Javascript

Using eval() to decode JavaScript you downloaded from a remote website in your extension is just plain wrong. It’s not safe! Don’t do it!

Mozilla just opened the new source repository (mozilla-central) meaning the next release features will start landing. David Baron posted about landing new CSS selectors. Robert O’Callahan posted about some kick-ass SVG-based CSS effects used to style HTML. This totally rocks and will help push SVG into more of a leading role on the Web.

Shaver and I have been talking about getting a decent mechanism for remote debugging a JavaScript session. I have been looking at JSSH. It’s a bit dated, but a great little Firefox/Mozilla extension that adds a huge amount of external flexibility, control and extensibility. The Watir-based web testing system for Firefox (called FireWatir) uses JSSH to control the current Firefox browsing session. The big downside to JSSH is that it has binary components, so you need to build it across platforms and Gecko versions. Yuck!

Oh yeah, it’s this crappy post from ReadWriteWeb on the new Google Maps Flash API. I have no problem with a Flash API for Google Maps. Power to the people! But I did have a massive gag reaction to the following fairy tale:

Last year (wow, that long ago?) I made a simple demo to show Firefox 3 offline capabilities. A lot has changed between then and now. Firefox 3 offline capabilities changed significantly to align better with WHATWG offline specification. The biggest changes involve dropping support for our own mechanism and supporting WHATWG manifests and application cache. The specification gives some details on how it works. There is an MDC article on using offline resources in Firefox 3.

XPCOM is, currently, a core Mozilla technology. Developers use XPCOM for a variety of reasons, many of which result in XPCOM components being accessed from JavaScript. XPCOM uses IDL to describe interfaces. This can make XPCOM components a bit rigid and not feel right in JavaScript. Recent support for optional parameters in IDL has helped a little. Another helpful concept is using JavaScript functions in place of an IDL callback interface. For example:

Web protocol handlers are a new Firefox 3 feature that gives more power to RIA web applications. Basically, when a user clicks on a link with specific protocol, Firefox can send an HTTP(S) request with the link data to a web application. An easy example is a mailto: link: