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
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

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!