mozillaZine: Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is now available for download. Also known as the 1.8 Beta 4 milestone, this is the first beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers. The final release of Firefox 1.5, which will be widely promoted to end-users, is scheduled for later this year.

Please note that this is NOT for normal users, it will replace the current Firefox and will disable most extensions. However for developers it’s great! Looking forward to doing more E4X stuff, as well as SVG demos!

Release Notes for Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

Brendan Eich writes about JavaScript and it’s future especially concerning JS 2.x.

Brendan writes “With DHTML and AJAX
hot (or hot again; we’ve been here before, and I don’t like either acronym), I am asked frequently these days about JavaScript, past and future. In spite of the fact that JS was misnamed (I will call it JS in the rest of this entry), standardized prematurely, then ignored and stagnated during most of its life, its primitives are strong enough that whole ecologies of toolkit and web-app code have emerged on top of it. (I don’t agree with everything Doug Crockford writes at the last two links, but most of his arrows hit their targets.)”

* Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: JavaScript 1, 2, and in between

Get an introduction to ECMAScript for XML (E4X), a simple extension to JavaScript that makes XML scripting very simple. In this paper, the authors demonstrate a Web programming model called Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and show you how some new XML extensions to JavaScript can make it very simple.

AJAX and scripting Web services with E4X, Part 1, Part 2

ECMAScript for XML (E4X) has been introduced in the beta builds of Mozilla Suite 1.8. It is an extension to the ECMAScript standardized scripting language, and allows the use of native XML primitives/objects, in other words it is no longer necessary to embed XML as Strings.

Check out my latest E4X Examples at the Codepit.