Mozilla Hacks

Hacks v2.0

Avatar photo By Jay Patel

Posted on January 6, 2010 in Featured Article and MDN

As you may have noticed, Hacks looks a bit different today.  That’s because we’ve completely redesigned the site. We wanted to make it easier for everyone to not only enjoy the new content we publish, but also to find past articles and demos. With Firefox 3.6 just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to rediscover Hacks!

Thanks go out to Chris Howse for his design expertise, Craig Cook and Matt Harris for their development work, and everyone else that helped out.  What a difference a redesign like this can make:

Hacks v1.0

Chris Blizzard started the Hacks blog back in June 2009 as part of the “35 days of Firefox” campaign to give developers a look at the latest features and web technology upgrades that were coming in Firefox 3.5.  Since then, we have continued to reach out to web developers and collaborate with them to put together amazing posts.

With a collection of helpful tutorials, updates on web standards, and technology demos, Hacks has become a popular destination for anyone interested in keeping up with innovation on the web.  We cover a wide range of topics, including everything from new possibilities with HTML5 to the latest version of Firebug. Developers get to see what is possible on the web today, while everyone gets a glimpse of what the future holds for Firefox and the open web.

Hacks has ignited a renewed focus on web developer outreach and collaboration. In addition to the blog, you can follow us on Twitter, watch videos and demos on YouTube, and even subscribe to the about:hacks newsletter. Our goal is to inform and inspire web developers to help us establish a strong Mozilla Developer Network (MDN).

We have big plans for MDN in 2010, and Hacks v2.0 is just the beginning!  Enjoy the new website and please share your thoughts and feedback with us…

Happy New Year!

About Jay Patel

I strive to make the web better by making sure those that develop and drive it are happy campers.

More articles by Jay Patel…

25 comments

  1. Eddie Giese

    Why no @font-face? I thought you guys might use this opportunity to show off the WOFF capabilities in 3.6.

    January 6th, 2010 at 13:20

    1. Jay Patel

      WOFF is definitely a possibility for the next revision. We wanted to focus on the content organization and user experience for v2.0. Maybe we can pretty things up a little in a future 2.x update? Thanks for the suggestion.

      January 6th, 2010 at 15:10

  2. Mathias Bynens

    I think I l’ – I think I l’ – I think I like i’ ’ike i’ ooooooooo

    January 6th, 2010 at 13:37

  3. Jon Rimmer

    Great stuff! Really a big improvement on the old design. It’s very useful to have a single place to come to to keep up with Firefox development, rather than having to get the info by trawling mailing lists, developer blogs, etc.

    January 6th, 2010 at 13:43

  4. Carlo Carmagnini

    I like the new design. It’s very clean, spacings are perfect. Excellent work! :-)

    January 6th, 2010 at 13:47

  5. lida

    i love firefoxxx :)
    thanks

    January 6th, 2010 at 13:56

  6. g

    not to be too hypercritical, but it looks more like Hacks v1.5 to me :D

    January 6th, 2010 at 14:14

    1. Jay Patel

      true… but v2.0 just sounds cooler. ;-)

      January 6th, 2010 at 15:11

    2. John Faulds

      I agree. I think ‘completely redesigned’ is a bit inaccurate. I think this is more of a refinement than a redesign.

      January 6th, 2010 at 17:51

  7. sombriks

    i like the new-looking

    January 6th, 2010 at 14:21

  8. Daniel Nautré

    It really looks great.

    January 6th, 2010 at 14:33

  9. David Laurell

    Looks pretty nice, but why aren’t you using more HTML5 tags? The video tags seems to have disappeared. You could also improve the semantic stuff like replacing abbr with time etc.

    January 6th, 2010 at 14:44

    1. Alix Franquet

      The video tags did disappear from some of the posts during the update, we’re fixing them right now, they’ll be back soon. Thanks for the other suggestions!

      January 6th, 2010 at 15:05

  10. Jane Finette

    Many congrats — looks FAB!! Congrats!

    January 6th, 2010 at 14:44

  11. James John Malcolm

    Love the new Demo page, the homepage & the added home-on-hover!

    January 6th, 2010 at 15:45

  12. Justin Dolske

    Might be nice, at some point, to have a list of demos sorted/tagged by technology. That would allow folks to easily find, say, demos for video, webgl, etc.

    January 6th, 2010 at 17:52

    1. Jay Patel

      You can always just click a category to see a list of relevant articles and demos together.

      We considered separating out the demos completely from articles, but managing two sets of categories created a few design challenges this round.

      We will definitely improve the filtering and sorting for the next rev. Thanks for the suggestion Justin!

      January 6th, 2010 at 18:06

  13. Lim Chee Aun

    Note that the ‘establish a strong Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)’ hyperlink is lacking a colon punctuation. And the site looks good!

    January 6th, 2010 at 17:54

    1. Jay Patel

      Thanks… fixed the link.

      January 6th, 2010 at 18:00

  14. Ken Saunders

    Great job! I love the demos feature. And good idea about giving the newsletter sign up high visibility.

    Is it just being anal and hyper-accurate, or signs of OCD to provide criticism about the statement “completely redesigned”?
    Select level of sarcasm > 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-OFF THE CHARTS

    Because of the initial campaign “Upgrade the Web in 35 days”, I thought that this was a temporary gig. I’m glad that it’s still going and progressing.
    I’ve learned quite a bit from Hacks and I’ve been inspired to explore and put into use some of the things that I’ve learned here that I probably wouldn’t have bothered with for a few more years if ever.

    Can that be used as a measure of success for Hacks?
    I’m not too sure. You’ll have to contact my attorney and manager I suppose to use that in any ads.

    Thanks guys and gals. You rock!

    January 7th, 2010 at 01:35

  15. Jesper Kristensen

    Looks great, except the flashing ShareThis button, which is quite annoying. It’s like those distracting flash adds the web had before flashblock came around.

    January 7th, 2010 at 11:00

    1. Jay Patel

      I’m experimenting with the dynamic vs static sharethis icon to see which one works better. I agree that the animated icon is a bit annoying… I’m going to switch to the regular one soon.

      January 8th, 2010 at 14:46

  16. Daniel Glazman

    Hi Jay. t

    The ✩ entity in the element appears correctly in the browser’s titlebar but NOT in my tab’s label… See http://pikchur.com/LY3

    January 11th, 2010 at 04:22

    1. Jay Patel

      Alix is seeing the same thing, but many others are not. It’s WFM on Windows 7. This is probably due to OS (title) vs browser (tab) character encoding… are both UTF-8?

      January 12th, 2010 at 11:37

  17. Daniel Glazman

    Jay, to be more precise, tab is ok in Mac OS X FF3.5.7 FRENCH, but NOK in FF3.7a1pre EN-US…

    January 12th, 2010 at 12:37

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