Mozilla Planetarium showcases the power of CSS3 and HTML5

Firefox 4’s launch is only a few days away but the guys over at Mozilla still enjoy keeping us on tenterhooks with articles, videos and other small bits of information about their browser’s next big release. The last example to join this list is an awesome online planetarium where you can check all sorts of interesting facts about the Solar System.

The most outstanding thing about this planetarium is that it’s entirely coded in HTML5 and CSS3, as a demonstration of the amazing possibilities of these new technologies. The Planetarium showcases the use of CSS3 Transitions on CSS3 Transformations, which were already introduced in the Beta version of Firefox 4 and enable you to animate any HTML element on the page.

CSS3 Transitions are applied to CSS properties, showing changes as animations rather than applying those changes immediately. The result is a smooth, seamless animation that works on Firefox 4, Chrome and Safari… and doesn’t require Flash.

Download Firefox 4 and go for a walk in space now!