Articles
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Lessons learned from the A-Frame category in the js13kGames competition
With the Global Game Jam weekend ahead, it’s a great time to consider building with WebVR and A-Frame. The js13kGames 2017 competition ended back in September last year, but the game devs who built playable WebVR entries limited to just 13 kilobytes learned a lot along the way. Here's a look at their learnings - and their code! And if you're looking for a new 3D challenge – Mozilla recently launched the WebVR Medieval Fantasy Experience Challenge, which is open now till the end of February.
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Introducing the MDN Product Advisory Board: actions and impressions from our first meeting
A report from the first in-person meeting of the MDN Product Advisory Board (PAB) held earlier this month. The goal of the MDN Product Advisory Board is to provide guidance that helps MDN be the best reference for web developers. In 2018, MDN users can look forward to a renewed focus on interactive samples and ongoing work around the MDN compatibility data project. Want to get more involved?
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Firefox 58: The Quantum Era Continues
2017 was a big year for Mozilla, culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, a massive multi-year re-tooling of the browser focused on speed, and laying the groundwork for 2018 releases. Here's a roundup of some of the goodies in Firefox 58: including Off-Main-Thread Painting (OTMP) and other Gecko engine performance improvements, new support for CSS `font-display`, new Add to Home screen support in Firefox for Android, and more.
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Paying it forward at Global Diversity CFP Day
Global Diversity CFP Day takes place on Saturday, February 3, 2018. It’s a decentralized, locally organized free event that's a safe space for people to get started as technical conference speakers. The workshop is designed to help you craft and submit a talk proposal to an event with an open CFP and a stated Code of Conduct. Especially designed for people who are typically under-represented at tech events, free workshops will take place on the same day at dozens of locations all over the planet
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Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly
A detailed look at how we replaced the most performance-sensitive portions of the
source-mapJavaScript Library’s source map parser with Rust code that is compiled to WebAssembly. The results: The WebAssembly is up to 5.89 times faster than the JavaScript implementation on realistic benchmarks operating on real world source maps! Additionally, performance is also more consistent: relative standard deviations decreased. We hope that, by sharing our experience, we inspire others rewrite performance-sensitive JavaScript in Rust via WebAssembly. -
Making WebAssembly even faster: Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With streaming compilation, the browser compiles the code while the code is still being downloaded. Up until now, this was just a potential future speedup. But with the release of Firefox 58 next week, it becomes a reality. Firefox 58 also includes a new 2-tiered compiler. The new baseline compiler compiles code 10–15 times faster than the optimizing compiler. Combined, these two changes mean we compile code faster than it comes in from the network.
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Using Hardware Token-based 2FA with the WebAuthn API
To provide higher security for logins, websites are deploying two-factor authentication (2FA), often using a smartphone application or text messages. Those mechanisms make phishing harder but fail to prevent it entirely. Firefox 60 will ship with the WebAuthn API enabled by default, providing two-factor authentication built on public-key cryptography immune to phishing as we know it today. The API is available today in Firefox Nightly, and it's not too soon to start learning how to secure millions of users already in possession of FIDO U2F USB tokens.
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New flexbox guides on MDN
With Flexbox and Grid, plus the related specifications of Box Alignment and Writing Modes, we have new layout models for the web, which have been designed to enable the types of layouts we need to create. Whether your interest is in being able to implement more creative designs, or simply to streamline development of complex user interfaces Rachel Andrews' thoughtful materials will help you to gain a thorough understanding of the power of Flexbox and Grid working together.
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Actual Input Latency: cross-browser measurement and the Hasal testing framework
Editor’s Note: This post is also featured on the 2017 Performance Calendar. This is a story about an engineering team at Mozilla, based in Taipei, that was tasked with measuring performance and solving some specific performance bottlenecks in Firefox. It is also a story about user-reported performance issues that were turned into actionable insights. It […]
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A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab
Yuki “Piro” Hiroshi is a trailblazer and a true do-it-yourselfer. Whenever the Tokyo-based programmer gets irritated with any aspect of his browsing experience, he builds a workaround for himself and shares it with others. After authoring nearly 100 browser extensions, Piro recently took on his biggest challenge yet: migrating the legacy Tree Style Tab (TST) extension to work with the new WebExtensions API and Firefox Quantum.
