Mozillianist
Desktop Apps with HTML5 and the Mozilla Web Runtime
Desktop Apps with HTML5 One of the best things about HTML is that it’s never “done”. HTML has been with us longer than most of the development technologies that we consider commonplace. (.NET, ASP, Java, PHP, etc.) The latest incarnation of HTML, HTML5 has been the source of a great deal of buzz in the software and information industries. When we say “HTML5″, we’re implicitly referring to the “stack” of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At Mozilla we often refer to this collectively as the “Web Run-Time”...
Mozilla Hacks - th...
MDN hack day tomorrow in the #mozldn space in London, England
We cleared the aftermath of yesterday’s epic Geek Quiz (photo proof here) but there is no rest for the wicked in the London Mozilla Space. Tomorrow (yes, that day after this one) we’ll run an MDN hack day here in 101 St. Martin’s Lane, London (5 minute footwalk from Leicester Square or 10 from Charing Cross). If you have no idea what hack day in MDN means, check out Tristan Nitot’s introductory post. There are still tickets available, so go to http://mdn-hackday-london.eventbrite.com/ and...
Getting snappy – performance optimizations in Firefox 13
Back in the fall of 2011, we took a targeted look at Firefox responsiveness issues. We identified a number of short term projects that together could achieve significant responsiveness improvements in day-to-day Firefox usage. Project Snappy kicked off at the end of the year with the goal of improving Firefox responsiveness. Although Snappy first contributed fixes to Firefox 11, Snappy’s most noticeable contributions to date are landing with Firefox 13. Currently in beta, this release includes...
DOM MutationObserver – reacting to DOM changes without killing browser performance.
DOM Mutation Events seemed like a great idea at the time – as web developers create a more dynamic web it seems natural that we would welcome the ability to listen for changes in the DOM and react to them. In practice however DOM Mutation Events were a major performance and stability issue and have been deprecated for over a year. The original idea behind DOM Mutation Events is still appealing, however, and so in September 2011 a group of Google and Mozilla engineers announced a new proposal...
Mozilla Hacks Weekly, May 10th 2012
Thursday again, dear readers, and time for more link suggestions from us in Mozilla’s Developer Engagement Team! At the end of this blog post, you also have all the Developer Engagement team members and what they work on. If you are interested in discussing more, contributing or taking part of our work, don’t hesitate to contact us or follow us on Twitter! Weekly links If there is anything you think we should read or know about, don’t hesitate to post a comment, contact us on Twitter or...
State of the Docs, May 9th, 2012
By rights, today’s edition of “State of the Docs” should be a little light, since it has been only a week and a half since a very productive documentation sprint. But our amazing documentation contributors collectively do not rest, and so there is still lots to mention. Outside the usual categories of docs, Tom Lowenthal created a page of privacy policy guidelines, with help from Jishnu Menon, along with a privacy policy template that you can fork on Github. If you missed the earlier Hacks post...
A look into a Firefox work week
This post was originally published as A Compendium of Awesome, and is a short summary of a Firefox work week. Posted here to give an overview, with focus on some details, about things happening with Firefox developement. Two weeks ago, the Firefox team got together for a work week in Toronto. It was amazing. Walking through a room with that many excellent people doing excellent things was inspiringhumblingunbelievable and the hits kept on rolling. The combined mobile and graphics teams cut the...
Weekly HTML5 Apps Developer Resources, May 8th 2012
Weekly Resources for HTML5 Apps Developers Articles Financial Times passes 2m users for its HTML5 web app Coding the future: HTML5 takes the internet by storm Utilize JavaScript messaging with postal.js Open Source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile JavaScript Style Guides And Beautifiers Spine.js vs Backbone.js HTML5 – You’ll never believe how LinkedIn built its new iPad app Resources 10 useful libraries for JavaScript developers HTML5.org – The Web platform: Browser technologies index...
May Dev Derby: Show us what you can do with Websockets
The May Dev Derby is underway. A monthly contest hosted by the Mozilla Developer Network, the Dev Derby gives you the chance to apply the technology you read about on this blog, push the web forward, and compete for fame, glory, and prizes. This month, we are excited to see what you can do with Websockets. Websockets allow you to send messages to a server and receive event-driven responses in real time, without server polling. But this is about more than just sending messages. Websockets have...
Firefox and the release channels
When we meet and talk to people, there are often questions about Firefox, how the release shedule works and what different channels we have for testing. Therefore, I’d like to introduce you to/remind you about them and also let you know where the most important testing is, both for you and for us. Firefox release channels Basically, we have four different Firefox release channels: Firefox Release The official release of Firefox. Firefox Beta Testing the next version of Firefox befire it becomes...
MDN Hack Day Tour would like to thank…
Attention UK hackers: MDN Hack Day London takes place this Saturday May 12, at the newest Mozilla Space, on lovely St. Martin’s Lane. Designers, developers, and friends are all invited to register. Hacky goodness guaranteed. Many Thanks Yous, One Mozilla It was a whirlwind week and a half for the crew of the Mozilla MDN Hack Day Tour in Latin America. Over the course of 10 days we visited four cities in four countries in the Conosur, the southern part of South America. We met hundreds of...
MDN downtime on May 8th, 2012
Update 2012-05-08: Thanks to last-minute magic by Mozilla IT, MDN won’t be completely unavailable after all. However, it will be running on a single virtual machine rather than three physical servers, so expect worse than usual performance during the time frame described below. Mozilla Developer Network will be down for maintenance and completely unavailable for approximate eight hours on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012, starting at 15:00 UTC (Tue 17:00 CET, Tue 11:00 US-EDT, Tue 8:00 US-PDT). It should...
Privacy policy guidelines and Template for web apps
Releasing an app is much more than just coding it. You are providing a service to people and they trust you with their data. With the amount of reports of apps “calling home” and storing and sending your data to third parties without your consent rising it is important to make it plain and obvious what you do. An easy to understand and plain Privacy Policy is not only a good service but it can make it easier for investors and users to choose your product over another. Ramping up developers to...
Mozilla Hacks Weekly, May 3rd 2012
Last week we took a little break from Mozilla Hacks Weekly since a number of us were traveling South America for our MDN tour. Now we’re back, though, so here are more link suggestions from us in Mozilla’s Developer Engagement Team! At the end of this blog post, you also have all the Developer Engagement team members and what they work on. If you are interested in discussing more, contributing or taking part of our work, don’t hesitate to contact us or follow us on Twitter! Weekly links If...
MDN First steps
This is a guest post by Jérémie Patonnier. This article was originally published in French. For two years now, Jérémie has been an active contributor to MDN. He organizes short doc sprints each Wednesday evening at the Mozilla Paris office. During those events, people ask a lot of questions about MDN and how to contribute. Here are the most common questions with the hope that they will help you to understand how to get involved with MDN. What is MDN? Please, don’t laugh, you have no idea how...
State of the browser in London, England
Last Saturday in London, England the State of the browser conference brought together developer advocates from almost all browser vendors to give the audience an overview of what is going on in the world of browsers. Browser panel with Bruce Lawson (Opera), Chris Heilmann (Mozilla), Martin Beeby (Microsoft) and Paul Kinlan (Google)My involvement was to talk about the state of HTML5 when seen from a native market’s perspective, show some cool new technologies that need our input and take part...
Doc sprint in [insert California cliché]
The last weekend in April saw yet another amazingly productive documentation sprint for MDN. A group of community members gathered at the Mozilla spaces in California, while others contributed remotely. The in-person group worked on Friday in Mozilla’s Mountain View headquarters, then spent Saturday and Sunday at the Mozilla space in San Francisco. Here is the obligatory “OMG! Awesome view!” photo from the roof deck in San Francisco, showing just some of the doc sprinters getting in the way of...
Aurora 14 is out! What’s new in it?
We have just released Firefox Aurora 14, which includes a number of improvements. If all goes well, these features should be released in 12 weeks as part of Firefox 14. Highlights There are a few of things we’d like to shine some extra light on here: Native Fullscreen Support in Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”: Firefox can now use the native full-screen mode and button. It animates and behaves properly in that mode, like any other well-integrated application. Great news for gamers! The Pointer Lock API,...
State of the Docs, April 24, 2012
The following is a sample of the changes to the documentation on MDN in the past four weeks. We expect a large flurry of activity during the Documentation sprint this weekend. If you’re in the Bay Area, you’re welcome to join in person for any part of the sprint, or join remotely if you’re elsewhere. Help needed A reader provided feedback that they don’t understand the domQuery example in the global Function object. It needs to be more clearly explained. Web standards docs Vikash Agrawal...
Weekly HTML5 Apps Developer Resources, April 25th 2012
Weekly Resources for HTML5 Apps Developers Mozilla Marketplace Partner Spotlights: Here are some profiles of app developers who are joining the Mozilla Marketplace. Kicksend Teambox Audiovroom MobBase Resources Create.js – a suite of tools for creating rich HTML5 experiences The State of HTML5 Video (with compatibility tables) Semantic client-side device detection with Media Queries Adobe’s new HTML5 Resource Center Facebook HTML5 Resource Center...
Announcing the March Dev Derby Winners
Three-D interfaces have been a fascination for as long as we have used computers. CSS 3D transforms allow you to add depth to effects, making more exciting and more engaging user experiences possible. By moving and rotating content in the X, Y and Z axes you can create beautiful transitions and interfaces without having to learn a new language. Last month, web enthusiasts showed the world just how exciting 3D transforms can be in the March Dev Derby. This was by ever measure our most...
Bret Victors “Inventing on principle” – and a few things it inspired
Bret Victor‘s “Inventing on principle” talk (also available on YouTube in case you want to skip ahead) from this year’s CUSEC is one of these hours of your life where you watch something and go “wow”: Bret talks about having a principle to follow when inventing new things. A principle that guides you in your decisions instead of concentrating on the product you want to build. He is not the first to do that and he mentions a few other people in the talk who took the same approach and got very...
Mozilla Hacks Weekly, April 19th 2012
It’s Thursday, and that means link suggestions from us in Mozilla’s Developer Engagement Team! At the end of this blog post, you also have all the Developer Engagement team members and what they work on. If you are interested in discussing more, contributing or taking part of our work, don’t hesitate to contact us or follow us on Twitter! Weekly links If there is anything you think we should read or know about, don’t hesitate to post a comment, contact us on Twitter or through any other means....
Weekly HTML5 Apps Developer Resources, April 18th 2012
Weekly Resources for HTML5 Apps Developers At Mozilla we’re really excited about HTML5 in general and the Mozilla Apps initiative in particular. Each week we’ll post here on Hacks with a list of resources of interest to developers building HTML5 apps. This week, we’ll start with a reference list of resources for apps and HTML5 Developers. If you find a link that you think should be included, please feel free to forward it to JStagner at Mozilla.com Mozilla Resources The Mozilla Marketplace Apps...
HTML5 conversion and information at Mosync hackathon in Stockholm, Sweden
It is not often that you find yourself in a disused nuclear reactor from the 50s to talk about state-of-the-art web technology. For about a hundred developers and designers this is exactly what happened last Saturday in Stockholm, Sweden. The R1 reactor played host to the Mosync hackathon organised to get developers to try out the Wormhole and Reload technologies, both of which make it very easy to build apps based on HTML5 or C++ for both feature and smartphones. Mosync asked Mozilla to...
MDN Hack Day @polyglotconf, Sunday May 27th in Vancouver BC
Right now my fellow Mozillians are either in Buenos Aires or on their way there to stage this Friday’s MDN Hack Day and the start of our whole South American tour. Me? I’m still at home in Canada working hard the next steps. I’m happy to announce the next MDN Hack Day event will be taking place in my own city, Vancouver BC as part of Mozilla’s sponsorship of the first ever Polyglot Conference at the end of May. So what’s Polyglot all about? From their site, Polyglot is “An entirely...
Mozilla Hacks Weekly, April 12th 2012
Time again to share some good reading tips from Mozilla’s Developer Engagement Team! At the end of this blog post, you also have all the Developer Engagement team members and what they work on. If you are interested in discussing more, contributing or taking part of our work, don’t hesitate to contact us or follow us on Twitter! Weekly links If there is anything you think we should read or know about, don’t hesitate to post a comment, contact us on Twitter or through any other means. The picks...
State of the Docs, March 30, 2012
This post got stuck in Drafts without getting published. Publishing now for the record. Tristan Nitot wrote a blog post describing how MDN does documentation the Mozilla way. It also gives a good summary of ways that you can help out. Upcoming events Plans are proceeding for the next MDN documentation sprint, April 27 to 29. The first day (Friday) will be the Mozilla office in Mountain View, California, and the weekend days will be in the San Francisco office. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay...
Mozilla MDN Hack Day on Tour, Heading South
The MDN spring tour continues with a trip into autumn in the Conosur – the southernmost region of South America. We’re heading south to participate in MozCamp, a gathering of the Mozilla Hispano community, and to meet web developers in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; São Paulo, Brazil; and Santiago, Chile. We’ll introduce some exciting new Mozilla projects like Boot-to-Gecko (B2G), Apps, Persona, and WebFWD and show some of our work on developer tools, Firefox, and the Add-ons...
Mozilla Hacks Weekly, April 5th 2012
It’s Thursday, and past April 1st, so time to present you with some good serious reading! At the end of this blog post, you also have all the Developer Engagement team members and what they work on. If you are interested in discussing more, contributing or taking part of our work, don’t hesitate to contact us or follow us on Twitter! Weekly links If there is anything you think we should read or know about, don’t hesitate to post a comment, contact us on Twitter or through any other means. The...
Enhance your HTML5 app with audio.
When we think of sound in an HTML application we might think of two things: We remember all those sites that started playing loud obnoxious background music when the page loads and then we think about music playing apps. Sound can however be much more: when building immersive app experiences it can be a crucial attribute. It can enhance tactile feedback or communicate activity or changes in state to the user. A ping sound when a new email arrives or a dismissive sound when there was an error...
HTML5 audio and audio sprites – this should be simple
As we’re having a HTML5 Audio developer derby this month, I thought it fun to play with audio again. And I found it sadly enough pretty frustrating. One thing I proposed in a lot of talks is using the idea of CSS sprites and apply them to HTML5 audio. You’ll get the same benefits – loading one file in one HTTP request instead of many, avoiding failure as files might not get loaded and so on. To test this out I wrote the following small demo using the awesome Music Non Stop by Kraftwerk. ...
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 for games to port to the web, I figured this was a good candidate. It was quite easy to port, here is the result: Me & My Shadow on the Web You can also get the source on GitHub. The port was...
April Dev Derby: Show us what you can do with HTML5 audio
The April Dev Derby is officially underway. A monthly contest hosted by the Mozilla Developer Network, the Dev Derby gives web developers of all levels of experience the chance to push the web forward, learn about new web technologies, and compete for fame, glory, and prizes. This month, we’re excited to see what you can do with HTML5 audio. HTML5 audio allows you to embed sound in web pages without forcing users to rely on plug-ins. In particular, this allows you to play sounds in games with...
WebRTC efforts underway at Mozilla!
Last week, a small team from Mozilla attended IETF 83 in Paris, and we showed an early demo of a simple video call between two BrowserID-authenticated parties in a special build of Firefox with WebRTC support. It is still very early days for WebRTC integration in Firefox, but we’re really excited to show you something that works! At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been experimenting with integrating social features in the browser, and it seemed like a cool idea to combine this with WebRTC to establish a...
Taking pictures with the Camera API – part of WebAPI
Through the Camera API, part of WebAPI, it becomes possible to take pictures with your device’s camera and upload them into the current web page. This is achieved through an input element with type="file" and an accept attribute to declare that it accepts images. The HTML looks like this: <input type="file" id="take-picture" accept="image/*" When the users choose to activate this HTML element, they are presented with an option from where they want to choose a file, where the device’s...