Firefox Development Highlights Articles
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Saying Goodbye to Firebug
The most popular and powerful web development tool. Firebug has been a phenomenal success. Over its 12-year lifespan, the open source tool developed a near cult following among web developers. When it came out in 2005, Firebug was the first tool to let programmers inspect, edit, and debug code right in the Firefox browser.
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Remaking Lightbeam as a browser extension
You may have heard of browser extensions — the technology for building extensions in Firefox has been modernized to support Web standards, and is one of the reasons why Firefox Quantum will be the fastest and most stable release yet. This post looks at conceptual differences between a browser extension and a traditional web application, illustrated with some practical examples and tips from the author's experience developing Lightbeam.
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Firefox 56: Last Stop before Quantum
Here at Mozilla, we’re extremely excited about next month’s release of Firefox Quantum, with massive speed improvements, a brand new UI, and many Developer Tools upgrades -- available now in Developer Edition. But last week's general release of Firefox 56 features good news for developers now - including "headless mode" across all OSes, our modern new debugger, and much more.
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Firefox Quantum Developer Edition: the fastest Firefox ever with Photon UI and better tooling
Firefox Quantum is now available in Developer Edition, and this Firefox is fast. Today’s release is a major milestone towards our next-generation browser, and includes Quantum CSS, Firefox's new CSS rendering engine; Photon, a major UI refresh; and lots more speed and features you've requested.
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Developer Edition Devtools Update: Now with Photon UI
An update on all the changes and improvements to Firefox Dev Tools available now in the Firefox Quantum Developer Edition release. Beginning with the brand-new logo and new Photon UI, the DevTools suite is faster and more responsive to developer needs - including improvements to the Inspector, Console, Debugger, and Network Monitor.
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Building the DOM faster: speculative parsing, async, defer and preload
In 2017, the toolbox for making sure your web page loads fast includes everything from minification and asset optimization to caching, CDNs, code splitting and tree shaking. Understanding what goes on inside a browser is still the most powerful tool for every web developer. This article breaks down how
deferandasyncwork and how you can leverage the new keywordpreload. -
An inside look at Quantum DOM Scheduling
Scheduling is a significant piece of Project Quantum, which focuses on making Firefox more responsive, especially when lots of tabs are open. In this article, we describe problems we identified in multi-tab browsing, the solutions we figured out, the current status of Quantum DOM, and opportunities for contribution to the project.
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Designing for performance: A data-informed approach for Quantum development
What makes work on performance so challenging and why is it so important to include the user from the very beginning? This article explores the difference between technical and perceived performance, and describes an approach to testing and measurement that correlates the user's quality of experience with characteristics that engineers can benchmark.
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Quantum Up Close: What is a browser engine?
A web browser is a piece of software that loads remote files and displays them locally, allowing for user interaction. Quantum is the code name for an project we’ve undertaken at Mozilla to massively upgrade the Firefox browser engine. In this post, we'll start from the beginning, by explaining the fundamental thing Quantum is changing and why you should care.
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Firefox 53: Quantum Compositor, Compact Themes, CSS Masks, and More
Firefox 53 includes the first significant piece of Project Quantum, the Quantum Compositor for Windows. Dig in to features and under-the-hood improvements such as compact themes, new WebExtension features, the CSS mask property, and more.
