JavaScript Articles
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A Homepage for the JavaScript Specification
Ecma TC39 has shipped a website for following updates to the JavaScript specification. It's the first part of a two-part project to help people find the information they need in order to understand the specification and our process. The current website is a simple MVP that provides links to our most significant documents, as well as a list of proposals that are near completion. We will experiment with other features as the need arises.
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Iodide: an experimental tool for scientific communication and exploration on the web
Meet Iodide, an experimental open source tool to help scientists write beautiful interactive documents using web technologies, all within a browser-based iterative workflow that will be familiar to many scientists.
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Announcing a New Management Structure for Ecma TC39
In 2019, Ecma’s TC39—the standardizing body behind JavaScript/ECMAScript—will change its management structure to reflect the growth of the committee and the frequency of its meetings. TC39 will move away from single-chair and vice-chair roles to a flat hierarchy with three chairs sharing the responsibility. Congratulations to new co-chairs Aki Braun (PayPal), Brian Terlson (Microsoft), and Yulia Startsev (Mozilla).
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Refactoring MDN macros with async, await, and Object.freeze()
In January, the MDN engineering team landed a major refactoring of the KumaScript codebase, the underlying Node server that runs macros in Kuma, which is the wiki that powers MDN. This work included some modern techniques of interest to JavaScript programmers.
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Firefox 65: WebP support, Flexbox Inspector, new tooling & platform updates
Firefox 65 ships today with some notable Firefox Devtools updates, including the release of the CSS Flexbox Inspector, a new changes panel, and more. We're shipping CSS platform improvements and updates to a variety of JavaScript APIs. Firefox 65 supports the WebP image format, and support for AV1, an open and royalty-free video compression format, is shipping now in Firefox 65 for Windows.
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Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast 🎉
At Mozilla, we want WebAssembly to be as fast as it can be. This started with its design, which gives it great throughput. Then we improved load times with a streaming baseline compiler. With this, we compile code faster than it comes over the network. Now, in the latest version of Firefox Beta, calls between JS and WebAssembly are faster than many JS to JS function calls. Here's how we made them fast - illustrated in code cartoons.
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Dweb: Creating Decentralized Organizations with Aragon
Aragon is an open source project for building decentralized organizations with Ethereum, IPFS, and the web. Aragon apps enable trust-less and transparent governance through smart contracts that execute on the Ethereum blockchain.
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Overscripted! Digging into JavaScript execution at scale
We set out to explore the unseen or non-obvious JavaScript execution events that are triggered when a user visits a webpage, and all the first- and third-party events that are set in motion when people retrieve content. To help enable more exploration and analysis, we are releasing our full set of data about JavaScript executions. This post introduces the dataset, how it was collected, and the decisions made along the way. We’ll share examples of insights discovered and provide information for participating in the associated Overscripted Web: A Mozilla Data Analysis Challenge, which we’ve launched today with Mozilla’s Open Innovation Team.
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Baby’s First Rust+WebAssembly module: Say hi to JSConf EU!
A secret project has been brewing for JSConf EU, and this weekend is the big reveal: The Arch is a larger-than-life experience that uses 30,000 colored LEDs to create a canvas for light animations. And you can take charge of this space. Using modules, you can create a light animation. But even though this is JSConf, these animations aren’t just powered by JavaScript modules. In fact, we hope you will try something new… Rust + WebAssembly.
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Debugging Modern Web Applications
The Firefox Dev Tools team released an upgrade to the debugger’s source map support. It lets you inspect the code that you actually wrote. Combined with the ongoing work to provide first-class JS framework support across all Firefox devtools, these advances boost productivity for web app developers working in frameworks like React, Angular, and Ember and with modern tools like Webpack, Babel, and PostCSS.
