Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
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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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CSS source map support, network performance analysis & more – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 29
Firefox 29 was just uplifted to the Aurora release channel. This means that it is time to report some of the major changes that you can expect to see inside of the Developer Tools for this release. Better Looking Tools In addition to new features, we have been updating the look and feel of our […]
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JavaScriptOO.com, to find what meets your JavaScript needs
The JavaScript Renaissance We all know the major players in JavaScript projects. MV* frameworks like AngularJS, Backbone, and Ember.js are inspiring a whole new breed of client applications. Utility libraries like underscore and lodash simplify constructs once reserved for academic exercise. And of course, the monolithic namespace jQuery is everywhere. The large teams and growing […]
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Five Potential Privacy Pitfalls for App Developers
Fighting for data privacy — making sure people know who has access to their data, where it goes or could go, and that they have a choice in all of it — is part of Mozilla’s DNA. Privacy is an integral part of building an Internet where people come first. “Individuals’ security and privacy on […]
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WebGL Deferred Shading
WebGL brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the web. Many features of WebGL 2 are available today as WebGL extensions. In this article, we describe how to use the WEBGL_draw_buffers extension to create a scene with a large number of dynamic lights using a technique called deferred shading, which is popular among top-tier games. live demo […]
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Localizing the Firefox OS Boilerplate App
As Firefox OS devices are launched in more and more countries and apps become available to users of all different languages, it becomes increasingly important to consider localizing your app. Making your app available in more languages is one of the best ways to make your app available and relevant to more users. As such, […]
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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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The Gamepad API
I’ve been fascinated by video games since I was a kid. From the Atari and Colecovision to the NES and Super NES, I’ve spent countless hours playing a variety of games. While my own video game playing has tapered off, I’m still interested in the issues and advancements surrounding gaming. I’ve watched the recent popularity […]
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Split console, pretty-print minified JS and more – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 28
Just in time for the holidays, the Firefox Developer Tools teams has some excellent new surprises for you to enjoy as you hack on holiday projects! It’s a pretty long list, so let’s get started. App Manager The App Manager continues to be a priority for the Devtools team and with Firefox 28, in addition […]
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Ember Inspector on a Firefox near you
… or Cross-Browser Add-ons for Fun or Profit Browser add-ons are clearly an important web browser feature, at least on the desktop platform, and for a long time Firefox was the browser add-on authors’ preferred target. When Google launched Chrome, this trend on the desktop browsers domain was pretty clear, so their browser provides an […]