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Mozilla Firefox 3.6 gets oriented

By Sean Michael Kerner on October 13, 2009 2:22 PM

From the 'Nifty But Who Will Use It?' files:

The upcoming Firefox 3.6 release will include a number of interesting new features. One of them is support for machine orientation information.

What's that? Think iPhone with its ability to detect which direction the device is held in and if it's moving (for gameplay and for browsing).

The same tech will now be available for desktops, but not all desktops and with good reason. It's a hardware dependent technology.

A number of different phone vendors have the technology but what about desktops? Apparently Macbooks and a number Lenovo Thinkpads expose machine orientation as well.

The way Firefox 3.6 will handle the machine orientation info is by way of a simple javascript API that developers can access. The new javascript event enables developers to listen for changed in orientation and have their application respond accordingly.

It's a neat idea, but I'm not sure it makes sense on the desktop. For mobile phones, sure why not.

Does anyone actually move their notebook about in the same sort of way? Even a netbook is too bulky for that in my view.

Where it could be 'fun' I supposed is on airplanes where the plane isn't level. With machine orientation the browser could auto-magically adjust the slant of the resolution. I suppose it could also help in using the browser in some kind of embedded scenario as a game delivery technology overall too.

Where do you think machine orientation information could help desktop/notebook users?

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