Taking a page from the mobile market, Mozilla's upcoming Firefox 3.6 will be able to detect the orientation of your laptop and other devices equipped with accelerometers capable of discerning up from down.

"One new feature that we're including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for webpages to access machine orientation information if it's available," wrote Christopher Blizzard, a Mozilla evangelist. "Many modern MacBooks and ThinkPads contain devices and drivers that expose this information. We've added support for Linux, Macs, and some ThinkPads where driver and devices are available."

It remains to be seen if there would be much interest for this from those who lug around 17-inch notebooks, but it could open up a whole new world of Web-based gaming for netbook owners. Given the portability and light-weight design of 8.9-inch and even 10.1-inch netbooks, along with a growing install-base, Firefox may have a leg up on the competition in the next round of browser wars.