The Opera team have released a very ear­ly pre­view of their next brows­er, which fea­tures an updat­ed ver­sion of their Presto ren­der­ing engine. Opera 10.5 will sup­port CSS trans­forms and tran­si­tions, so I’ve updat­ed the demos on my old post, Ani­me with CSS and WebKit, to reflect that.

Last month the W3C released a work­ing draft of the File API, which defines the basic rep­re­sen­ta­tions for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and pro­gram­mat­ic ways to read files. The Fire­fox team have already imple­ment­ed much of it, and have released a series of impres­sive demos on hacks.mozilla.org, which you can see if you have a recent beta of Fire­fox 3.6 (or a night­ly trunk build).

The four demos shown to date dis­play dif­fer­ent (although relat­ed) aspects of the API, show­ing first mul­ti­ple file uploads, then a drag and drop upload inter­face, next adding progress infor­ma­tion (although this does­n’t work for me), then read­ing EXIF data from a JPEG image. You can imag­ine how these com­bined would be used for native drag and drop upload­ing to Flickr, for example.

The File API plays a big part in inte­grat­ing the brows­er more tight­ly with the OS, par­tic­u­lar­ly when com­bined with the drag and drop func­tion­al­i­ty, and I’m sure it’s only a mat­ter of time until the oth­er browsers imple­ment this. Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Fire­fox team for their work on this, and hacks.mozilla.org for some great demos.