Firefox 1.5 Feature: Canvas
I think my favorite new feature in Firefox 1.5 is the inclusion of the canvas. A canvas allows you to dynamically create images based on simple ECMAScript syntax. Creating boxes, lines, or even more advanced shapes with shadings is no problem at all with canvases. You can actually compare canvases to Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in its rendering quality.
The really great thing about canvases is that they aren't just in Firefox 1.5! They are also being added to Opera 9. Furthermore, they have been in Safari for a while!!! So, once again that other buggy/nasty browser with version numbers 6 and 7 is shown to be useless!
What types of things are possible with canvases? Basically anything you can dream up, really. This includes interactive dynamics. That is, you can also interact with the graphics in a way which feels very much like Flash itself. Below are some links including demos and tutorials relating to canvases. The first of which is the wikipedia article which contains a number of canvas links to examples. The second link is somewhat of an old ray-casting looking example which demonstrates more than anything else the speed of canvas interaction. It's really fast compared to what you would have to do manually in JavaScript, though much slower than Flash for doing complicated graphics. I think we can thank the lightning fast Gecko for the speed it does have. As with all things on the web, this is slower in Presto (Opera).
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