S8080 Blog

We have been itching to tell you about this, but it’s been under wraps.

The Audit Commission will give delegates at this week’s Local Government Association (LGA) conference their first look at the new ‘oneplace’ website we have been working on. To be launched in December this year, Oneplace replaces the working title of Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA), giving independent information on the performance of local public services throughout England.

Visitors to the site will be able to access jargon-free, easy-to-read summaries of how local public services are doing in their area and around the country. There will also be links to detailed information from the independent inspectorates behind CAA – the Audit Commission, Ofsted, Care Quality Commission and Her Majesty’s Inspectorates of Constabulary, Prisons and Probation.

You can read more here and try out the prototype of the site. We’ll be able to show you more once the site is live.

The latest, greatest version of Firefox was released on the 30th June and so far, so good. Touted as the fastest (benchmarked twice as fast as V3), safest and smartest version yet. So what can you expect from the new version?

What’s New in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Reviews

The first tranche of reviews seem favourable – noting how solid and fast the release is. Here is a mini review from the Register and another from PC Advisor.