Web APIs Articles
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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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Always Right – An Extension Migration Story
A veteran Firefox add-on developer describes how he migrated Always Right, one of his personal must-have browser extensions, to the new WebExtensions API.
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Life After Flash: Multimedia for the Open Web
Part II: Flash delivered video, animation, interactive sites and, yes, ads to billions of users for more than a decade, but now it’s going away. Here's a compilation of resources that looks ahead at the open web technologies that have emerged to make web video, animation, and game development more performant and engaging than ever!
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Debugging Web Push in Mozilla Firefox
Web Push has a large number of "moving parts", systems and components that need to work together in order for your message to be successfully sent and received. One of the challenges with implementation issues is trying to figure out what went wrong. In this article, we offer suggestions and insight into best using and debugging the service.
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Internationalize your keyboard controls
Recently I came across two lovely new graphical demos, and in both cases, the controls would not work on my French AZERTY keyboard. There was the wonderful WebGL 2 technological demo After The Flood, and the very cute Alpaca Peck. Shaw was nice enough to fix the latter when I told him about the issue. […]
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WebGL 2 lands in Firefox
With the release of Firefox 51, WebGL 2 support has landed! WebGL is a standard API to render 3D graphics in the Web. WebGL 2 is based on the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification, and introduces new features – many of them aimed at increasing performance and visual fidelity.
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What’s new in IndexedDB 2.0?
The draft of Indexed Database API 2.0 is almost complete, providing several new APIs for fine-grained access to IndexedDB. The good news is that all these new APIs are implemented in Firefox and will be available in the release of Firefox 51 (currently available in Developer Edition, scheduled for general release in January 2017). In […]
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FlyWeb – Pure Web Cross-Device Interaction
FlyWeb is an experimental project we’ve been prototyping from within the depths of Mozilla’s platform division. It started as a side-project late last year, and since then a small, ad-hoc team has been working on implementing a “version zero” of the concept. We’ve been tinkering for the last 6 months on an implementation, and it’s […]
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What’s new in Web Audio?
The Web Audio API is still under development, which means there are new methods and properties being added, renamed, shuffled around or simply removed! In this article, we look at what’s happened since our last update in early 2015, both in the Web Audio specification and in Firefox’s implementation. The demos all work in Firefox […]
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Animating like you just don’t care with Element.animate
In Firefox 48 we’re shipping the Element.animate() API — a new way to programmatically animate DOM elements using JavaScript. Let’s pause for a second — “big deal”, you might say, or “what’s all the fuss about?” After all, there are already plenty of animation libraries to choose from. In this post I want to explain […]
