Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Gears renamed “Gears”. “We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.” Support for Firefox 3 and Safari is being added and Opera are integrating Gears with both their desktop and mobile browsers.

# 29th May 2008, 12:38 am / gears, google, opera, firefox3, safari

Firefox 3’s password remembering. I’m loving Firefox 3, and the way it does password remembering (with a non-modal toolbar so you can tell if your password worked before deciding to save it) is just one of the major improvements. Opera gets this right as well.

# 2nd April 2008, 8:24 pm / opera, passwordsaving, firefox3, mozilla, nelsonminar

getElementsByClassName pre Prototype 1.6. Older releases of Prototype break in Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 due to unsafe namespace management—getElementsByClassName is now a browser built-in but with different semantics to the Prototype method of the same name. Prototype 1.6 is fine.

# 26th March 2008, 8:28 am / getelementsbyclassname, javascript, john-resig, firefox3, namespaces, prototype, safari

Cross-Window Messaging. Now in Firefox 3 trunk, the HTML 5 specified ability for JavaScript to send messages between windows (or iframes) hosted on different domains. Fantastically powerful, but must be implemented with care to avoid accidentally processing bad messages from malicious third parties.

# 10th February 2008, 12 pm / firefox, firefox3, crosswindowmessaging, javascript, john-resig, html5

Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies. Ryan points out that sizing everything in ems, while neat, imposes a pretty hefty maintenance cost and is rapidly becoming unnecessary thanks to the page zoom feature in IE 7, Opera and Firefox 3.0.

# 19th January 2008, 7:36 am / firefox3, fullpagezoom, ems, css, ryan-tomayko, ie7, opera

Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction.

# 9th January 2008, 11:57 pm / xmlhttprequest, crossdomain, ajax, javascript, john-resig, accesscontrol, w3c, firefox, firefox3, mozilla, http, xml

Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on.

# 25th September 2007, 11:04 pm / pagerank, google, privacy, firefox, mozilla, firefox3, toolbars, google-toolbar