Articles
-
Short sweet doc sprint for March
This past weekend, a small band of hardy MDN contributors pitched in for the first of a monthly series of doc sprints. This sprint was organized on fairly short notice, yet a significant amount of work was accomplished. Web standards docs Jérémie Patonnier created a bunch of API reference pages for MozMobileConnection, and SVG attributes […]
-
Gameleon and the map editor – a WebFWD project
More than 9 months ago, we were working on a web game, having all the nice HTML5 stuff like Canvas, WebSocket, CSS3. We were playing a lot with experimental code in NodeJS and Redis. We had all the nice scripts and plugins and quite a good architecture to make the game possible. We lacked one […]
-
WebRTC Data Channels for Great Multiplayer
WebRTC is getting great press lately for it’s amazing applications in voice and video communication. But did you know that WebRTC also has support for peer-to-peer data? Below I’ll talk about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of data channels, and then I’ll show you how we’re using them in BananaBread to support peer-to-peer multiplayer.
-
How to install packaged apps in Firefox OS – options and tools
I thought this would be a good time to show the options for developers how to install packaged apps, and as an extension to that, installing them on an actual Firefox OS device (more on Open Web apps, if it’s new to you). Why a packaged app? First and foremost, a packaged app is where […]
-
Notes on developing an API – Mobozi, a WebFWD project
HTML5 has made it easy to do a lot of really cool stuff on the mobile web, but one thing that is still pretty difficult is dealing with photos. Android has supported access to the device camera via the File API since version 3.0 and iOS opened it up last Fall with iOS 6. Allowing […]
-
Adding cursor swipe to the Firefox OS keyboard
In this article we will take a look at how to approach adding features to a core component in the system such as the input keyboard. It turns out it is pretty easy! Before we start, take a look at this concept video from Daniel Hooper to get an idea of what we want to […]
-
Announcing Firefox OS App Workshops
Madrid, Bogotá, Warsaw & Beyond Firefox OS phones will be available to consumers in several countries this summer, and they will be looking for great apps to install from Firefox Marketplace. If you know how to build mobile app experiences with HTML5 and JavaScript, we’re looking for you—especially if you’d like to develop apps in […]
-
Making WebRTC Simple with conversat.io
WebRTC is awesome, but it’s a bit unapproachable. Last week, my colleagues and I at &yet released a couple of tools we hope will help make it more tinkerable and pose a real risk of actually being useful. As a demo of these tools, we very quickly built a simple product called conversat.io that lets […]
-
Firefox Developer Tools work week wrap-up
Last week in Sunnyvale we had the first Developer Tools work week to include the recently-integrated Jetpack team ( for a slightly different take on the week, see Paul’s post. ). And what a week! I was a bit shocked by how many things I thought were just interesting ideas suddenly became real things that […]
-
Fantastic front end performance, part 3 – Big performance wins by optimizing fonts – A Node.js holiday season, part 8
This is episode 8, out of a total 12, in the A Node.JS Holiday Season series from Mozilla’s Identity team. Today we’re talking even more front end performance! We reduced Persona’s font footprint 85%, from 300 KB to 45 KB, using font subsetting. This post outlines exactly how we implemented these performance improvements, and gives […]