Developer Tools Articles
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Everything Is Broken: Shipping rust-minidump at Mozilla – Part 1
For the last year, we've been working on the development of rust-minidump, a pure-Rust replacement for the minidump-processing half of google-breakpad. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are, and how we made rust-minidump.
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Common Voice dataset tops 20,000 hours
The latest Common Voice dataset, released today, has achieved a major milestone: More than 20,000 hours of open-source speech data that anyone, anywhere can use. The dataset has nearly doubled in the past year. Mozilla’s Common Voice seeks to change the language technology ecosystem by supporting communities to collect voice data for the creation of voice-enabled applications for their own languages.
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Performance Tool in Firefox DevTools Reloaded
In Firefox 98, we’re shipping a new version of the existing Performance panel. This panel is now based on the Firefox profiler tool that can be used to capture a performance profile for a web page, inspect visualized performance data and analyze it to identify slow areas.
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A new year, a new MDN
If you’ve accessed the MDN website today, you probably noticed that it looks quite different. We hope it’s a good different. Let us explain! In mid-2021 we started to think about modernizing MDN’s design, to create a clean and inviting website that makes navigating our 44,000 articles as easy as possible. We wanted to create a more holistic experience for our users, with an emphasis on improved navigability and a universal look and feel across all our pages.
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Hacks Decoded: Adewale Adetona
Adetona Adewale Akeem, more popularly known as iSlimfit, is a Nigeria-born revered digital technologist and marketing expert. He is the co-founder of Menopays, a fintech startup offering another Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) option across Africa. We chatted with him about founding Menopays and the impact of tech solutions developed in Nigeria.
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Contributing to MDN: Meet the Contributors
If you’ve ever built anything with web technologies, you’re probably familiar with MDN Web Docs. With about 13,000 pages documenting how to use programming languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the site has about 8,000 people using it at any given moment. MDN relies on contributors to help maintain its ever-expanding and up to date documentation. We reached out to 4 long-time community contributors to talk about how and why they started contributing, why they kept going, and ask what advice they have for new contributors.
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Lots to see in Firefox 93!
Firefox 93 comes with lots of lovely updates including AVIF image format support, filling of XFA-based forms in its PDF viewer and protection against insecure downloads by blocking downloads relying on insecure connections.
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Getting lively with Firefox 90
As the summer rolls around for those of us in the northern hemisphere, temperatures are high and unwinding with a cool ice tea is high on the agenda. Isn't it lucky then that Background Update is here for Windows, which means Firefox can update even if it's not running. We can just sit back and relax! Also this release we see a few nice JavaScript additions, including private fields and methods for classes, and the at() method for Array, String and TypedArray global objects. This blog post just provides a set of highlights.
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Eliminating Data Races in Firefox – A Technical Report
We successfully deployed ThreadSanitizer in the Firefox project to eliminate data races in our remaining C/C++ components. In the process, we found several impactful bugs and can safely say that data races are often underestimated in terms of their impact on program correctness. We recommend that all multithreaded C/C++ projects adopt the ThreadSanitizer tool to enhance code quality.
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Improving Cross-Browser Testing, Part 2: New Automation Features in Firefox Nightly
It’s clear that WebDriver needs to grow to meet the capabilities of DevTools-based automation. However, that process will take time, and we want more developers to be able to run their automated tests in Firefox today. To that end, we have shipped an experimental implementation of parts of CDP in Firefox Nightly, specifically targeting the use cases of end-to-end testing using Google’s Puppeteer, and the CDP-based features of Selenium 4.
