RT @stephendonner: We're pushing over 4GB/second (sustained, on GetPersonas.com), due to today's major update offer ...

Fun with Tooltips

A long time ago, at a far away company, I was given a project that required a not-so-usual use of tooltips. I had to implement multi-line tooltips like so: Luckily it only had to work in IE, and line breaks for tooltips in IE are just normal linebreaks in HTML, so nothing too complicated. But this got me thinking, what else is possible with tooltips? What are the limitations of tooltips? Is there any consistency between browsers? I've setup a ...

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Contribute to Mozilla Service Week

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 important that this site be accessible to everyone, but we have many higher priority bugs and features to work on, with limited resources. Display bugs are also an easy way to get started coding, without ...

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Cesium 0.1 Released!

  • By mhahnenberg
  • Comments Off

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 in turn an extension for Firefox. Developed at Yahoo!, it calculates a score for a web page's overall performance using a number of heuristics (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) based on web development best practices geared specifically toward decreasing page load times. But YSlow is not without its ...

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Improving Accessibility Through ARIA

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 Rich Internet Applications) The simplest definition of ARIA is adding UI semantics via HTML element attributes. Simply, you add things like '<div role="navigation">' or '<form role="search">' to specific HTML elements to give screen readers a better understanding of your content. The ARIA spec is huge (160 pages), ...

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Use Sprites Wisely

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 is important but you should always be concerned about how sprites and other hacks can affect user experience. More info: Rob Sayre - Sprites Vladimir Vukićević - To Sprite Or Not To Sprite

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Announcing Mozilla Service Week

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 stories Start today Check it out and pledge some hours. You can refine your pledge over time. Be sure to tag your various items with mozservice09. Mozillians have many “hi-tech” skills that they may not realize ...

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Socorro Moves to New Hardware

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, Inc after an intense week of consultation and analysis in March earlier this year. After auditing our existing system of hardware and software, it was apparent that we were woefully underpowered for what we were trying to do. While simply tuning PostgreSQL helped ...

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How Download Day Succeeded

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 people involved from start to finish who helped make the project a success and I felt this would be a great opportunity to give you an idea of what makes up a project like this at Mozilla....

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Geolocation in the Browser

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. If you're running Firefox 3.5, we'll replace that with a real map showing your current position. [caption id="attachment_385" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Geolocation finding me at the Mozilla office."]...

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Socorro Dumps Wave Good-bye to the Relational Database

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 database? That's the situation that we've got in Socorro right now. Each time we catch a crash coming in from the field, we process it and save a "cooked" version of the dump in the database. We also save some details about the crash in ...

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  • Posted April 20th, 2009 in Socorro

More entries

Making getpersonas.com blazing fast
I love speed. I'm a speed fanatic. Fast cars, planes, skydiving, anything involving triple digit MPH. But the thing that I like fast the most is websites. Millisecond response times, ...
Rebuilding the Plugin Directory
[caption id="attachment_864" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early snapshot of the Plugin Directory"][/caption] Most web browsers, including Firefox, offer the ability ...
getpersonas.com 2.1 has launched!
If getpersonas.com seems a little bit snappier today, there's a reason. Last night we released a new version of the ...
CSS Gradients Tutorials
hacks.mozilla.org has two great tutorials up about CSS gradients available in Firefox 3.6: css gradients in Firefox 3.6building beautiful buttons with css gradients Really awesome stuff, looking forward to ...
Mozilla Launches Facebook Security Quiz
Are you up for the challenge? This week Mozilla launched the security quiz on Facebook. We encourage ...

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