getBoundingClientRect is a method, first introduced by Internet Explorer 5 (and now included in Firefox 3), which provides the top, right, bottom, and left offset coordinates of an element. After PPK mentioned this method in a recent post of his, poo-poo-ing its applicability, I thought I’d take some time to show how useful it can […]
Comment · Posted: March 18th, 2008
Mozilla developer ‘Pavlov’ wrote up some extensive details on memory use in Firefox 3. I highly recommend that you check it out. I borrowed some of his data and created another view of the results. For example, here’s the results from Windows Vista of a number of browsers: Note that both Safari 3 and IE […]
Comment · Posted: March 13th, 2008
Today, at SXSW, I hosted a panel discussion on the “Secrets of JavaScript Libraries.” We set out to discuss the behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty code that powers the universal features of the most popular JavaScript libraries. I think the presentation went quite well. I think we could’ve, easily, done a 2 hour talk with all the content […]
Comment · Posted: March 12th, 2008
Today was the Mozilla Birds-of-a-Feather here at SXSW. It was a lot of fun and was a great opportunity to catch up with a bunch of the community. Everyone from users, to web developers, to extension developers were in attendance. We ran a mini contest, giving away some prizes for the best, original, Firefox extension […]
Comment · Posted: March 11th, 2008
Our day has finally come. CSS coders got some love with Internet Explorer 7 – us JavaScript folk got absolutely nothing. In fact, at last count, all we got were a couple new bugs to deal with (file:// requests not working via XMLHttpRequest and <object>.getElementsByTagName(“*”) always returning no elements). Internet Explorer 8 is our release. […]
Comment · Posted: March 6th, 2008
I’m really excited about Microsoft’s switch today to make standards mode rendering the default rendering style, going forward – even at the cost of “breaking the web.” I think this is going to have serious positive ramifications for the whole web ecosystem, which is just fantastic. I can’t imagine this decision coming lightly and I […]
Comment · Posted: March 4th, 2008
A common technique for writing cross-browser JavaScript code is to detect the features that you wish to use before you actually use them. Good object detection is done on a case-by-case basis, analyzing each feature as it’s encountered. Some common examples of object detection: All that these are doing is detecting if these particular properties […]
Comment · Posted: February 29th, 2008
Something that’s frequently befuddled is the differentiation between where JavaScript is executing and where performance hits are taking place. The difficulty is related to the fact that many aspects of a browser engine are reliant upon many others causing their performance issues to be constantly intertwined. To attempt to explain this particular inter-relationship I’ve created […]
Comment · Posted: February 28th, 2008
