Featured Articles
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Firefox 68: BigInts, Contrast Checks, and the QuantumBar
Firefox 68 is available today, sporting support for big integers, whole-page contrast checks checks for accessibility, and a completely new implementation of a core Firefox feature: the ever-awesome URL bar. Dan Callahan also reports on updated CSS scroll-snapping and other features, DOM API updates, next steps in the WebRender implementation, and more.
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Making a Clap-Sensing Web Thing
The Project Things Gateway exists as a platform to bring all of your IoT devices together under a unified umbrella, using a standardized HTTP-based API. We recently announced the Things Gateway and we’ve started a series of hands-on project posts for people who want to set up a Gateway and explore. In this post we’ll take what we’ve learned so far and build a real add-on for the Gateway. This add-on will provide a clap-sensing Web Thing that we can use to control our lights and other devices.
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Introducing sphinx-js, a better way to document large JavaScript projects
Go beyond the flat, alphabetical lists of JSDoc, and document your JavaScript libraries in a way that’s easier to learn. As a bonus, keep your old JSDoc syntax.
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Developer Edition 48 – Firebug features, editable storage, inspector improvements and more…
This week marks the release of Firefox Developer Edition 48. In preparation for the arrival of multiprocess Firefox and the deprecation of the Firebug add-on, we are porting Firebug features to the built-in tools. We have also made tweaks to the current tools that we’ll cover in this post. Firebug theme As part of porting […]
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Smoother scrolling in Firefox 46 with APZ
Have you ever been on Facebook or Twitter, merrily scrolling down the page, when all of a sudden, the browser appears to freeze? For several long seconds it just hangs there, and you’re not sure if it’s going to crash or not. Then, finally, something gives way, and the page jumps to catch up to […]
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Join Us for Firefox OS App Days
If you’re a developer interested in web technologies, I’d like to invite you to participate in Firefox OS App Days, a worldwide set of 20+ hack days organized by Mozilla to help you get started developing apps for Firefox OS. At each App Day event, you’ll have the opportunity to learn, hack and celebrate Firefox OS, […]
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Using window.matchMedia to do media queries in JavaScript
For people building web sites, Responsive Web Design has become a natural approach to making sure the content is available for as many users as possible. This is usually attended to via CSS media queries. However, there is a JavaScript alternative as well. Introducing window.matchMedia The way to approach media queries in JavaScript is through […]
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Firefox 71: A year-end arrival
Please welcome Firefox 71 to the stage! This time around, we have a plethora of new developer tools features including the web socket message inspector, console multi-line editor mode, log on events, and network panel full text search! And as if that wasn’t enough, there are important new web platform features available, like CSS subgrid, column-span, Promise.allSettled, and the Media Session API.
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The Baseline Interpreter: a faster JS interpreter in Firefox 70
Modern web applications load and execute a lot more JavaScript code than they did just a few years ago. While JIT (just-in-time) compilers have been very successful in making JavaScript performant, we needed a better solution. We’ve added a new, generated JavaScript bytecode interpreter to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 70. Instead of writing a new interpreter from scratch, we found a way to do this by sharing most code with our existing Baseline JIT. Meet the new Baseline Interpreter.
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Dweb: Building a Resilient Web with WebTorrent
The web is healthy when the financial cost of self-expression isn’t a barrier. This installment of the Dweb series describes WebTorrent – an implementation of the BitTorrent protocol that runs in a web browser. It’s written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. The distributed approach removes the cost of running centralized servers at data centers, allowing websites to scale sustainably.