JavaScript Articles
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ECMAScript 5 strict mode in Firefox 4
Editor’s note: This article is posted by Chris Heilmann but authored by Jeff Walden – credit where credit is due. Developers in the Mozilla community have made major improvements to the JavaScript engine in Firefox 4. We have devoted much effort to improving performance, but we’ve also worked on new features. We have particularly focused […]
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improving JavaScript performance with JägerMonkey
In August 2008, Mozilla introduced TraceMonkey. The new engine, which we shipped in Firefox 3.5, heralded a new era of performance to build the next generation of web browsers and web applications. Just after the introduction of our new engine Google introduced V8 with Chrome. Apple also introduced their own engine to use in Safari, […]
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Flash-Free Clipboard for the Web
As part of our effort to grow the Web platform and make it accessible to new devices, we are trying to reduce the Web’s dependence on Flash. As part of that effort, we are standardizing and exposing useful features which are currently only available to Flash to the entirety of the Web platform. One of […]
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Time to get hacking – Introducing Rec Room
It’s no secret that the best frameworks and tools are extracted, not created out of thin air. Since launching Firefox OS, Mozilla has been approached by countless app developers and web developers with a simple question: “How do I make apps for Firefox OS?” The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still […]
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ES6 In Depth: Arrow functions
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. Arrows have been part of JavaScript from the very beginning. The first JavaScript tutorials advised wrapping inline scripts in HTML comments. This would prevent browsers that didn’t support […]
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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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Faster Canvas Pixel Manipulation with Typed Arrays
Edit: See the section about Endiannes. Typed Arrays can significantly increase the pixel manipulation performance of your HTML5 2D canvas Web apps. This is of particular importance to developers looking to use HTML5 for making browser-based games. This is a guest post by Andrew J. Baker. Andrew is a professional software engineer currently working for […]
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Firefox 4: easier JS form handling with FormData
This feature has landed in Mozilla Central (trunk) and only available with a Firefox Nightly Build for the time being. XMLHttpRequest Level 2 (editor’s draft) adds support for the new FormData interface. FormData objects provide a way to easily construct a set of key/value pairs representing form fields and their values, which can then be […]
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animating SVG with canvas and burst
Today’s demo is short, but it also includes a long screencast that describes how it’s put together. The demo’s author, Alistair MacDonald (@F1LT3R), is one of the maintainers of Processing.js and the Burst engine, which is the basis for today’s demo and tutorial. If you haven’t clicked through to his site, I strongly suggest that […]
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ES modules: A cartoon deep-dive
ES modules bring an official, standardized module system to JavaScript. With the release of Firefox 60 in May, all major browsers will support ES modules, and there is current work to add ES module support to Node.js, as well as ES module integration for WebAssembly. Lin Clark's deep dive illustrates how ES modules work, what problem they solve, and how they are different from modules in other module systems.