MacBook and ThinkPad users rejoice
The engineering team over at Mozilla has been cooking up an
interested surprise for its user base in its upcoming Firefox 3.6 release. The
browser will now be able to detect a mobile device’s orientation as long as it
is equipped with an accelerometer that can tell which way is down.
"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," said Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla Evangelist.
"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."
Mozilla’s new device orientation JavaScript API is very
simple to implement and was originally built as something the team would
include in a future mobile browser release. The addition of the feature would
allow developers to build applications and listen for changes in a device’s
gravitational orientation.
According to Mozilla, the API is very simple to use and only
requires a simple event listener to be enabled. A short video clip of the
feature in action on a MacBook pro can be found here.
In retrospect, the last two months of developmental changes
in Firefox have been somewhat invasive and poky to user environment data. Not
only can a site use a JavaScript API call to geolocate a user through Google
Gears, it can also now distinguish the way a user is specifically holding his
or her device in physical space. Nevertheless, we should remind skeptics that
the “Allow” button is not the only option available to choose from if we are to
continue such intuitive technological endeavors.
