Removed the non-standard feature XMLHttpRequest.onuploadprogress which was deprecated in Firefox 14.

No change.

Developer tools

Change JSTerm's $ helper function from getElementById to querySelector() (Firefox bug 751749).

User Agent

The Gecko part of the user agent string changed. The build date (which hadn't been updated since 2010) was removed, and the Gecko version number was put in its place instead. So Gecko/20100101 -> Gecko/17.0. This may affect you if you are doing user agent sniffing.

Changes for add-on and Mozilla developers

Interface changes

nsIInputStream
- : The available() method returns 64-bit length instead of 32-bit (Firefox bug 215450).
nsIDOMWindowUtils
- : The sendMouseScrollEvent() method has been replaced with sendWheelEvent() (Firefox bug 719320).
nsIFilePicker
- : The open() method, to open the file dialog asynchronously, has been added and the show() method has been deprecated (Firefox bug 731307).
nsIScriptSecurityManager
- : The checkLoadURIStr() and checkLoadURI() methods have been removed (Firefox bug 327244).
nsIRefreshURI
- : The setupRefreshURIFromHeader() method has a principal parameter added (Firefox bug 327244).

New interfaces

None.

Removed interfaces

None removed.