Web APIs Articles
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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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Pointer Events now in Firefox Nightly
[Important Update: After this article was published, Pointer Events were disabled in Firefox Nightly because of a stability bug. They will be re-enabled after this bug is fixed. You can still test Pointer Events in Firefox by setting dom.w3c_pointer_events.enabled to “true” in about:config.] This past February Pointer Events became a W3C Recommendation. In the intervening […]
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How fast are web workers?
The next version of Firefox OS, the mobile operating system, will unleash the power of devices by taking full advantage of their multi-core processors. Classically, JavaScript has been executed on a single thread, but web workers offer a way to execute code in parallel. Doing so frees the browser of anything that may get in […]
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Streaming media on demand with Media Source Extensions
Introducing MSE Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a new addition to the Web APIs available in all major browsers. This API allows for things like adaptive bitrate streaming of video directly in our browser, free of plugins. Where previously we may have used proprietary solutions like RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) and Flash, we can now […]
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Let’s get charged: Updates to the Battery Status API
Web APIs provide a way for Open Web Apps to access device hardware, data and sensors through JavaScript, and open the doors to a number of possibilities especially for mobile devices, TVs, interactive kiosks, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Knowing the battery status of a device can be useful in a number of situations […]
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How TV Functionality Leverages Web Technology
The convergence of Internet-based IPTV, Video-on-Demand (VoD) and traditional broadcasting is happening now. As more and more web technology comes to television, the gap between web apps and native apps is rapidly narrowing. Firefox OS now supports the TV Manager API, a baseline of the W3C TV Control API (the editor’s draft driven by the […]
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This API is so Fetching!
For more than a decade the Web has used XMLHttpRequest (XHR) to achieve asynchronous requests in JavaScript. While very useful, XHR is not a very nice API. It suffers from lack of separation of concerns. The input, output and state are all managed by interacting with one object, and state is tracked using events. Also, […]
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Birdsongs, Musique Concrète, and the Web Audio API
In January 2015, my friend and collaborator Brian Belet and I presented Oiseaux de Même — an audio soundscape app created from recordings of birds — at the first Web Audio Conference. In this post I’d like to describe my experience of implementing this app using the Web Audio API, Twitter Bootstrap, Node.js, and REST […]
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What’s new in Web Audio
Introduction It’s been a while since we said anything on Hacks about the Web Audio API. However, with Firefox 37/38 hitting our Developer Edition/Nightly browser channels, there are some interesting new features to talk about! This article presents you with some new Web Audio tricks to watch out for, such as the new StereoPannerNode, promise-based […]
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Embedding an HTTP Web Server in Firefox OS
Nearing the end of last year, Mozilla employees were gathered together for a week of collaboration and planning. During that week, a group was formed to envision what the future of Firefox OS might be surrounding a more P2P-focused Web. In particular, we’ve been looking at harnessing technologies to collectively enable offline P2P connections such […]