Tag: Firefox

:focus-visible Support Comes to Firefox

Posted on February 10, 2021 in Design

Look at that! The :focus-visible pseudo-selector is now supported in Firefox, as of version 85 which shipped yesterday. I had to rush over to the MDN Docs just to confirm, and yep, the :focus-visible page has been updated to reflect the news.

What’s so cool about :focus-visible? It’s all about the blue focus ring that displays around elements that are in focus. It’s sort of a happy medium between loving the outline for accessibility purposes (gotta know what element is selected when tabbing on a keyboard) but not-really-loving how it looks (gotta have everything follow brand).

The strategy has largely been an all-or-nothing choice between using a custom outline when any element is in :focus (great, but that means for both keyboard tabbing and mouse clicks) or ditching the outline altogether (not great, like ever). :focus-visible accomplishes the same thing as :focus, but uses a browser’s knowledge of user inputs (or heuristics) to determine whether the focus is coming from a keyboard or a mouse.

(Are a browser’s heuristics perfect at determining the input? That depends. Things get murky once we start factoring in things like touch interactions.)

That means, we get to remove the default focus ring (yay!) for the right types of interactions (double yay!) and display our own custom styles while we’re at it (triple yay!). Allow me to pluck Andy Adams’ fine example straight from our almanac. Note that :focus-visible cannot remove the focus ring like :focus can, so the two are used together:

.next-image-button:focus {   outline: none; }  .next-image-button:focus-visible {   outline: 3px solid blanchedalmond; /* That'll show 'em */ }

Chrome implemented :focus-visible back in 2018. Firefox had it’s own prefixed version, :-moz-focusring, prior to this implementation. Safari? Go vote for the feature!

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Proper Tabbing to Interactive Elements in Firefox on macOS

Posted on January 15, 2021 in Design

I just had to debug an issue with focusable elements in Firefox. Someone reported to me that when tabbing to a certain element within a CodePen embed, it shot the scroll position to the top of the page (WTF?!). So, I went to go debug the problem by tabbing through an example page in Firefox, and this is what I saw:

I didn’t even know what to make of that. It was like some elements you could tab to but not others? You can tab to <button>s but not <a>s? Uhhhhh, that doesn’t seem right that you can’t tab to links in Firefox?

After searching and asking around, it turns out it’s this preference at the OS level on macOS.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > User keyboard navigation to move focus between controls

If you have to turn that on, you also have to restart Firefox. Once you have, then you can tab to things you’d expect to be able to tab to, like links.

About that bug with the scrolling to the top of the page. See that “Skip Results Iframe” link that shows up when tabbing through the CodePen Embed? It only shows up when :focus-ed (as the point of it is to skip over the <iframe> rather than being forced to tab through it). I “hid” it by doing a position: absolute; top: -9999px; left: -9999px thing (old muscle memory), then removing those values when in focus. For some reason, when tabbed to, Firefox would see those values and instantly jump the page up, even though the focus style moved it back into a normal place. Must have been some kind of race condition thing.

I also found it very silly that Firefox would do that to the parent page when that link was inside an iframe. I fixed it up using a more vetted accessible hiding technique.

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Firefox 83

Posted on November 19, 2020 in Design

There’s a small line in the changelog that is is big news for CSS:

We’ve added support for CSS Conic Gradients (bug 1632351) and (bug 1175958).

🎉🎉🎉

Conic gradients are circular, just like their radial counterpart, but place color stops around the circle instead of from the center of the circle.

Adding more color stops gives it a “cone-like” appearance that’s fitting of the name:

Prior to Firefox 83, cross-browser support for conic gradients meant using a polyfill, like this one from Lea Verou. But browser support is much nicer with Firefox in the mix.

This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.

Desktop

Chrome Firefox IE Edge Safari
69 83 No 79 12.1

Mobile / Tablet

Android Chrome Android Firefox Android iOS Safari
86 No 81 12.2-12.4

And wouldn’t you know it! We just so happen to have a brand-spankin’ new CSS Gradients guide that not only covers conic gradients, but linear, radial, and repeating gradients as well, including explanations, examples and, of course, plenty of CSS tricks sprinkled in along the way.

One of those tricks? Using hard color stops to create a pie chart.

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Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools

Posted on June 4, 2020 in Design

It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows the declaration as crossed out with a warning () icon. It would be nice if they went a step further to tell you which thing was wrong (or both) and suggest likely fixes, but hey, I don’t wanna look a gift horse in the mouth.

Firefox is starting to go a step further in telling you when certain declarations aren’t valid, not because of a syntax error, but because they don’t meet other qualifications. For example, I tossed a grid-column-gap: 1rem on a random <p> and I was told this in a little popup:

grid-column-gap has no effect on this element since it’s not a flex container, a grid container, or a multi-column container.

Try adding either display:grid, display:flex, or columns:2. Learn more

Well that’s awful handy.

Elijah Manor has a blog post and video digging into this a bit.

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Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality

Posted on April 23, 2020 in Design

I still think Coil is cool. I have it installed on CSS-Tricks as a publisher and money trickles in. I have a paid account and I trickle out money to other sites that use it. I wrote about all that last year.

This’ll explode to something huge if we actually get the Web Monetization API stuff. No more browser extensions would be needed, and a real ecosystem could be built around it.

Anselm Hook writes about using Coil (for now) to monetize games on the web, which is a good reminder that this isn’t just for publications — it’s for anything-web. Coil even works for things off your own domain, like your YouTube channel.

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Firefox 71: First Out of the Gate With Subgrid

Posted on December 5, 2019 in Design

A great release from Firefox this week! See the whole roundup post from Chris Mills. I’m personally stoked to see clip-path: path(); go live, which we’ve been tracking as it’s so clearly useful. We also get column-span: all; which is nice in case you’re one of the few taking advantages of CSS columns.

But there are two other things I think are a very big deal:

  1. If you have fluid images (most sites do) via flexible-width containers and img { max-width: 100%; }, you’re subject to somewhat janky loading as those images load in because the browser doesn’t know how tall the space to reserve needs to be until it knows the dimensions of the image. But now, if you put width/height attributes (e.g. <img width="500" height="250" src="...">), Firefox (and Chrome) will calculate the aspect ratio from those and reserve the correct amount of space. It seems like a small thing, but it really isn’t. It will improve the perceived loading for a zillion sites.
  2. Now we’ve got subgrid! Remember Eric Meyer called them essential years ago. They allow you to have an element share the grid lines of parent elements instead of needing to establish new ones. The result might be less markup flattening and cleaner designs. A grid of “cards” is a great example here, which Miriam covers in this video showing how you can get much more logical space distribution. It must be in the water, as Anton Ball covers the same concept in this post. I’m a fan of how this is progressive-enhancement friendly. You can still set grid columns/rows on an element for browsers that don’t support subgrid, but then display: subgrid; to have them inherit lines instead in supporting browsers.

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Weekly Platform News: Layout Shifts, Stalled High-Bitrate Videos, Screenshots in Firefox

Posted on September 26, 2019 in Design

In this week’s roundup: fighting shifty layouts, some videos might be a bit stalled, and a new way to take screenshots in Firefox.

Let’s get into the news!

Identifying the causes of layout shifts during page load

You can now use WebPageTest to capture any layout shifts that occur on your website during page load, and identify what caused them.

Step 1: Paste a snippet

Paste the following snippet into the “Custom Metrics” on webpagetest.org in field in the Custom tab (under Advanced Settings) and make sure that a Chrome browser is selected.

[LayoutShifts] return new Promise(resolve => {   new PerformanceObserver(list => {     resolve(JSON.stringify(list.getEntries().filter(entry => !entry.hadRecentInput)));   }).observe({type: "layout-shift", buffered: true}); });

Step 2: Inspect entries

After completing the test, inspect the captured LayoutShifts entries on the Custom Metrics page, which is linked from the Details section.

Step 3: Check the filmstrip

Based on the "startTime" and "value" numbers in the data, use WebPageTest’s filmstrip view to pinpoint the individual layout shifts and identify their causes.

(via Rick Viscomi)

A high bitrate can cause your videos to stall

If you serve videos for your website from your own web server, keep an eye on the video bitrate (the author suggests FFmpeg and streamclarity.com). If your video has a bitrate of over 1.5 Mbps, playback may stall one or more times for people on 3G connections, depending on the video’s length.

50% of videos in this study have a bitrate that is greater than the downlink speed of a 3G connection — meaning that video playback will be delayed and contain stalls.

(via Doug Sillars)

Firefox’s :screenshot command

Firefox’s DevTools console includes a powerful command for capturing screenshots of the current web page. Like in Chrome DevTools, you can capture a screenshot of an individual element, the current viewport, or the full page, but Firefox’s :screenshot command also provides advanced options for adjusting the device pixel ratio and setting a delay.

// capture a full-page screenshot at a device pixel ratio of 2 :screenshot --fullpage --dpr 2  // capture a screenshot of the viewport with a 5-second delay :screenshot --delay 5

(via Reddit)

Read even more news in my weekly Sunday issue, which can be delivered to you via email every Monday morning.

Web Platform News: Sunday issue →

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8 Little Videos About the Firefox Shape Path Editor

Posted on March 7, 2019 in Design

It sometimes takes a quick 35 seconds for a concept to really sink in. Mikael Ainalem delivers that here, in the case that you haven’t quite grokked the concepts behind path-based CSS properties like clip-path and shape-outside.

Here are two of my favorites. The first demonstrates animating text into view using a polygon as a clip.

The second shows how the editor can help morph one shape into another.

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Firefox DevTools WebConsole 2018 retrospective

Posted on January 21, 2019 in Design

Here’s a wonderful post by Nicolas Chevobbe on what the Firefox DevTools team was up to last year. What strikes me is how many improvements they shipped — from big visual design improvements to tiny usability fixes that help us make sure our code works as we expect it to in the console.

There are lots of interesting hints here about the future of Firefox DevTools, too. For example, tighter integrations with MDN and, as Nicolas mentions in that post, tools to make it feel like a playground where you can improve your design, rather just fixing things. Anyway, I already feel that Firefox DevTools has the best features for typography of any browser (make sure to check out the “Fonts” tab in the Inspector). I can’t wait to see what happens next!

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