The Firefox team is showing great dedication in its quest to fix the little things broken on the web.

Animated GIFs are something of an eyesore. Not to mention so very 1998. That's why it's refreshing to learn that the next Mozilla Firefox -- version 3 is due to arrive in late September or early October -- will include support for two new animation techniques that will encourage a shift away from animated GIFs and challenge the use of Flash for smaller user interface elements (where it's unnecessary in the first place). These are experimental methods using data formats not yet widely supported. But they are an improvement over the status quo, and they point the way toward a future more reliant on forward-thinking web standards.