What is Thimble used for?

It is from Mozilla.org. It is free and has many cool features. It's Remix mode allows you easily modify existing Thimble projects to suit your requirements.

Thimble is a one-stop program bundling code editor, web server, web browser and developer tools.

It has an unbelievable number of cool features. Sure, I will test drive it!

• Make a change and see your changes in real time
• Has handy code snippets
• Has a built-in JavaScript console
• Add your files (drag and drop) and manage them
• Has both dark and light themes
• Embedded tutorials-follow or create OK
• Get code hints
• Edit CSS right in the HTML file
• Publish to Web
• Pick colors in the editor
• Test project on your mobile device
• Has a DOM inspector to work with HTML elements
• Has Image filters
• Take selfies

You start here.

Here is a video that explains it all:

How do you capture screenshots with Firefox?

Firefox screen shots - an application to capture sections or whole Web pages is still in BETA, but you can give it a try. I have version 56.0(32bit).

The Firefox browser has a new menu item.

 It is very easy to use. Let us say, I open this page:

 https://www.bing.com/

I get to see today's Bing page as shown:

I used a desktop app called lightshot to capture this image.

Now let me use the Firefox Screenshot menu to capture a part of this web page. In order to describe I will be capturing the steps again using lightshot.

Click on the menu item (you will see Firefox Screenshots when you hover the item). You get this intro screen.

You just hit the right pointing arrow to get to the next page of this wizard.

Click again the arrows.

Here click on this page and select the region as shown

Click Save. It gets saved to the cloud.

Click Download and it gets into your Downloads folder as shown.

Well it can only capture anything on the Firefox browser. Useful but other tools do exist.

Which browser supports HTML5 best?

This comparison can be made quite easily by accessing this URL in the browser you want to test. It gives a number the maximum of which can be 555.

http://html5test.com/index.html

This was the score for the latest Microsoft Edge 25.10586.0.0 and MicrosoftEdgeHTML 13.10586:

This one was for Mozilla Firefox 44.0

Well, Firefox does a little better.

There has been a lot of progress made by Microsoft in the past few years.

http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2013/08/which-is-best-browser-to-text-html5.html

Is there a test for WebRTC support in browsers?

Yes. There is a test devised by WEBRTC.ORG. You can test the browsers with this simple test. As WebRTC depend on the use of built-in devices of your computer like Camera, Audio etc, you will have to give explicit permission to their use by the test.

Mozilla Firefox passes all the tests devised by WebRTC.org as shown in the following. All you need to do is launch your browser and type in the address, test.webrtc.org. You will be asked whether you are ready to share the devices like camera, audio etc. After getting an affirmative answer you will be presented with this test screen.

Webrtc_MOZ_test.png
You start the test by hitting the Start button. The various tests are run and if you wait a little while you will get this display,

Webrtc_Moz.png

As you can see most of the tests were successful except for one. This may be due to the configuration as you see this detail:

 Reflexive connectivity
[ INFO ] Gathered candidate of Type: srflx Protocol: UDP Address: 24.25.241.5
[ WARN ] Could not connect using reflexive candidates, likely due to the network environment/configuration.

With Microsoft Edge most of the tests fail and the results are as shown in the following images:

 WebRTC-MSFT01

 WebRTC-MSFT02

WebRTC-MSFT03

I did wait for a while to see if it runs the remaining tests and it did not.

The good news however is that ORTC through its APIs, support WebRTC in Edge so that Edge can communicate with Firefox a la WEBRTC. We shall look at it in another post.

What is Web RTC?

WebRTC is still evolving although it has already made a big presence.

WebRTC stands for Web-based Real-Time Communications. It is free and the WebRTC project provides mobile applications and browsers to have communication capabilities using simple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).  Since voice and video are involved it is complicated because of various standards it has to contend with.

WebRTC is supported by Google, Mozilla, Opera and others. Microsoft is not in the list having differences over some of the details such as Google's VP8 video codec to become the default.

Microsoft has its own web based communication which is called CU-RTC-WEB. Microsoft acquired Skype which has browser-based version of voice and video calling application and it is in Microsoft's interest to stay with evolving WebRTC.

The key resource is WebRTC.org.

Here are the components of WebRTC, a screen shot from the WebRTC site.

If you are interested in the under-the-hood details of WebRTC go here (http://www.webrtc.org/reference/webrtc-components).

Here is video of browser based communication between Mozilla and Chrome.

Read more on how the technology is evolving;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2849392/does-skype-for-web-mean-webrtc-is-ready-for-prime-time.html