JavaScript Articles
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Porting "Me & My Shadow" to the Web – C++ to JavaScript/Canvas via Emscripten
Editors note: This is a guest post by Alon Zakai of the Mozilla Emscripten team. Thanks Alon! Me & My Shadow is an open source 2D game, with clever gameplay in which you control not one character but two. I happened to hear about it recently when they released a 0.3 version: Since I’m looking […]
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Firefox 69 — a tale of Resize Observer, microtasks, CSS, and DevTools
For our latest excellent adventure, we’ve gone and cooked up a new Firefox release. Version 69 features a number of great new additions including JavaScript public instance fields, the Resize Observer and Microtask APIs, CSS logical overflow properties (e.g. overflow-block) and @supports for selectors.
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Debugging Modern Web Applications
The Firefox Dev Tools team released an upgrade to the debugger’s source map support. It lets you inspect the code that you actually wrote. Combined with the ongoing work to provide first-class JS framework support across all Firefox devtools, these advances boost productivity for web app developers working in frameworks like React, Angular, and Ember and with modern tools like Webpack, Babel, and PostCSS.
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Debugger.html Call Stack Improvements
Debugger.html is an open source project, built on top of React and Redux, that functions as a standalone debugger for Firefox, Chrome and Node. The debugger is also being integrated into the Firefox Developer Tools offering. Currently it is available in the Firefox 53 release behind the devtools.debugger.new-debugger-frontend preference.
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Fathom: a framework for understanding web pages
Meet Fathom, a mini-language for writing semantic extractors, that you can use client- or server-side to extract meaning from the content of a web page. Scoop up all those ideas you threw away because they required too much understanding by the browser. We can do that now.
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A crash course in assembly
To understand how WebAssembly works, it helps to understand what assembly is and how compilers produce it. Third part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. We recommend starting from the beginning.
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Better than Gzip Compression with Brotli
HTTP Compression Brotli is an open source data compression library formally specified by IETF draft. It can be used to compress HTTPS responses sent to a browser, in place of gzip or deflate. Support for Brotli content encoding has recently landed and is now testable in Firefox Developer Edition (Firefox 44). In this post, we’ll […]
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ES6 In Depth: The Future
ES6 In Depth is a series on new features being added to the JavaScript programming language in the 6th Edition of the ECMAScript standard, ES6 for short. Last week’s article on ES6 modules wrapped up a 4-month survey of the major new features in ES6. This post covers over a dozen more new features that […]
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Compacting Garbage Collection in SpiderMonkey
Overview Compacting is a new feature of our garbage collector, released in Firefox 38, that allows us to reduce external fragmentation in the JavaScript heap. The aim is to use less memory in general and to be able to recover from more out-of-memory situations. So far, we have only implemented compacting for JavaScript objects, which […]
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Introducing Blast.js
After releasing Velocity.js, a highly performant web animation engine, I wanted to leverage that power for typographic manipulation. The question soon arose, How could I animate one letter, one word, or one sentence at a time without bloating my HTML with wrapper elements? If I could figure this out, I could create beautiful typographic animation […]