The folks over at the Web Tech weblog have posted that Gecko (Mozilla’s layout engine) nightly builds now support a new “-moz-transform” CSS property. This property — a version of which is similarly supported by WebKit — is described as a “CSS property that accepts a list of transform functions (generic affine linear transforms) and then applies those transforms, in order, to the HTML elements the property is applied to.” Several examples of how to use the property (and descriptions of what it does) are available in the Web Tech post. “It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for CSS transforms. Much of the functionality once reserved for plugins can now be directly integrated into CSS and JavaScript.” More information and code samples are available in the Web Tech article.

Jan Odvarko writes, “Since bug 430155 (“new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel’s creator”) is now fixed, it’s possible to intercept HTTP traffic from within a Firefox extension!” Jan estimates that this fix will be part of Firefox 3.0.3, and points out that this feature is crucial for Firebug as one of that add-on’s features is the ability to display the response of any HTTP request made by a page. To this point, Firebug has been making use of the Firefox cache and XHR monitoring to implement this feature, but there are several issues with this approach that make it suboptimal. For more information about this new feature, including examples of how to make use of it in Firefox add-ons, read Jan’s article at his Software is hard weblog.