Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Detecting Mozilla App Install Capabilities with JavaScript

By  on  

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I'm riveting super excited about the forthcoming Firefox Marketplace. A marketplace where you can download desktop, tablet, and mobile phone applications based on web technologies, from a host with a record as awesome as Mozilla, is a dream come true. The initial install process is powered via a JavaScript interface within Firefox, and if you can detect if the user's current Firefox install has app capabilities, you can advertise your own app when they come to your website.

The JavaScript

Feature detection is the best way to discover if the user's browser can install Firefox Marketplace applications:

var canInstallMozApp = !!(navigator.mozApps && navigator.mozApps.install);

Marketplace features live within the navigator object under the mozApps property. The install method triggers app installation, so that's ultimately the method whose existence should be checked. If present, the user has app install capabilities and you know you can show a "download our app" advertisement or, if your app manifest is configured properly, you can install the app from your own site!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Fixed Positioning

    When you want to keep an element in the same spot in the viewport no matter where on the page the user is, CSS's fixed-positioning functionality is what you need. The CSS Above we set our element 2% from both the top and right hand side of the...

  • By
    Parallax Sound Waves Animating on Scroll

    Scrolling animations are fun. They are fun to create and fun to use. If you are tired of bootstrapping you might find playing with scrolling animations as a nice juicy refreshment in your dry front-end development career. Let's have a look how to create animating...

Discussion

  1. Alex

    I personally can’t find a use for it even if combined with OpenCl, WebGl in the not-so-distant future.

  2. Fred

    Nice! Potch has some boilerplate install code. I think it should use this snippet if it doesn’t already.

  3. Peter Fisher

    Nice, first I’ve heard of this. Now to think if an app. :-)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!