SMIL enabled by default on nightly builds!

Good news: SVG Animation (SMIL) support is now enabled by default in mozilla-central nightly builds!

SMIL support has actually been built into our nightlies for some time now, but until last week, it was turned off by default, using an about:config preference. But we're confident that it will be ready to ship in Firefox 3.7 and that it's stable enough for our nightly testers to give it a spin, so we've flipped the switch!

Brian Birtles has a nice status page, documenting what currently works and what's not yet supported.

In particular, SMIL animation now works for most SVG-recognized CSS properties. Colors, numeric values like opacities & lengths, and enumerated values should all work, and I'm working on remaining types (see below). With support for CSS properties, we can make much prettier animations now, with flashing colors and fade-in using opacity -- for example, this simple demo.

Marek Raida has some fun demos on his blog, too -- I especially like the 'good spirit' animation and the 'digging' animation (which requires scripting for handling mouse events).

Here's what's on the immediate roadmap for people working on SMIL:

• dholbert: Finish off support for CSS properties (bug 520239, bug 520487, bug 520488)


• jwatt: Support more SVG properties (e.g. bug 522267)


• birtles: Support syncbase timing - that is, animations whose start/end times are dependent on other animations. (bug 474743)

So, play away! I'm looking forward to feedback from nightly testers.