Mozilla"s popular browser Firefox has an update coming rather soon, and although it may not be packing that many new features, it still has some surprises up its sleeve. Firefox 3.6 will be able to detect the orientation of your computer, and change its output to fit accordingly.
According to CNET, this new feature is being implemented for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it"ll help gaming; with many labyrinth-style games available, being able to detect which way is down will allow people rotate their laptop to play it. Mozilla made an official post on the new feature, with Christopher Blizzard saying, "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. As you can see from the demo above you can use it to figure out if the machine is moving and what direction it"s facing." He went on to say, "Originally built as something that we would include for our upcoming mobile browser release, we"ve made it available on desktop systems as well. 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."
A quick warning stated that some MacBooks detect the orientation information backwards, which Mozilla is apparently working on. To use the detection API from Mozilla, all developers apparently need to do is add the following event listener:
/* 3 values: e.x, e.y, e.z */
}, true);
There"s a video demo showing on the Mozilla blog (again, found here), if you"re interested in checking it out. Expect to see a beta of 3.6 released soon, followed by the final version later on in the year.