In an effort to bootstrap Mozilla Service Week, we’ve put out our first call for volunteering on Idealist.org. Want to exercise your CSS skills? We need help fixing IE 6 layout issues. We mark IE6 bugs as critical when they block a user’s ability to volunteer, but display bugs are less of a priority. It’s... »

Update: We’ve released Cesium 0.1.1, which can be downloaded here: http://people.mozilla.org/~rdoherty/cesium/cesium-0.1.1.zip YSlow is an invaluable resource for developers who want to ensure that their web applications are as responsive as possible to users. For those who don’t already know, YSlow is an extension for Firebug, another incredibly useful tool for web developers, which is... »

Accessibility is a pretty hairy issue in web development. When attempting to determine if your site is accessible, there are so many standards and recommendations to follow. 508, WCAG, WCAG 2.0, WAI Priority 1, 2 & 3. Well, now there is a new standard from the W3C called WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible... »

Vlad has good points about proper use of CSS sprites in his recent post on the subject as well as his comments on Ryan’s post. In short, even the simplest sprite images can eat up massive amounts of system memory — 50MB to even 100MB per page or more. Perceived speed for your site... »

We are excited to announce the release of Mozilla Service Week. It is a new website for our community that aims to: Promote technology related volunteering between Mozillians and their local communities Promote idealist.org and other existing websites that make it easier to connect and change your world Inspire your participation during Sept 14-21 through pledges and... »

What has two quad core 3GHz 64bit CPUs, sixteen gigs of RAM and makes the Socorro users happy? That would be the new hardware that the Socorro system moved to during a six hour operation on Thursday night. The new hardware was recommended by the folks from the aptly named PostgreSQL Experts,... »

The Download Day campaign won a People’s Voice Webby Award for online campaigns and a SoFIE award for Most Effective Online Brand Experience. As Mary said, NoBox came up with a great design, and the project was a great success. From where I sat, it was a pretty amazing view. There were many... »

Firefox 3.5 makes it super simple to discover the location of a user on your website  You can read more about it from Doug Turner or the official Mozilla page, but today I want to look at how to use the new API. The following image is a screenshot of geolocation plus Google maps. ... »

Let’s say we’ve got some twenty-five million chunks of data ranging in size from one K to several meg. Let’s also say that we only rarely ever need to access this data, but when we do, we need it fast. Would your first choice be to save this data in a relational... »

For the past couple of days I’ve been pondering our browser support chart that the Mozilla webdev team wrote up about a year ago. Since then, the browser ecosphere has changed considerably. Chrome burst onto the scene with no warning, IE8 was released and Safari 4 is up-and-coming. One of the toughest parts of... »

One of the most effective ways of speeding up a website’s render time is to reduce the number of HTTP requests required to fetch content. An effective method to achieve this is via CSS sprites, which is combining multiple images into one large image and using CSS to only display parts of it. Here’s an... »

The crash reporter has been given a new look, and the homepage has a new Dashboard. Our UX Engineer Neil Lee has applied some simplifications to the query form. This redesign was focused on the homepage and global navigation. Another new feature is that MTBF and Top Crashers By Signature can be exported in CSV format.... »