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hacks.mozilla.org

hacks.mozilla.org


Introducing the new MDN websiteAugust 27

This week, Mozilla unveiled the newly redesigned Mozilla Developer Network, the latest incarnation of MDC. The website has evolved over the years and we recently decided to change the name from Mozilla Developer Center to the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to better reflect the developer segments that make up our community and provide a better platform for engaging developers in the Mozilla mission and our plans for pushing the open Web forward. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some of the new features and content, in addition to some of the things you can expect in the months to come.

Our Mission
Upon first glance, the most obvious change is that the website has undergone a radical overhaul: from top to bottom, the entire MDN looks different. Even the tagline underneath the title is new: the Mozilla Developer Network is “a comprehensive, usable, and accurate resource for everyone developing for the Open Web.”

The idea behind the tagline is perhaps the biggest change we’ve made to the MDN: we wanted to create a place where all web developers – not just people who develop using Mozilla technologies – can find the resources they need to make the Internet at-large a better place. This fundamental premise drove many of the design decisions incorporated into the new MDN.

The New Home Page
One of our main goals for this redesign was to streamline and simplify the process of findi


Firefox 4: HTTP Strict Transport Security (force HTTPS)August 26

This article is about a new HTTPS header: Strict-Transport-Security, which force a website to be fetched through HTTPS. This feature will be part of Firefox 4.

How do you type URLs?

Do you prefix them with http:// or https:// systematically? Or do you just type example.com and let your browser add http://, like most of the people do?

If a web page provide has an https version but you access it through http, what happens? The http version of the Website re-direct you to the https, but you first talked to the non-encrypted version of the website.

These behaviors can be exploited to run a man-in-the-middle attack.

To avoid this, you may want to force your website to be visited through https to transform any http://x.com request to https://x.com (with no client-server dialog).

Sid Stamm recently integrated HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) into
Firefox. HSTS, specified in an IETF draft, allows sites to specify when they wish to be accessed only over https.

A website can specify strict transport security for their domain via an HTTP header sent by the server set during an HTTPS response:

Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000

Firefox 4: Drawing arbitrary elements as backgrounds with -moz-elementAugust 24


This is a guest post by Markus Stange. Markus usually works on the Firefox Mac theme implementation, but this time he went on a small side trip through the Gecko layout engine in order to implement -moz-element.

In Firefox Beta 4 we’re introducing a new extension to the CSS background-image property: the ability to draw arbitrary elements as backgrounds using -moz-element(#elementID).

<p id="myBackground1" style="background: darkorange; color: white; width: 300px; height: 40px;"> This element will be used as a background. </p> <p style="background: -moz-element(#myBackground1); padding: 20px 10px; font-weight: bold;"> This box uses #myBackground1 as its background! </p>

A -moz-element() image works just like a normal url() image. That means it’s subject to all the familiar background properties like background-position, background-repeat, and even





Firefox 4 Beta: Latest Update is Here – what’s in for web developers?August 24

The latest Firefox 4 Beta has just been released (get it here). This beta comes with hundreds of bug fixes, Firefox Sync and Firefox Panorama. Here is a quick overview of the new features for web developers.

HTML5 Video preload attribute supported in Firefox 4, autobuffer attribute removedAugust 24

This is a re-post from Chris Pearce’s blog. To comply with the HTML5 specification, we replaced the autobuffer attribute with the tri-state preload attribute. We encourage you to update your code. See the documention on MDC.

Late last week I landed support on Firefox trunk for the HTML5 video ‘preload’ attribute. This replaces the ‘autobuffer’ attribute, which we previously supported. If you were previously using the autobuffer attribute on your HTLM5 videos, you need to update to using the preload attribute as well.

The preload attribute provides a hint to the browser as to how much downloading is sensible for a given media. The preload attribute can have three values:

  1. “none” – suggests to the browser that it doesn’t need to load this media at all until the user plays the resource. The browser will delay any network traffic required to load the media until the users tries to play the resource, or explicitly loads the resource. I suggest using this preload value, along with the poster attribute, when it’s unlikely that the user will play the resource. This is probably most useful in a mobile environment, where data can be expensive.
  2. “meta