Articles by Arun Ranganathan
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Firefox 4: An early walk-through of IndexedDB
Web developers already have localStorage, which is used for client side storage of simple key-value pairs. This alone doesn’t address the needs of many web applications for structured storage and indexed data. Mozilla is working on a structured storage API with indexing support called IndexedDB, and we will have some test builds in the next […]
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Beyond HTML5: Database APIs and the Road to IndexedDB
IndexedDB is an evolving web standard for the storage of significant amounts of structured data in the browser and for high performance searches on this data using indexes. Mozilla has submitted substantial technical feedback on the specification, and we plan to implement it in Firefox 4. We spoke to prominent web developers about evolving an […]
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Revitalizing Caching
Apparently, there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and the naming of things (or so Phil Karlton’s dictum goes). Earlier this month, we invited representatives of Twitter, Facebook, SproutCore, Palm’s webOS, Microsoft’s “Office On The Web”, Yahoo, and Google to talk to us about the former problem (amongst other things), though […]
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WebGL Draft Released Today
Even without a draft specification of WebGL in circulation, we’ve seen some promising 3D content using WebGL appear on the web, put together mainly through developer ingenuity and the fact that Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit are open source projects with early support for the technology. Today, the WebGL Working Group at Khronos released a provisional […]
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W3C FileAPI in Firefox 3.6
Often, web applications will prompt the user to select a file, typically to upload to a server. Unless the web application makes use of a plugin, file selection occurs through an HTML input element, of the sort <input type="file"/>. Firefox 3.6 now supports much of the W3C File API, which specifies the ability to asynchronously […]
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video – more than just a tag
This article is written by Paul Rouget, Mozilla contributor and purveyor of extraordinary Open Web demos. Starting with Firefox 3.5, you can embed a video in a web page like an image. This means video is now a part of the document, and finally, a first class citizen of the Open Web. Like all other […]
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cross-site xmlhttprequest with CORS
Editor’s Note: This article sure is a popular one! The Fetch API is now available in browsers and makes cross-origin requests easier than ever. Check out this Hacks post or the link above to learn more. XMLHttpRequest is used within many Ajax libraries, but till the release of browsers such as Firefox 3.5 and Safari […]
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(r)evolution number 5
We’ve just launched Firefox 3.5, and we’re incredibly proud. Naturally, we have engaged in plentiful Mozilla advocacy — this site is, amongst other things, a vehicle for showcasing the latest browser’s new capabilities. We like to think about this release as an upgrade for the whole World Wide Web, because of the new developer-facing features […]
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better security and performance with native JSON
The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) mechanism for representing data has rapidly become an indispensable part of the web developer’s toolkit, allowing JavaScript applications to obtain and parse data intuitively, within scripts, with lightweight data encapsulation. Firefox 3.5 includes support for JSON natively by exposing a new primitive — window.JSON — to the top level object. […]
