Articles by Chris Mills
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Level Up Your Cross-Browser Testing
Today we’re announcing a special opportunity for web developers to learn how to build and automate functional browser tests — we’ve partnered with Sauce Labs to offer a special extended trial of their excellent tools, and we’ve created a custom learning resource as part of this trial. 2016: The year of web compat In 2016 […]
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Make the Web Work For Everyone
Updated 2016/07/22: Commenters found a few data errors (thanks!) which have now been corrected. Millions of websites have compatibility problems on one or more of the major browsers, leading to a poor user experience. The web developer community can fix this. The web has changed immensely in the past 20 years. In 1996 there were […]
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Learning to code for the Web: The MDN Learning Area welcomes you!
As an aspiring developer or as a teacher looking to extend your knowledge of code, it can be difficult to know where to start with web technologies. In this blog post, we’ll be discussing why we have created the Mozilla Developer Network Learning Area to help solve common learning challenges and get you up and […]
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Firefox and the Web Speech API
Speech Synthesis and recognition are powerful tools to have available on computers, and they have become quite widespread in this modern age — look at tools like Cortana, Dictation and Siri on popular modern OSes, and accessibility tools like screenreaders. But what about the Web? To be able to issue voice commands directly to a […]
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Keep pushing it, with the W3C Push API
You are all familiar with this experience — a little bubble pops up on your phone without warning, containing a nagging message along the lines of “your insipidly cute little monsters are rested, and want to go and fight more battles!”, or “You’ve got unanswered friend requests from people you don’t know. Hurry up and […]
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Creating a mobile app from a simple HTML site: Part 4
How to polish your app and prepare it for market In previous sections of this step-by-step series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) we’ve created an app that loads multiple school plans from the server. What we have so far is functional, but still has a number of issues, including two which are major: […]
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Creating a mobile app from a simple HTML site: Part 3
Adding a server to separate the app from its data This is the third part in our series of posts about creating a dynamic mobile app from a simple HTML site. In Part 2 we separated the data from its visual representation, but the data is still contained inside the app. In this article, we […]
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Creating a mobile app from a simple HTML site: Part 2
Or: Making our simple app work for others In the first part of this series, which began late last year, we worked through the process of developing a school planner app. At this point (see the final code from Part 1) we’ve got multiple school plans displayed at once, and we’ve got Web, iOS and […]
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What’s new in Web Audio
Introduction It’s been a while since we said anything on Hacks about the Web Audio API. However, with Firefox 37/38 hitting our Developer Edition/Nightly browser channels, there are some interesting new features to talk about! This article presents you with some new Web Audio tricks to watch out for, such as the new StereoPannerNode, promise-based […]
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Exploring object-fit
On web documents, a common problem concerns the display of different sized images (or videos) in the same place. Perhaps you are writing a dynamic gallery app that accepts user submissions. You can’t guarantee that everyone will upload images of exactly the same aspect ratio, so what do you do? Letting the aspect ratio distort […]
