Developer tools

Mozilla wants you to get your game on -- in your browser

SAN FRANCISCO--If you could play high-end, 3D games in your browser at the same speed as on a console, would you? Here at the annual Game Developers Conference, the maker of Firefox revealed a plan to get you to do just that.

Mozilla's current holy grail is getting the mix of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS that powers the modern Web to run apps at speeds that rival native code, the operating system-dependent languages underpinning apps on iOS, Android, Windows 8, and other proprietary systems.

The not-so-secret weapon in Mozilla's plan is something called ASM.js, said Director of Engineering Vladimir Vukicevic. "It's a dialect of JavaScript that can optimize [code] much better. It's around two times as fast," he said.… Read more

Google to fix some WebP image format shortcomings

Google is on the cusp of fixing some initial shortcomings of its WebP, an image format it hopes will speed up browsing.

A new version of libwebp, the library that software can use to display and create WebP images, adds support several features, some of which were the subject of criticism when Google announced WebP in 2010:

Metadata handling so people can see camera and exposure information stored in the file with the EXIF and XMP technologies.

ICC (International Color Consortium) color profiles for more accurate color rendering.

Animated WebP images, a new spin on a once-once obscure GIF technology … Read more

Microsoft to developers: This is the 'modern.IE' world

In case you weren't sure, Microsoft wants you to really, really understand that Internet Explorer 10 isn't just any old update to the much-maligned browser. The latest example: "modern.IE," a set of tools to help Web developers that the company announced today.

"It's still too hard to test sites across the different OSes and browsers," Ryan Gavin, Internet Explorer's general manager, said in a phone interview with CNET yesterday. "On our part, we can encourage best practices. We know we can do better here, so we're providing the tools … Read more

OpenCandy brings the bucks to desktop software

LAS VEGAS--If you want to make money off of apps, you must develop for mobile, right? Wrong, says SweetLabs' Chester Ng, who points to his company's success with its OpenCandy project to help developers earn a living.

The problem is both cultural as well as logistical, Ng said in an interview outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Desktop software, especially on Windows, has a long history of being developed as freeware. But pitching a secondary software purchase to the user during the installation process had been poisoned, he said.

"The problem is that developers don't like the … Read more

Firefox 'porn mode' finally to match competition

Big changes to Firefox's "porn mode" -- the private-browsing feature that turns off recording cookies, history, and temporary files -- landed today in the Firefox Nightly build.

When it reaches the general public a few months from now in Firefox stable, the feature will allow you to run the private-browsing feature in a new window, without closing your regular instance of Firefox. This pulls the browser up to parity with Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Safari doesn't open private browsing into a separate window.

Firefox's project manager, Asa Dotzler, stated in the blog post announcing … Read more

Mozilla to developers: Come build apps for Firefox OS!

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft's not the only big tech player taking a gamble on a new direction. Mozilla made an aggressive argument for Firefox OS to Web and app developers Monday night at its confusingly named Mobile Monday Mixer -- confusing because the company held the event last night at its San Francisco office.

As the lights from the Bay Bridge blinked in the background, Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, laid out why developers should care about Firefox OS. "If you're looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple … Read more

Hey, Web developers! Here's a one-stop shop for your app needs

Enough with having separate Web programming tutorials from Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

These five major browser makers, along with Facebook, Adobe Systems, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard, have become stewards of a new effort to centralize developer resources at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This Web Platform Docs project will include not just help on to use a bewildering array of new Web technologies, but also will detail which ones are accepted standards, how well the various tools work across multiple browsers, and how stable the standards are.

"A key part of this project is that it … Read more

HTML5 is dead. Long live HTML5!

HTML5 fans got a very large splash of very cold water in their faces yesterday.

Facebook has been a big fan of building mobile apps using HTML5 and related Web standards, but no less than founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook's HTML5 app "one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made."

Those are powerfully damning words, and many developers will likely take them to heart given Facebook's cred in the programming world.

But there are subtleties here -- not an easy thing for those who see the world … Read more

Adobe fleshes out Muse, Edge tools for Web publishing

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version … Read more