Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
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Black Box Driven Development in JavaScript
Sooner or later every developer finds the beauty of the design patterns. Also, sooner or later the developer finds that most of the patterns are not applicable in their pure format. Very often we use variations. We change the well-known definitions to fit in our use cases. I know that we (the programmers) like buzzwords. […]
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Introducing TogetherJS
What is TogetherJS? We’d like to introduce TogetherJS, a real-time collaboration tool out of Mozilla Labs. TogetherJS is a service you add to an existing website to add real-time collaboration features. Using the tool two or more visitors on a website or web application can see each other’s mouse/cursor position, clicks, track each other’s browsing, […]
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Capturing – Improving Performance of the Adaptive Web
Responsive design is now widely regarded as the dominant approach to building new websites. With good reason, too: a responsive design workflow is the most efficient way to build tailored visual experiences for different device screen sizes and resolutions. Responsive design, however, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating a […]
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Firefox Development Highlights – H.264 & MP3 support on Windows, scoped stylesheets + more
Time for the first look this year into the latest developments with Firefox. This is part of our Bleeding Edge and Firefox Development Highlights series, and most examples only work in Firefox Nightly (and could be subject to change). H.264 & MP3 support on Windows Firefox for Android and Firefox OS already support H.264 and […]
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Firefox OS – video presentations and slides on the OS, WebAPIs, hacking and writing apps
In August, Mozilla’s Director of Research Andreas Gal, and one of the lead engineers for Firefox OS, Philipp von Weitershausen, gave a couple of presentations in Brazil about Firefox OS. We’re now happy to share both the videos and the slides, in various formats for you to see or use, giving your own presentations! Videos […]
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Using the Vibration API – Part of WebAPI
As part of Mozillas WebAPI effort, we have been working with bringing a Vibration API to all devices that support it.
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localForage: Offline Storage, Improved
Web apps have had offline capabilities like saving large data sets and binary files for some time. You can even do things like cache MP3 files. Browser technology can store data offline and plenty of it. The problem, though, is that the technology choices for how you do this are fragmented. localStorage gets you really […]
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WebRTC comes to Firefox
As we mentioned in the Hacks blog back in April , WebRTC will be on by default in Firefox 22. getUserMedia (gUM) has been on by default since Firefox 20. PeerConnection and DataChannel, which enable video/audio calling and peer-to-peer data sharing, are what’s new in Firefox 22 (due to be released today). WebRTC brings real-time […]
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Introducing Web Activities
One of the more powerful things lately for apps on various mobile phones have been intents. Register your app for handling certain types of actions, or specify in your app what kind of support you are looking for, for the thing you are trying to do. This is especially important in the case of Firefox […]
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Live Editing Sass and Less in the Firefox Developer Tools
Sass and Less are expressive languages that compile into CSS. If you’re using Sass or Less to generate your CSS, you might want to debug the source that you authored and not the generated CSS. Luckily you can now do this in the Firefox 29 developer tools using source maps. The Firefox developer tools use […]