CodeDread Blog » Firefox

TypedArrays make me theoretically happy

Jeff — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:11:10 +0000

I’ve been busy at my day job not launching code, but over the weekend I had some fun converting kthoom‘s unzip/inflate algorithm from using binary strings to using Typed Arrays. Typed Arrays mean native binary data that is accessible to JavaScript in the browser, making operations like unzip much much faster (like 4x).

Unfortunately browser support is limited to WebKit nightlies (Chromium 11) and Firefox 4 at this time. To compound this, Firefox did not bother to implement FileReader.readAsArrayBuffer() which means you can’t use the File API to read in binary data yet… uh… WTF? So basically I no longer support Firefox in kthoom. Oh well, the performance benefits cannot be ignored and they’ll eventually get there. Bug.

That’s not to say WebKit is all peachy-keen. You currently can crash Chromium OSX nightlies by creating an ArrayBuffer of unusual size and there are some issues passing ArrayBuffers into web workers. This means that I disabled use of Workers in kthoom as a result and everything happens in a single thread. :-/

Oh, and you can’t easily convert bytes from TypedArrays into strings…

FML.

FXPointer Broken – You Can Help!

Jeff — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:53:05 +0000

I’m writing this quick entry as a desparate plea out there: Anyone who has an hour or two and knows some XUL-fu skills, can you please take a look at my FXPointer extension? This thing worked fine in Firefox 3.0, but unfortunately some change in Firefox 3.5 causes FXPointer to completely break the location bar. Every time I’ve tried to debug this problem, I’ve failed and I don’t have a lot of time these days to work it out.

If someone thinks they can help out, please download the XPI (using a different browser than Firefox), rename to .zip, unzip and start hacking. WARNING: This breaks the location bar in Firefox 3.5 – do not enable the add-on unless you’re going to help debug the problem.

Conceptually it’s pretty straightforward. In the content/fxpointer.xml XBL file, I bind to the id=”urlbar” and then modify the onTextEntered() method.

I put the source code up on a Google Code Project to make it easier for hackers to get the source.

Put The Students To Work!

Jeff — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:04:59 +0000

I’m delightfully surprised at how much attention Mozilla is apparently giving SVG. First they’ve hired jwatt to work full-time on SVG. Now it looks like some students also have an interest in advancing the SVG implementation within Mozilla. Great!

I don’t have the experience of a seasoned Mozilla hacker (only a couple patches years ago), but I do know that SMIL, SVG Fonts, SVG in CSS and SVG text-specific edge cases could use some work from a SVG 1.1 perspective. Hopefully they get in contact with jwatt, rlongson, roc, dholbert and birtles and get some ideas rolling…

Houston, the SMIL has landed

Jeff — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:38:53 +0000

This day was five-and-a-half years in the making: the initial patch to add SMIL support has landed on Mozilla trunk. SMIL is the Open Web way of doing declarative animation, I use it on my site here and there via FakeSmile. This Mozilla patch is partial support for SMIL within SVG only (not HTML). Note that SMIL support is disabled in the build by default, as roc says “we should enable it when we’ve got enough implemented that we wouldn’t feel embarrassed about shipping it. ” – but this is a significant step forward.

Thanks and congratulations go to Daniel, Brian and Robert! Also thanks to Erik and Ian for putting some SMIL tests into Acid3. Not that this had anything to do with it. Oh, no.

Opera has supported SMIL in SVG for a couple years now. Anyone want to place bets on who will be the second to release a browser that supports it? Mozilla? Apple? Google? Microsoft? What, did I say something funny?

No Smiling in Firefox 3.1

Jeff — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:22:45 +0000

Poo. Declarative animation in SVG won’t make it for the Firefox 3.1 release. That’s a big shame, though I trust that it’s the right decision.

SVG Mini News Digest

Jeff — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:18:42 +0000

Rather than twittering these and missing a sizable chunk of people who might be interested, I thought I’d post a couple quick links to very cool news in the SVG world:

Apple finally pushed a firmware update to their iPhones that makes Safari support SVG. I first heard about it here and then Doug blogged about it.
Mozilla finally landed SVG effects for HTML, presumably for Firefox 3.1 but I’ll be keeping an ear to roc’s blog for further updates on that.
Work on the Flex SVG Viewer (FSV) has started to pick up. It is now released under the MIT license and just had its first contributed patch. More on this at a later time.
Some guy named Tim Berners-Lee chastised Internet Explorer for not supporting SVG and that article has been picked up by the Associated Press – who does he think he is?
The W3C SVG Interest Group garnered several new members within the last couple days and chatter has picked up on the Mailing List which is a hopeful sign that we’re starting to gel a bit. If you care about SVG and can help in some tangible way, I invite you to consider joining.

Ubuntu 7.10 Dash Crash

Jeff — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:55:45 +0000

I recently tried to compile Daniel Holbert’s SMIL patches in mozilla-central. While doing this, I observed the “configure” was core dumping. The folks in the #developers channel over on irc.mozilla.org were able to help me out and trace it down to the fact that Ubuntu’s dash was crashing. I worked around this by changing Mozilla’s configure script to use #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh.

Apparently this crash has been fixed on Ubuntu 8.10 because Daniel himself hasn’t witnessed this crash?

Web Stats: Now With “MarketShare”

Jeff — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:07:08 +0000

I took 20 minutes and added a feature request to my SVG Web Stats web application tonight: Now you can switch the timeline graph from Traffic mode to Distribution mode, which shows the share of each browser on my site as a percentage of the total.

Continuing with the navel-gazing theme, some points I noted in my stats:

Opera and Safari now amount to 7-10% of my total unique visits
Since its release last month, Firefox 3 has about the same share as IE7, which was released over a year and a half ago (20% total)
IE has lost roughly 5% of total share on my site since I’ve started recording these statistics (this is my third year)
IE6 is still the browser version with the largest single share (roughly 30%). Give Firefox 3 a few more months though…
Virtually no one is using IE8 Beta 1, released over four months ago. I mean, way more people are using Firefox 3.1 pre-Alpha-1! I see at most one or two hits a week from IE8. Which makes sense because you can’t install multiple copies of IE and there aren’t very many cool things you can do with IE anyway.

Mozilla Works on SVG Effects For Web

Jeff — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:45:50 +0000

Very cool stuff from roc. An interesting alternative to all the CSS properties being added to WebKit. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still plodding away on bog-standard CSS 2 – expect an update from them in August, if you’re still interested (if you are maybe you want to try a new plugin for IE?)

Firefox Getting Ready To Smile?

Jeff — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:49:43 +0000

Chris Double was kind enough to update the SMIL patch on Bug 21642 for Mozilla and then do some builds for me so I wouldn’t have to muddle through the build and patch process. I’m ashamed to admit that so far this has been enough of a deterrant that I haven’t bothered to try it out, so I’m really glad Chris did this. The best part is that, in doing this, Chris found Firefox crashing on several tests and was able to update the patch to fix these problems.

Anyway, with the patch, a Mozilla trunk nightly gains about 4.5% to their overall SVG score. Put another way, they score 25/116 on the SVG+SMIL animation tests in the Full test suite. While this isn’t in the league of current WebKit nightlies (and neither of these platforms are in the league of Opera 9+), it does show that progress could be made on this were it applied to the trunk (once Firefox 3 ships, of course). Does anyone know if this patch means that a Firefox build would pass those SVG+SMIL tests in Acid 3?

[Update: Chris has made the Firefox builds available for download here]

[Update 2008-04-20: Chris' latest build now makes the SMIL score 38/125, though some tests have now regressed.]