Posts Tagged Firefox

Caching in Javascript with Cachejs

Posted by Howard Yeend in javascript, web on May 18, 2010

Here’s a useful open-source (MIT license) javascript caching object I developed for my job at GG.com, the best horse racing site on the net.
(I am contractually obliged to say that every time I mention the URL. Not really though).

Like most web applications these days, we make fairly extensive use of Ajax, sending and receiving JSON data across the net on hover events and so on.

However, we’ve found that all those HTTP requests can slow down the user experience, and causes unnecessary extra load on our application servers, so we decided to employ a client-side Least Recently Used (LRU) caching object, so that we can reduce the number of HTTP requests, and increase the response speed for cachable queries. It employs lazy garbage collection, just like memcached does. In fact we see this as a kind of “memcache for javascript”, if that makes any sense at all.

  • I’d love to see what you do with it ;0)

It depends upon no external libraries. Here’s a simple usage example:

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CSS Gradient Background – Cross Browser!

Posted by Howard Yeend in web on April 2, 2010

You read that right. This works in:

  • Firefox >=3.6
  • MSIE >=5.5 (!)
  • Safari >=4
  • Chrome

Oh Em Gee, I’ve got a CSS-applied Gradient.

How neat is this?

I mean really, this is super cool.

And it degrades gracefully in older browsers and Opera.

My boss Mike passed this little CSS gem to me, and now dear reader I pass it to you. It was orignally developed by FakeDarren, who posted a great little CSS button example. I find it useful for those times when designers get all fancy with gradiented backgrounds.

I’ve condensed Darren’s CSS down to these four lines plus comments, which will give you the lovely Green-to-Black CSS gradient background you can see above.

  .gradientV{
/* thanks to http://blog.fakedarren.com/2010/01/cross-browser-css-gradients/ */
/* and https://puremango.co.uk/2010/04/css-gradient/ */
    /* fallback (Opera) */
    background: #008800;
    /* Mozilla: */
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #00FF00, #000000);
    /* Chrome, Safari:*/
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear,
                left top, left bottom, from(#00FF00), to(#000000));
    /* MSIE */
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(
                StartColorStr='#00FF00', EndColorStr='#000000', GradientType=0);
  }

And as you may have guessed by the ‘V’ in the class name, you can also do horizontal gradients – here are some more examples for left-right gradients, and we see what happens when we apply animations to a gradiented DIV.
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Firefox Extensions

Posted by Howard Yeend in Firefox on March 13, 2009

Firefox has been a massively innovative browser; bringing tabbed browsing and plugins to the masses. Here I list what I consider to be essential firefox plugins (aka extensions). This list is quite old now and some of these have been incorporated into firefox. I’ll be writing an updated list soon, in the meantime, let me know in the comments what extensions/plugins/tweaks and hacks you love!

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Firefox/IE Bookmarklets / Favelets

Posted by Howard Yeend in Firefox on March 13, 2009

A few javascript bookmarklets I’ve written which will enhance your browser; eg enable right click, edit cookie, hide/show images etc. Neat little browser hacks / tweaks!

They work with both firefox and MSIE. Read the rest of this entry »

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