Seems like only yesterday I was using Netscape, then Mozilla, then Firebird, and finally what we today know as Firefox. Clearly the browser has come a long ways over the years. Rightfully so — it’s seen tremendous development time. But when was the last time you found some functionality with the browser that, while perhaps unimportant, was nevertheless one of the coolest things you have seen in a long time? Today, I think we might see evidence that Firefox 3.6 may be able to deliver on this.

Enter the upcoming Firefox 3.6 feature to watch. It will be able to detect computer orientation. Mind you we are not talking about being able to tell whether it likes PCs or Macs — rather the idea that if you move your computing device on its side, the browser will detect this and render things accordingly. So those of you with some Thinkpads and MacBooks will be able to take advantage of this cool technology.

In the end, I believe it will be tomorrow’s mobile devices (sort of like the iPhone), that will benefit the most here. And if Mozilla has its way, the new release of Firefox will be leading the pack as users discover just how cool it can be to have a browser that acts like the one on the iPhone, but with an open source twist.

[awsbullet:open source]