Articles by Dietrich Ayala
-
Introducing the Dweb
This is the first post in a series about the distributed/decentralized web, introducing projects that cover social communication, online identity, file sharing, new economic models, as well as high-level application platforms. All are decentralized or distributed, minimizing or entirely removing centralized control. You'll meet the people behind these projects, and learn about their values and goals, the technical architectures used, and see basic code examples of using the project or platform.
-
Always Right – An Extension Migration Story
A veteran Firefox add-on developer describes how he migrated Always Right, one of his personal must-have browser extensions, to the new WebExtensions API.
-
Vaulting Out of Walled Gardens with Fancy Links
Have you ever noticed that in Twitter, Facebook, Google and Pinterest some links are displayed quite fancily, with preview images, descriptive text summaries and other information? These links are fancy because of metadata in the source code of the web page itself, implemented specifically for the rich display of links inside each of these companies’ […]
-
Build and Run Firefox OS on Sony Open Devices
A few years ago, Sony released their first port of Firefox OS, for the Xperia E. Since then, Sony has started the Open Devices initiative to bring support for AOSP (the Android Open Source Project) to many more of its smartphones. The porting work described in this post is based on this effort and brings […]
-
Making and Breaking the Web With CSS Gradients
What is CSS prefixing and why do I care? Straight from the source: “Browser vendors sometimes add prefixes to experimental or nonstandard CSS properties, so developers can experiment but changes in browser behavior don’t break the code during the standards process. Developers should wait to include the unprefixed property until browser behavior is standardized.” As […]
-
Firefox OS, Animations & the Dark Cubic-Bezier of the Soul
I’ve been using Firefox OS daily for a couple of years now (wow, time flies!). While performance has steadily improved with efforts like Project Silk, I’ve often noticed delays in the user interface. I assumed the delays were because the hardware was well below the “flagship” hardware I’ve become accustomed to with Android and iOS devices. Last […]
-
Trainspotting: Firefox 37, Developer Edition and More
Welcome to Trainspotting, a new series on Mozilla Hacks designed to help the busy Web developer keep up with what’s new, what’s changed and what is coming soon in all of the Firefoxes, the Web platform, and the tools for building the Web! Mozilla develops Gecko and Firefox on a “train model” – we branch the […]