Last week’s big news in browser land: the release of an Opera development channel version: Opera Next. In April, Firefox announced its rapid release channel browser Aurora. And last week, Chrome/Chromium finally released Canary for Mac (Canary for Windows was released in July, 2010). What does this mean? In all three cases, it means we [...]
[9 May 2011]
Examples of CSS gradients are cropping up in the wild, and with good reason. CSS gradients: don’t require the additional HTTP request of an image file. are easier to modify than image files. “weigh less” than most image files. That’s the ideal, at least. In their current state, gradients are actually a hot mess. The [...]
[6 Apr 2011]
Running scripts in WebKit WebKit nightly builds now support the HTML5 async and defer script attributes. This makes it easier for web pages to load faster by downloading JavaScript without blocking other elements of the page. How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users Oh snap! Chrome comes out ahead in a recent [...]
[22 Sep 2010]
We’re going to do a baseline JIT for Firefox 4. It’s not done yet, and it hasn’t landed in any tree yet, so nobody’s tested it. It’s gonna give similar performance characteristics to Chrome. But we’re also gonna do tracing on top of that. What we discovered, is that for a lot of applications, especially [...]
[9 Jul 2010]
Two web development links for your enjoyment. FormData interface coming to Firefox An overview of the FormData object of XMLHttpRequest, and how you will soon be able to use it in Firefox. From Hacks.Mozilla.Org. Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text‘ Tips for mitigating, even eliminating the appearance of unstyled text when using @font-face. [...]
[17 May 2010]
So Apple announced the iPad, and it won’t support Flash. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Neither the iPhone nor iPod Touch support Flash. Indeed most mobile platforms don’t (yet) support Flash. Even the smartest of smart phones have limited processing power and storage space compared to laptops and desktops. According to Steve Jobs, Apple doesn’t [...]
[4 Feb 2010]
If Privacy Icons become widely adopted (and I think Mozilla is in a unique position to help make that happen) then the correlation of good companies using the icons and bad companies not using the icons becomes rather strong. If a privacy policy doesn’t include any icons it’s synonymous with that policy making no guarantees [...]
[13 Jan 2010]
Firefox 3.6 supports multiple file input. This new capability allows you to get several files as input at once, using standard technologies. This is a big improvement, since you used to be constrained to one file at a time, or needed to use a third party (proprietary) application. This will be particularly useful, for example, [...]
[10 Dec 2009]
Sometimes when developing and testing a site, you need to clear your browser’s cache. Clearing the cache is particularly important when testing SWF files. Browsers tend to hold on to those like a pitbull on a chew toy. Firefox makes it easy to clear your cache with its Clear Private Data feature (Tools > Clear [...]
[24 Jun 2009]
Using ExternalInterface and Firebug Lately, the day job has had me busting booty on a Flash/ActionScript project that makes considerable use of the ExternalInterface class. ExternalInterface allows Flash to communicate with its HTML container using JavaScript. It’s a groovy feature, but one that changes the development process a bit. Unlike straight-up Flash development, ExternalInterface requires [...]
[1 May 2009]