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We do like reading in Mozilla's Developer Engagement Team - here are our latest recommendations for you!

Weekly links November 10th 2011

If there is anything you think we should read or know about, don't hesitate to post a comment, contact us on Twitter or through any other mean.
The picks this week are:

Christian Heilmann

A good explanation on Firefox's Full Screen API and of course the 700,000th bug on Firefox's bugzilla.

If you want to read more tips or discuss the web with Christian, he's available on Twitter as @codepo8.

Eric "Sheppy" Shepherd

Jeff Griffiths

The new ThemeRoller app for jQuery Mobile looks awesome!

If you want to read more tips or discuss the web with Jeff, he's available on Twitter as @canuckistani.

Joe Stagner

Building Web Pages with Local Storage.

If you want to read more tips or discuss the web with Joe, he's available on Twitter as @MisfitGeek.

Rob Hawkes

Here is the draft report from the W3C Games Community Group Summit in San Francisco earlier this month. After playing with the Joystick API this week I'm excited to see how browsers and game developers can work together to make the Web a viable platform for gaming.

If you want to read more tips or discuss the web with Rob, he's available on Twitter as @robhawkes.

Robert Nyman

25 Secrets of the Browser Developer Tools - a good overview of various web browser developer tools and in-depth information about them.

If you want to read more tips or discuss the web with Robert, he's available on Twitter as @robertnyman.

10 Nov 2011 2:54pm GMT

I'm in Berlin this week to attend this weekend's MozCamp EU; because I'm a dork I really really like having some sort of local data network access, in particular for using google maps on my unlocked Android phone. Having mobile data access has completely changed how I travel, I'm much more likely to just really explore a place than I would without access to google maps. So here's my process for getting cheap mobile data in Berlin:

1. took the U6 -> S line trains to Alexanderplatz to get to the Alexa Mall ( http://g.co/maps/rv2hz, see map below )
2. went to Media Markt ( think German Best Buy ), bought a FONIC.de 10 euro SIM card
3. back at the Tryp hotel where I'm staying, I registered online with fonic.de to activate the sim. There is no English localization of the site and my German is terrible so I had a second window open to google translate to get through it.
4. in order for the data plan to really start, I had to set my Android phone to 'data roaming' mode.

This will get you a flat rate of 500MB of data, plus relatively cheap text and calling! Sadly, you do need to jump online to register the sim, this is definitely less convenient than what I got last month in London, where they sell flat-rate data sims from vending machines at Heathrow.

Alexa / Media Markt:

View Larger Map

10 Nov 2011 1:07pm GMT

This year's Velocity EU conference had a special presentation round where browser makers talked about the performance of their specific products. I was invited last minute to represent Firefox and originally was asked to show benchmarks, impressive demos and how we compare to others. As browsers get released in very short intervals these days, this doesn't quite make sense any longer - at least to me.

Funnily enough the other browser representatives took the same approach so I was happy to see that we agreed that we are beyond number-comparisons and head to head browser war on performance.

My talk "Accelerating the overall web experience" covered other things, like that the choice of which browser to use lies with the users and there is not much we can do to change that. I also pointed out that users will find a way to make our browsers slow, no matter how hard we try and that in a lot of cases third party add-ons and debugging tools are to blame for an impression of slowness.

I ended by showing how the new developer tools in Firefox empower developers to perform much better in finding bugs and fixing them - a part of performance that is not easily measurable but very important.

You can see the slides here (left+right to go back and forward, down for next bullet point and N to toggle notes) or read them as an HTML page:

There is also an audio recording of the talk on archive.org:

All in all it was good to see that all browsers are getting faster and faster and we all see this as a given rather than a goal.

10 Nov 2011 12:11pm GMT