Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
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Building A Paid App For Firefox OS
At first glance the Firefox Marketplace for Firefox OS may look similar to the Apple Store or Google Play Store but there is a key difference: it does not lock you into Mozilla or lock you into your Firefox OS phone. It enables you to sell a web app that will run on any open […]
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Reintroducing the Firefox Developer Tools, part 2: the Scratchpad and the Style Editor
This is part two, out of five, focusing on the built-in Developer Tools in Firefox, their features and where we are now with them. The intention is to show you all the possibilities available, the progress and what we are aiming for. In the first post in the series we discussed the Web Console and […]
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Event listeners popup, @media sidebar, Cubic bezier editor + more – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 33
A new set of Firefox Developer Tools features has just been uplifted to the Aurora channel. These features are available right now in Aurora, and will be in the Firefox 33 release in October. This release brings many new additions, especially to the Inspector tool: Event listeners popup Any node with a JavaScript event listener […]
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Detecting touch: it's the 'why', not the 'how'
One common aspect of making a website or application “mobile friendly” is the inclusion of tweaks, additional functionality or interface elements that are particularly aimed at touchscreens. A very common question from developers is now “How can I detect a touch-capable device?” Feature detection for touch Although there used to be a few incompatibilities and […]
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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 […]
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WebRTC enabled, H.264/MP3 support in Win 7 on by default, Metro UI for Windows 8 + more – Firefox Development Highlights
Time again for looking at the latest progress with Firefox. These posts are part of our Bleeding Edge and Firefox Development Highlights series – take note that most examples only work in Firefox Nightly (and could be subject to change). WebRTC enabled by default Previously, you needed to go to about:config in Firefox and set […]
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Gap between asm.js and native performance gets even narrower with float32 optimizations
asm.js is a simple subset of JavaScript that is very easy to optimize, suitable for use as a compiler target from languages like C and C++. Earlier this year Firefox could run asm.js code at about half of native speed – that is, C++ code compiled by emscripten could run at about half the speed […]
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Building the Firefox browser for Firefox OS
As soon as the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project was announced in July 2011 I knew it something I wanted to contribute to. I’d already been working on the idea of a browser based OS for a while but it seemed Mozilla had the people, the technology and the influence to build something truly disruptive. […]
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JavaScript on the server: Growing the Node.js Community
Cloud9 IDE and Mozilla have been working together ever since their Bespin and ACE projects joined forces. Both organizations are committed to the success of Node.js, Mozilla due to its history with Javascript and Cloud9 IDE as a core contributor to Node.js and provider of the leading Node.js IDE. As part of this cooperation, this […]
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Firefox OS Apps run on Android
At Mozilla we believe that apps and browsing are best viewed as cooperative and symbiotic, each better when working together. We are working to strengthen that relationship by building an apps ecosystem that is built using the Web technologies that so many developers are already familiar with. We built Firefox OS as a mobile OS […]