Web APIs Articles
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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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Firefox 66: The Sound of Silence
Firefox 66 is out, and brings with it a host of great new features like screen sharing, scroll anchoring, autoplay blocking for audible media, and initial support for the Touch Bar on macOS.
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Firefox 65: WebP support, Flexbox Inspector, new tooling & platform updates
Firefox 65 ships today with some notable Firefox Devtools updates, including the release of the CSS Flexbox Inspector, a new changes panel, and more. We're shipping CSS platform improvements and updates to a variety of JavaScript APIs. Firefox 65 supports the WebP image format, and support for AV1, an open and royalty-free video compression format, is shipping now in Firefox 65 for Windows.
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Performance-Tuning a WebVR Game
The smaller the app, the faster it loads. Here's how I reduced the size of a favorite WebVR game, optimizing font, audio, and image files to hit my target: 10-second load times in VR headsets.
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New API to Bring Augmented Reality to the Web
The WebXR Device API has two goals that differentiate it from WebVR: support for new user inputs like voice and gestural navigation, and laying a foundation for augmented reality on the web. This emerging specification aims to remove barriers so AR and VR content is accessible to creators and users alike.
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Visualizing Your Smart Home Data with the Web of Things
Today we're mashing up two very different applications to make a cool personal dashboard for investigating all our internet-connected things, and their behavior over time. We can use one of the Web Thing API's superpowers: its flexibility. This adaptability allows us to create a bridge between the Project Things gateway and Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Prometheus, a time-series database originally intended for supervising large clusters of servers.
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Using Hardware Token-based 2FA with the WebAuthn API
To provide higher security for logins, websites are deploying two-factor authentication (2FA), often using a smartphone application or text messages. Those mechanisms make phishing harder but fail to prevent it entirely. Firefox 60 will ship with the WebAuthn API enabled by default, providing two-factor authentication built on public-key cryptography immune to phishing as we know it today. The API is available today in Firefox Nightly, and it's not too soon to start learning how to secure millions of users already in possession of FIDO U2F USB tokens.
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A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab
Yuki “Piro” Hiroshi is a trailblazer and a true do-it-yourselfer. Whenever the Tokyo-based programmer gets irritated with any aspect of his browsing experience, he builds a workaround for himself and shares it with others. After authoring nearly 100 browser extensions, Piro recently took on his biggest challenge yet: migrating the legacy Tree Style Tab (TST) extension to work with the new WebExtensions API and Firefox Quantum.
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Using the new theming API in Firefox
Explore the new theming API for Firefox Quantum, and see what you can do with lightweight theming, dynamic themes, per-window themes, and a quick look at what's next for themes in 2018.
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Add Progressive Web Apps to your Home screen in Firefox for Android
Nowadays, practically all websites are built with responsive web design principles at their core: truly a dramatic improvement over yesteryear’s desktop-focused web. Over the last two years, a similar and complementary evolution has been happening: Progressive Web Apps (PWA), an umbrella term for a new set of standardized browser technologies that combine the low-friction nature of the web with the reliability and capabilities we typically associate with native apps, are gaining ground on mobile and desktop.