Recently, there have been a couple of JavaScript quizzes floating around. There was one by Dmitry Baranovskiy (for which I explained the answers) and one by Kangax. But there are so many strange pieces of JavaScript that I thought I’d put together a quiz of my own. I’ve decided that each part will be a... […]

Last year was one in which I did a lot of research on performance, resulting in the Speed Up Your JavaScript blog post series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) as well as several talks, namely JavaScript Variable Performance at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup, Speed Up Your JavaScript at Google (video), and... […]

In a previous post, I talked about Internet Explorer 8′s wide array of browser and document modes. Most people are pretty familiar with how the various document modes affect layout in terms of how CSS is implemented, but what has been lost is how the document mode affects the core JavaScript engine in the browser.... […]

Last week, I tweeted about a JavaScript quiz I came across on Dmitry Baranovskiy’s blog entitled, So you think you know JavaScript? As with other quizzes of this type, there is only one question to answer for five different pieces of example code: what is the result? The example code tests some of the quirkier... […]

When Microsoft began planning for Internet Explorer 8, they were struck with an interesting problem. They were willing to admit that Internet Explorer had implementation bugs both in rendering and scripting. After admitting that, though, they had the problem that is commonly referred to as “don’t break the Internet.” Microsoft had no way of knowing... […]

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about feature detection and browser detection. That post featured a little bit about user-agent sniffing and the comments continued the trend. I maintain that user-agent sniffing is an important technique to keep in your back pocket for those rare occasions when it’s needed. Before being able to do... […]

Interviewing a front-end engineer is an interesting task primarily because most are self-taught. Startups and large companies alike have equal trouble finding quality front-end engineers simply because they don’t know what to look for and which questions to ask. Having been around the industry for a while, I’ve developed my own methods for interviewing front-end... […]

Browser detection has been a hot-button topic in web development for a long time. This battle pre-dates JavaScript browser detection by a couple of years and begins with the introduction of Netscape Navigator, the first truly popular and widely-used web browser. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was so far beyond any of the other available web browsers... […]

In a previous post, I discussed the problem with setting an HTML image’s src attribute to an empty string. In Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome, this results in a second request being made to the server (Firefox 3.5 patched this behavior and Opera doesn’t exhibit the behavior). My post also showed a couple of ways... […]

Three years ago, I gave my first talk at Yahoo! entitled, Maintainable JavaScript (slides). The point of the talk was to encourage people to use more rigor in their JavaScript coding. A lot of people who write JavaScript for a living began as hobbyists and hackers, including myself. All of the best front end engineers... […]