Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 52 posts.
Robots.txt files were invented 20+ years ago to help advise “robots," mostly search engine web crawlers, which sections of a web site should be crawled and indexed for search. Many sites use their robots.txt files to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) by excluding duplicate content like print versions of…
About a year ago, Mozilla announced a strategic investment in Cliqz GmbH, the Munich, Germany-based provider of search and privacy tools. Today, we want to tell you about an important ...
The library for web and native user interfaces
The Firefox Quantum release is getting close. It brings many performance improvements, including the super fast CSS engine that we brought over from Servo. But there’s another big piece of ...
Project Quantum is a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of ...
JWT, JWE, JWS, etc. are terrible designs and need to be scrapped, not resuscitated.
Note: Read about improvements to this technology in recent blog posts about Intelligent Tracking Prevention, and the Storage Access API.
Which libraries are vulnerable to attacks and how to prevent them.
If you’re considering an external display for your Mac, there’s a few important decisions to make. Apple doesn’t sell external displays any more, so you can’t just default to their wisdom. That’s an issue, because not all displays are well suited for Macs.
Posted by Devon O’Brien, Ryan Sleevi, Andrew Whalley, Chrome Security This post is a broader announcement of plans already finalized on t...
Upgrading a security protocol in an ecosystem as complex as the Internet is difficult. You need to update clients and servers and make sure everything in between continues to work correctly. The Internet is in the middle of such an upgrade right now.
Over the past seven months, we’ve been rapidly replacing major parts of the engine, introducing Rust and parts of Servo to Firefox. Plus, we’ve had a browser performance strike force ...
You see this everywhere, but as a lifelong gamer, my personal favorite example is probably graphics cards. In the '90s, graphics hardware generally provided a fixed set of functionality.
The new Riptide garbage collector in WebKit leads to a five-fold improvement in latency in the JetStream/splay-latency test.
In an eyetracking experiment comparing different clickability clues, weak and flat signifiers required more user effort than strong ones.
Summary The investigations on Thunderbird’s future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project. Background In late 2015…
WebAssembly is a way of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. So when people say that WebAssembly is fast, what ...
The section below about safe area insets was updated on Oct 31, 2017 to reflect changes in the iOS 11.2 beta.
Programming with WebAssembly or JavaScript is not an either/or choice. So developers don’t need to choose between WebAssembly and JavaScript. However, we do expect that developers will swap out parts ...
Performance is tricky to measure, and has many aspects. Also, in a new technology there are always going to be not-yet-optimized cases. So not every single benchmark will be fast ...
This is the first post in our “No Boundaries” series, in which we reveal how third-party scripts on websites have been extracting personal information in increasingly intrusive ways. [0] by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan Update: we’ve released our data — the list of sites with session-replay…
Historically, running native code on the web required a browser plugin. In 2013, we introduced the PNaCl sandbox to provide a means of bui...
Apple’s WebKit team today proposed a new Community Group at the W3C to discuss the future of 3D graphics on the Web, and to develop a standard API that exposes modern GPU features including low-level graphics and general purpose computation.
The benefits of immutable caching mean that when a page is refreshed, which is an extremely common social media scenario, elements that were previously marked immutable with an HTTP response ...
With the recent addition of SharedArrayBuffer, concurrency is finding its way into the JavaScript language.
Target="_blank" - the most underestimated vulnerability ever - Wednesday, 04 May 2016 - Alex's blog
For years, Comcast and other large telecommunication companies around the world have injected javascript into your web browsing experience to serve
Update: this post was updated to reflect a change in how we determine when Firefox will run in multiprocess mode. Firefox won’t run in multiprocess mode unless add-ons are explicitly ...
