Gemal's Psyched Blog

In an exciting collaboration with Mozilla and Google, Intel is bringing SIMD to JavaScript. This makes it possible to develop new classes of compute-intensive applications such as games and media processing—all in JavaScript—without the need to rely on any native plugins or non-portable native code. SIMD.JS can run anywhere JavaScript runs. It will, however, run a lot faster and more power efficiently on the platforms that support SIMD. This includes both the client platforms (browsers and hybrid mobile HTML5 apps) as well as servers that run JavaScript, for example through the Node.js V8 engine.

https://01.org/blogs/tlcounts/2014/bringing-simd-javascript

Open codec pioneer Monty Montgomery, leaves Red Hat, joins Mozilla to work on n open next-generation video codec. Monty Montgomery is the mastermind behind Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora.

More info here:
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/monty-montgomery-joins-mozilla-for-daala/

Today Shumway landed in the Firefox codebase. Shumway is a way to support playing Flash (SWF files) without the Adobe Flash Player.

The Adobe Flash Player has been plagued with bugs so being to play Flash without the normal player is a big step forward for security.

Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance.

Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.

Read more sbout Shumway

Read the bug report

Intel Labs has a new project out Parallel Extensions for JavaScript, code named River Trail. River Trail brings the processing power of Intel’s multi-core CPUs and their vector extensions to web applications. With River Trail it will finally be possible to stay in the browser even for more compute intensive applications like photo editing.
Read more here

For a long time I simply just didn't have the time to do development on my addons.

I've created 6 addons and some are fairly popular.

Linky which is the most popular one just passed 620.000 downloads and has more than 35.000 active daily users. Linky enables you to quickly open multiple links. You can also download, validate, copy and bookmark multiple links. All in one click.

Launchy which enables you to open links in other applications has around 23.000 daily users and more than 380.000 total downloads.

There's a rumor out that Sony is looking into bringing Firefox to the PS3 platform:

"We recently received a tip from a source very close to Sony who says that they have been in talks with Mozilla lately about possibly porting firefox over to the PS3. That said, our source made sure to point out that they were unsure if any deal had actually been reached at this point, but it is great news none the less considering the complaints Sony has been getting about the lack of reliability with their current built in PS3 web browser."

Read more

I'm here at EU MozCamp 2009 in wonderful Prague, and just saw that the about:memory feature landed on trunk.

I had the chance to talk to Vladimir Vukicevic, how implemented the infrastructure for it, and he told him that this is just an initial landing. The about:memory is not yet finished and it can and will be improved in loads of way.

The final/ultimate implementation will include data for how much memory JavaScript, images, etc takes up.

I'm trying to figure out a way to achieve this:

1) I want links to open in the same tab. So if I click on a link that has target=_blank or target=_new in my Mozilla Firefox I want them to open in the same tab. Popups I want to open in a new window.

2) I want links from external applications to open in a new tab but same window. So if I click on a link in my mail program I want a new tab to open with the link so that I don't loose data on the current tab.

HOW HOW HOW do I do that?

If I set "browser.link.open_newwindow" to 1 which means "Open links, that would normally open in a new window, in the current tab/window." it fixes problem 1 but not problem 2