Simon Holywell

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Firefox 3.1 has Web Workers (threading) and Geolocation

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The latest beta 2 release includes web workers, which are essentially threads allowing you to farm off Javascript heavy lifting to background processes so that the interface can continue to load without being impacted upon.  The Mozilla developer center [sic] has an interesting article on implementing them; Using web workers, which includes a couple of worked examples based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Geolocation is an interesting one for services like Twitter, Jaiku and possibly Facebook as it would allow users an easy way of updating all the services with their current location simply by Firefox broadcasting the information.  But even more interestly Yahoo! and Google maps (or a custom implementation of them – I am tempted but do not have the time at the moment) could use it to real time track the location of a user.  So potentially you could use the maps like a satellite navigation application with the watchPosition() function all the user would need is a GPS mouse with a Firefox plugin to read the position from it.  Oh yes and of course they would need a laptop with Firefox installed on it and a mobile internet connection. :-)  

Obviously for any of this to work you will need to be running the latest beta available from the Mozilla site.

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Posted on Wednesday, March 11, 2009. Tagged with: firefoxJavascriptmozillaComputingInternet

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Simon Holywell

My name is Simon Holywell and I am a Zend Certified PHP Developer with experience working for Web agencies, marketing companies and corporate IT in Australia and the United Kingdom. When I am not developing I can be found riding my motorbike, skateboarding or snowboarding. More information about my work history can be found on my online CV.

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