Articles by Dan Callahan
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Experimenting with WebAssembly and Computer Vision
This past summer, four students at a coding bootcamp in Los Angeles began experimenting with WebAssembly. The result, after six weeks of exploration, was WebSight: a real-time face detection demo based on OpenCV.
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Firefox 55: first desktop browser to support WebVR
Firefox on Windows is the first desktop browser to support the new WebVR standard (and macOS support is ready now in Nightly!) You'll find many new features for developers, as well as underlying platform changes that make Firefox and the Web faster and more secure.
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Intersection Observer comes to Firefox
What do infinite scrolling, lazy loading, and online advertisements all have in common? They need to know about—and react to—the visibility of elements on a page! Unfortunately, knowing whether or not an element is visible has traditionally been difficult on the Web. Most solutions listen for scroll and resize events, then use DOM APIs like […]
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Firefox 54: E10S-Multi, WebExtension APIs, CSS clip-path
The release of Firefox 54 completes the transformation of Firefox into a fully multi-process browser, running many simultaneous content processes in addition to a UI process and, on Windows, a special GPU process. This design makes it easier to utilize all of the cores available on modern processors and, in the future, to securely sandbox web content. This release also offers new support for the CSS clip-path property, and updates to the WebExtensions APIs.
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Firefox 53: Quantum Compositor, Compact Themes, CSS Masks, and More
Firefox 53 includes the first significant piece of Project Quantum, the Quantum Compositor for Windows. Dig in to features and under-the-hood improvements such as compact themes, new WebExtension features, the CSS mask property, and more.
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Firefox 52: Introducing WebAssembly, CSS Grid and the Grid Inspector
We cover some of the most innovative features to land in Firefox 52, including WebAssembly, CSS Grid, the CSS Grid Inspector Tool, an improved Responsive Design Mode, and Async and Await support for JavaScript.
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Previewing the WebAssembly Explorer
Unlike JavaScript, WebAssembly is a binary format, which means developers need new tools to help understand and experiment with WebAssembly. Discover the basic functions of the WebAssembly Explorer, which lets developers type in simple C or C++ programs and compile them to WebAssembly.
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WebAssembly Will Ease Collaboration on Next Generation Video Codecs
WebAssembly is a new, low-level format for programs on the Web being developed by Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, so it will eventually work in all browsers. This post explores how WebAssembly will play an integral role in the development of next generation video codecs. The new workflow represents a fundamental shift in Web development: The wall between “native” and the Web is falling, opening the door to dramatically greater performance on the Web.
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Async/Await Arrive in Firefox
The new
asyncandawaitkeywords—which make asynchronous code more concise, obvious, and maintainable—have arrived in Firefox 52. Currently available in the latest Developer Edition release, Firefox 52 is scheduled for general release in March 2017. -
Web Push Arrives in Firefox 44
Updated, 2016-02-20: The Push service now requires an explicit “TTL” header on requests to an endpoint. The article has been updated to reflect this. More details on the Mozilla Services Blog. Have you ever wished that a website could notify you when something important happened, even if you didn’t have the site open? Maybe you’ve […]
