Planet Mozilla

Benoit Girard: Dev Tip: Debugging optimized code without a clobber – Rebuilding a module without optimization

benoitgirard — 2012-05-16T18:13:54+00:00

Sometimes you have an optimized build for whatever reason (say you’re doing a lot of profiling) but optimizations make non trivial debugging impossible. You don’t have an up to date build without optimization so you whine, start a non optimize build and start looking at bugzilla for 20 mins.

Frankenstein optimized/non optimized build to the rescue! Simply add:

CXXFLAGS += -O0 -g

to the Makefile for the module(s) you’re interested in debugging, for me it was gfx/layers/Makefile.in.

How does this work? Well optimizations are done at the object level and each object file are built to follow the ABI. As long as the ABI is followed, and it really really should, then you can expect this to work without any problems.

Disclaimer: This isn’t supported! If you have problems then do a clobber build.

Irina Sandu: Android and mobile browsing insights – Week 20

Irina Sandu — 2012-05-16T17:41:30+00:00

Every week I post an overview on what’s been happening in the mobile (browsing) world and is relevant to Mozilla.

Updated Android version distribution numbers are available
Google’s Motorola acquisition expected to be completed soon
Android 5.0, code-named Jelly Bean, rumoured to be released in fall with multiple flagship devices
Baidu to be releasing Yi-based devices
56.1% of smartphone shipments in Q1 featured Android
Samsung confirmed as top mobile phone vendor by shipments in Q1

Updated Android version distribution numbers put Gingerbread at 64% of the market, with API level 9 at 0.5% and level 10 at 63.9%, Froyo (level 8) at 20.8% and Ice Cream Sandwich at almost 5%, with most of it on API level 15.

Google declared that it expects its acquisition of Motorola to be completed soon, before the first half of the year. After having passed regulatory approval in the US and the US, the company is now waiting from go-ahead from the authorities in China. The closing of the deal will likely raise more concerns over competition inside the Android ecosystem.

Details about the upcoming version of Android, version 5.0 code-named Jelly Bean, have emerged.The launch is rumoured to happen before Thanksgiving and to feature more OEMs that will produce the version’s flagship devices. It is to be expected that they will also be featured for sale in Google’s Play Store.

Baidu, China’s incumbent search engine, is set to release a series of new mobile devices based on its Yi mobile platform, a fork of Android, that was announced in September 2011. Dell is reported to be the company’s hardware partner for this venture in a country which recently surpassed the US as the fastest growing market for new Android & iOs activations.

The smartphone platform market was further dominated by Android in Q1 smartphone shipments, where Google’s ecosystem captured 56.1% of the market with 81 million units, up from 36.4% of the market and 36.3 million units in the same period of 2011. Apple’s platform was on the second place with 33 million and 22.9% of the market, also up from 16 million and 16.9% marketshare in Q1 of 2011. Other platforms with significant shares are Symbian with 8.6% of the market, followed by BB OS with 6.9%, Bada with 2.7% and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 which together account for 1.9%.

Q1 results of phone and smartphone shipments are out, confirming Samsung as having taken the lead as the top mobile phone vendor with 86 million units and 20.7% of the market, up from 68 million and 16.1% of the market the previous year. On second place there is Nokia, with 83 million and 19.8% marketshare, which is on a downward trend from its Q1 2011 result of 107 million corresponding to a 25.1% marketshare. Apple takes 3rd place with 33 million and 7.9% of the market, up from 16 million and 3.9%. Further down the top there are ZTE, LG, Huawei, RIM, Motorola, Sony and HTC with significant shares of the market.

David Boswell: Grow Mozilla discussion this Thursday

davidwboswell — 2012-05-16T17:17:45+00:00

“I’m a professional product manager and if you need help I would be delighted to join.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help with product management? Then join us to discuss community building at Mozilla.

Meeting time: Thursday, May 17 at 10:00 AM Pacific
Topics: Localizing Get Involved page and increasing community building skills with Mozilla Brain Builders
Video: David Boswell’s vidyo room (link for guest access is on agenda)
Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 9634#
Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor
Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

Note that the video and audio information has changed from previous meetings.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

Lawrence Mandel: Sign in to Telemetry with Persona

Lawrence Mandel — 2012-05-16T17:03:59+00:00

I’m pleased to report some user visible progress from the performance and metrics work week. Sign in to the Telemetry dashboard now uses Persona (aka, BrowserID).

No special permission is required. The Telemetry dashboard is open to all. Don’t have a Persona account? No problem. Click the sign in button to be prompted to create a free account.

This change is now live. You can try it yourself by visiting the Telemetry dashboard at http://mzl.la/telemetrydash.

Tagged: mozilla, telemetry

Tom Schuster: Short update of what the JS team is at

2012-05-16T13:13:00+00:00

We actually wanted to enabled Incremental GC on Nightly, but again we had some fallout and it had to be backed out again. Bill thinks it should reland at the end of the week.

We are happy to welcome Benjamin Peterson, who is going to join us this summer as an intern working on SpiderMonkey’s ES6 support. Benjamin is an active python contributor. He has already started implementing rest parameters.

Till Schneidereit, (a fellow German, finally!) started picking up some GC related bugs, thank you and feel welcome.

In an effort to reduce the memory usage of average JavaScript applications (MemShrink \o/), we came to the conclusion that it is okay to throw away JIT code compiled by Jäger on every Garbage Collection run. Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well for animation heavy scripts like games, where recompiling would introduce long pauses. Brian fixed that.

Jason showed us how to use the new Debugger API to debug JavaScript code running in Firefox.

David Mandelin and me blogged about the SpiderMonkey API (JSAPI), and what needs to change, C++ yeah!

The DataView object landed, thanks to the work of Steve.

Luke just finished a patch that is going to speed up the handling of some function parameters/variables. Besides blocking more IonMonkey performance improvements, it already showed 10% better scores on the v8 early-boyer benchmark. (Bug 659577)

Jan has been working on chunked compilation which should help IonMonkey with very large scripts. But because this is a very broad change and the Ion team likes to focus on stabilizing, fixing crashes and test failures first, this is going to land after the initial release. Luckily these kind of large scripts are uncommon for normal JavaScript, but they are often found in Emscripten compiled code. JägerMonkey (+TI) which has chunked compilation is still going to help those scripts.

Edit: Republished because of some tumblr problems.

Gervase Markham: Mobile Market Reports

gerv — 2012-05-16T12:04:19+00:00

“thinkinsights” and Google have released some fascinating data about smartphone usage, gathered from detailed consumer surveys.

All the presentation reports (right hand column) have roughly the same format. Why not download the report for your country, and the one for Brazil (the launch country for B2G) and see how different things are there compared to where you live?

Compared to the UK, in Brazil:

Far fewer people have smartphones (14% vs 51%)
Smartphones are used less often (40% vs 59% daily)
They are used on-the-go less often (64% vs 86%) – poorer network coverage?
Social networking is proportionately more popular than email
Smartphone gaming is significantly less popular (39% vs 62%)
They use fewer apps, even free ones (14 vs 23 installed)
Almost all smartphone users are urban
Cohabitation is significantly less common (20% vs 11%)

Thoughts: reading between the lines, network coverage is poorer and data-on-the-go is harder to find. We need to make sure B2G phones and apps are solid in absence of a good network connection. Also, the phone will be the only computing device for many users.

Wim Benes: Mozilla bij Open Overheid Congres

Fjoerfoks — 2012-05-16T10:27:52+00:00

Mozilla zal op 31 mei met een stand aanwezig zijn bij het 'Open Overheid Congres' in Utrecht. Hieronder een samenvatting van de inhoud van dit congres. Meer informatie kunt u vinden op http://www.ecp-epn.nl/open-overheid-congres. Het congres is gratis toegankelijk, dus kom langs en laat u bijpraten over openheid en bezoek tussendoor de stands van open-source leveranciers als Mozilla en anderen.

Open standaarden, Open source software en Open data: drie
losse onderwerpen die in de praktijk enorm verweven zijn, nu in één congres! Kom op 31 mei naar het Open Overheid Congres, georganiseerd door ECP, Forum Standaardisatie, ICTU, VKA, TNO en OSSLO.

Laat u bijpraten over de stand van zaken en ontmoet uitvoerders van beleid, beleidsmakers, IT-verantwoordelijken van overheidsorganisaties en marktpartijen. Vernieuwende denkrichtingen en praktijkvoorbeelden zullen u inspireren!

Open Overheid congres
Donderdag 31 mei 2012
12.00 – 17.00 uur (incl. lunch)
Beatrix Theater te Utrecht

Gervase Markham: Welcome To Life

gerv — 2012-05-16T08:05:13+00:00

An under-3-minute video short story by Tom Scott. “A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.”

Nicholas Nethercote: MemShrink progress, week 47–48

Nicholas Nethercote — 2012-05-16T06:26:55+00:00

Add-ons

The main news in the past two weeks has been about Kyle Huey’s patch that prevents most chrome-to-content leaks, which are the most common kind of add-on leak. Testing showed it worked beautifully, but caused a knock-on leak in add-ons built with old versions (1.3 and earlier) of the Add-on SDK. (This received a lot of attention.) Kyle then made a slight tweak that fixed that knock-on leak. So we’re currently still on track for Firefox 15 being “the one that fixes add-on leaks”.

For completeness, here are the add-ons that we know were temporarily affected by that knock-on leak: Wallflower, Visual Hashing, Translate This!, Easy YouTube Video Downloader. They (and probably quite a few others) are all working fine again now.

Here’s a quote from an email that one user sent to Kyle this week.

Firefox was leaking about 1.5GB per hour for me. It started with Firefox 3. I tracked it down to Ghostery and NoScript, but even without those addons it leaked about 500MB per hour of browsing.

GC and CC times got up into the 10 second range. Ugly. Really really ugly! And this is on top of the line massively overclocked hardware, too. I had to install a new addon to add a restart button to Firefox, because Firefox froze solid after hitting 2GB of memory usage. I also patched it after every update to allow up to 4GB, buying a little more time…

Then your patch comes along and solves it all… you are awesome man – totally awesome!

Another user — one who uses the leaky Autopager add-on — commented on Kyle’s blog.

Certainly, before this fix I would find that Firefox often became sluggish (input lag, slow paint operations, less than silky smooth scroll animations) as the memory usage built up. It’s hard to say how much various factors contributed to the whole, but GC pauses did undoubtedly cause the scroll animation stuttering.

Restarting was the cure. I haven’t noticed the same symptoms since, and while I haven’t had enough chance to make a conclusive judgement, the signs certainly seem to be good.

I have a full tab strip more often than not, and Fx set to load tabs from last time. This is offset by the wonderful and elegantly simple tabs on demand feature. I’m running a 2 year old laptop with 4GB ram.

And while we’re on the topic, here’s a comment from my blog.

Opened my firefox today, 30+ Tabs (only counting the ones in the active group, the others aren’t loaded), using just little more than 330 MB of RAM. A year ago, with Firefox 4, this would have been impossible. Keep it going!

Good times.

The following add-ons had zombie compartments fixed: Youtube Ratings Preview, SPDY Indicator It’s likely these leaks would have been fixed by Kyle’s change, but since Firefox 15 won’t be released until August 28, it’s good that they’ve been fixed now. (Indeed, the AMO review policy still requires that add-ons not cause zombie compartments with the current release of Firefox; that policy may be revisited once Firefox 15 is released.)

Compartment-per-global

The other big news is that compartment-per-global (CPG) landed, thanks to the work of various people, especially Luke Wagner and Bobby Holley. Bobby explained what this means and explored some of the consequences.

CPG will allow lots of things within Firefox to become simpler and faster. The main disadvantage is, unfortunately, increased memory consumption, as can be seen on areweslimyet.com. (Thanks to Luke, this increase was less than it could have been.) This is mostly due to more fragmentation in the JavaScript heap — we now have many more compartments, and each 4KB heap arena cannot be shared between compartments, so there are many more partially empty arenas present.

You might think this would make me bang my head against the wall in frustration, but it doesn’t. That’s because even if I ignore the many non-MemShrink-related benefits of CPG, there are two big MemShrink-related ones.

First, CPG will enable per-tab memory reporting, something that users have been requesting for years.

Second, CPG will lead to much more detail in about:memory and about:compartments. For example, Nils Maier has written a patch that makes it obvious all the JavaScript modules that have been loaded. Another example: Justin Dolske found that plusone.google.com was doing something silly (constantly creating new iframes?) that caused huge numbers of compartments to be created; without CPG I think all those globals would have been lumped into a single compartment and the problem would have been much less obvious. More information in about:memory will lead to more diagnosis of existing problems — particularly leaks of various kinds — in both Firefox and websites.

Memory Reporting

Kevin Locke tweaked the JS memory reporters so that more compartments are distinguished, instead of being lumped together. This was his first Mozilla patch — well done, Kevin!

Nathan Froyd improved the coverage of the layout memory reporters. This significantly reduces “heap-unclassified” for huge pages like the single-page version of the HTML5 spec.

Bug counts

Here are the current bug counts.

P1: 22 (-2/+3)
P2: 83 (-6/+4)
P3: 105 (-5/+6)
Unprioritized: 3 (-1/+3)

Mostly bouncing around at the moment.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Jetpack Project: weekly update for May 15, 2012

Jeff Griffiths — 2012-05-16T03:55:22+00:00

Project News

We released Add-on SDK 1.7 today. Please see the blog post and release notes for more info.
Nicholas Nethercote’s latest blog post mentions some progress on Nightly that will mitigate the problems users could see when using add-ons packed with older versions of the SDK and Firefox 15. Although we’ve seen good progress here, there are still some underlying issues, and we strongly recommend that you re-pack your older add-ons with SDK 1.7.
SDK developer Matteo Feretti ( aka ZER0 ) is speaking at JSDay in Verona tomorrow – let’s all wish him luck!

Quick Stats

Total open bugs: 291
Bugs created last week: 12
Bugs fixed last week: 5
Total SDK-based Addons on AMO: 745
Open pull requests on Github: 36

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2012-05-15 08:12:38 PDT

Meeting Brief

no Builder update today
SDK: releasing 1.7 today, khuey’s latest patch reduces impact of platform changes on older SDK versions.
Roundtable: landing changes to self.dat as per Irakli’s ‘Spring Cleaning’ plan.

Full minutes are available here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2012-5-15#Minutes

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: SeaMonkey Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-05-16T03:00:14+00:00

SeaMonkey/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15

< SeaMonkey | StatusMeetings

« last meeting | index | next meeting »

SeaMonkey Meeting Details

Time: 15 May, 2012, 12:00 UTC
- (8am Eastern, 1pm UK, 2pm Central Europe, 8pm Hong Kong)
Location: #seamonkey IRC channel
Further Read: Basics

Agenda

Who’s taking minutes? -> Ratty
Nominees for Friends of the Fish Tank:
- None

Action Items

(who needs to do what that hasn’t been recorded in a bug) We should assign people to the open items.

NEW

IanN to arrange with Jeff to send a tee-shirt or something to Serge (FotFT).
- No response from ~~The Scarlet Pimpernel~~Serge to email, will try email again.

OPEN

CLOSED

Status of the SeaMonkey Buildbot Master and Tree

ewong and Callek are looking into building on MSVC2010 by Friday.
tonymec is worried about status of trunk l10n: 7 languages not built since Apr 27, the other 14 currently only on Linux. This is probably related to the server moves going on.

Release Train

2.9b4 shipped April 19
2.9 shipped April 24
2.9.1 shipped April 30
2.10b1 shipped May 12

Extensions Compatibility Tracking

See Basics page. Please only list current changes here.
Addon Compatibility Listings
- Nothing special this time.
DOM Inspector Release Schedule (crussell)
- bug 746784 Predictable release schedule for development and localization.
- The last six weeks of a release cycle are for localizers no string changes will occur then. Localization happens on a branch (DOMI_2_0_12 right now) and concurrent development happens on default. Right now, DOM Inspector is set to ship with: de, el, en-GB, en-US, fr, ru, sk, sv-SE.
- Serge has filed some bugs so that the relevant changes to pull the right branch are in place. See bug 732749 (client.py: review SeaMonkey policy about which extension revisions are packaged).
- So in theory we could work out the correct tag from the Gecko version of the repos we’re building in? It’s not tagged it’s just a branch. To get on the right branch:

 hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/dom-inspector
 cd ./dom-inspector
 hg update DOMI_2_0_12

- It is to be hoped that our build team (Serge, Callek, ewong) can sort it out so it is fairly automated rather than having to tweak the client.py every 6 weeks.

2.x (Last, Current, Next)

2.9 had ~73,300 ADU by last Tuesday and 2.9.1 had ~53,600 downloads so far (2.8 reached ~203,100 downloads).
- Of the released versions, as of last Tuesday, we have 13.7% on 2.0, 5.1% on 2.1-2.3, 9.5% on 2.4-2.6, 4.4% on 2.7, 15.8% on 2.8 and 51.5% on 2.9. So, in the last four weeks, ~5k (an additional 4% of ADU) have migrated to 2.7 or above.
Still a large, but slowly decreasing, chunk of users on 2.0.x.
Figure out what is preventing people from moving from 2.0.x to the latest versions.
- Some people cannot upgrade due to system requirements (OS version, processor capabilities etc.)
- Perhaps putting resources into getting certain extensions working with SM 2.4 and above (those that won’t work with SM 2.7 automatically due to compatible-by-default extensions).
- Still need volunteers to look at what is keeping people at below 2.4. IanN could try knocking something up and send it round members lists for polishing but he’s not on all the channels (mozillazine, etc) to post it to when finished.
- Are some Linux distributions are still stuck on 2.0? We have data on OSes and OS versions in the raw data in the Mozilla metrics.
- metrics.mozilla.org now provides us a breakdown of versions against OS.
- There seems to be a very small number of 2.0.x users on OSes not supported by later versions. We even have some users on windows 7 using 2.0x! Fortunately Windows 8 users are at least using 2.7.
- Darwin 9.8 is last version with PPC support, so those people may stuck on old versions because of that.
  - For OSX/PPC I wonder if someone from the community could try building a contributed “TenFourMonkey” based on the patch sets from TenFourFox plus TenFourBird [Ratty].
  - SeaMonkey 2.6.1 for a PowerPC/G4 on Mac OS 10.5.x. IanN says we should advertise that more (and other contributed builds).
- Ian has done some working on comparing profile of 2.0.x users against 2.9 ones.
  - Split between OS for 2.9 is Windows 92.82%, Linux 2.53%, MacOS 4.65% and for 2.0.x is Windows 85.37%, Linux 5.55%, MacOS 9.08%.
  - For those using 2.0.x on MacOS about 39% are on OSX 10.4 or above, whereas for 2.9 it is about 82%.
  - For those using 2.0.x on Linux about 98% are on Kernel 2.6, whereas for 2.9 it is about 69% (31% on 3.0 or above).
  - For those using 2.0.x on Windows about 37% are on Vista/7/2008, a further 62% are on XP/2003, whereas for 2.9 it is about 50% on Vista/7/2008 and 49% on XP/2003.
See Basics page for the usual reminders.

2.9

open tracking (0)
tracking requests (1)
targeted (3)
fixed (5)

One tracked 2.5 issue still open.
- 2.1 through 2.7 have NOT included the ka (Kartvelian aka Georgian) locale. The last release with ka locale shipped was 2.0.14 and the ka l10n maintainers have not yet updated for changes in later SeaMonkey versions.
- Callek now needs to morph bug 667147 into removing |ka| from our [current] automation entirely (all-locales). Callek will look at best locale to transition any ka users to.
  - Plan is to migrate ka users to en-US with a english dialog saying they are out of date, and a link to the all-locales page if there is a language they understand better. Current ADU of ka alone is 3-5 individuals, so low impact.~Callek
  - Callek and ewong were working on this but they didn’t manage to get this done by the time 2.9 shipped. No new ETA unfortunately.
One regression issue noted for 2.8: bug 735946 Browser is not not focused when opening links from external applications. Fixed on 2.9+.

2.Next

Feature List, Planning

Bug statistics for last two (full) weeks: 38 new, 26 fixed, 42 triaged.

Good triaging effort.

Open reviews/flags:
20 review
9 super-review
1 ui-review
6 feedback

See Feature List page for major wanted/needed features.

Roundtable – Personal Status Updates

Status Updates from developers – what are you working on, what’s the progress, any other comments? (feel free to add yourself to the list if your name is missing and you have interesting status).

Aqualon

Callek

[RelEng] Released SeaMonkey 2.9.1:

bug 750014 Throttle 2.9 Updates to Manual Only until 2.9.1 goes live.
bug 750021 (SM2.9.1) Tracking bug for build and release of SeaMonkey 2.9.1.

ToDo:

bug 640464 Develop a way for tests in mozilla-central to be overridden in a suite build.
bug 741082 [sea-win32-02] “create aus previous upload dir failed”.
bug 746208 Investigate continuing TBPL service for SeaMonkey.
bug 748244 ADU breakdown by language.
Migrate the SeaMonkey Projects blog from Mozillazine to Mozilla Hosted.

ewong

Fixed:
- bug 667327 – Data Manager Allows Passwords to Be Copied Without Input of Master Password

Checkin-needed:
- bug 408834 – Page Info violates XUL box model.

Clueless as to what stage this bug is in:
- bug 745847 – “No branch_id for a branch_name ‘SeaMonkey-Release’ can be found.

Working On:
- bug 574955 – Make webconsole work in SeaMonkey
- bug 620997 – Open “Links” URLs in browser.

To Do:
- bug 633937 – Port bug 562048 to suite.

IanN

Usual testing, reviewing and commenting.
Fixed:
- bug 720661 Display account central when no default account / no accounts setup
- bug 747765 Cannot add/remove Print icon in Composer toolbar
- bug 103684 RFE: Implement direct ordering of filters (insert new filter at the current position / above the selected filter) – SM part
- bug 749962 Fix spelling of color in chatzilla.dtd
- bug 754065 Port |bug 744444 – delete CPP_PROG_LINK, purify/quantify targets| and |bug 606145 part 1 – Properly link host programs written in C++|
- bug 749985 Add en-GB localisation for ChatZilla
- bug 749989 Add en-GB localisation for Venkman
Checked in with rs but waiting for review:
- bug 725093 Update en-GB for Gecko 12.0 (mozilla-aurora)
- bug 725109 Update en-GB for Firefox 12.0 (mozilla-aurora)
- bug 725111 Update en-GB for Editor 12 (comm-aurora)
- bug 725121 Update en-GB for Thunderbird 12.0 (comm-aurora)
- bug 725179 Update en-GB for SeaMonkey 2.9
- bug 725187 Update en-GB for SeaMonkey 2.9 Help
- bug 725363 Update en-GB for Calendar/Lightning 1.4
- bug 747345 Update en-GB for Gecko 13
- bug 747358 Update en-GB for Firefox 13
- bug 747360 Update en-GB for Editor 13
- bug 749952 Update en-GB for Thunderbird 13
- bug 749955 Update en-GB for SeaMonkey 2.10 (2 patches)
- bug 749959 Update en-GB for Calendar/Lightning 1.5
Waiting for review on:
- bug 638643 Remove obsolete EditorToggleParagraphMarks from editor.js
- bug 749986 Add en-GB localisation for ChatZilla
- bug 749990 Add en-GB localisation for Venkman
Waiting for additional review on:
Reviewed and waiting for feedback from mobile peer:
- bug 689253 Update en-GB for Mobile 10.0 (comm-aurora)
Working on:
- Various SM Council documents.
- bug 606683 Allow customization of toolbar in Composer and MailNews Composition
- bug 639690 [META] Re-arrange code between editor and editorOverlay
- bug 657234 Move pasteQuote and pasteNoFormatting into contentAreaContextOverlay
- File/Folder selection in windows.
To Do:
- bug 639395 Get cmd_fontSize to reflect current state of selected content / content at caret.
- Prefs-in-a-tab.
- Create FAQ for Friends of the Fish Tank.
- Knock something up finding out why users are not upgrading to 2.4+ and send it around members lists for polishing.
- Help get composer standalone builds working with –enable-tests.

InvisibleSmiley

Fixed:
- bug 753475 “JavaScript strict warning: chrome://messenger/content/messengerdnd.js, line 66: function CanDropOnFolderTree does not always return a value”
- bug 753050 Port |bug 746859 – Add a play icon to the click-to-play placeholder| to Modern
- bug 751253 Reference to non-existing dictionaryGeneric.png in mozapps/extensions/newaddon.css
- bug 750855 Port |bug 728168 – Replace old synchronous favicons calls in feeds|
- bug 750226 Add zh-TW to “official builds” and “language packs” list in SeaMonkey Download & Releases page
- bug 750028 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.9.1
- bug 747788 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.9
- bug 747519 Port new doorhanger options from |bug 711618 – implement basic click to play permission model|
- bug 747155 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.9 Beta 4
- bug 738247 Create/Update 2.9 Release Notes
- bug 567518 Consider supporting or switching to SSL Google search (https)

KaiRo

mcsmurf

Check-in needed:

bug 721474 Port |bug 575830 Image zoom (Page zoom) is reset when I switch tabs| to SeaMonkey.
bug 732027 Port |bug 575955 Replace internal usage of old transactions shim, add a new toolkit test| to SeaMonkey.

Misak

Mnyromyr

MReimer

Neil

Fixed:

bug 658280 Switch Profile does not Prompt to Save existing Session Restore.
bug 745447 XUL progress meter layout should match HTML.
bug 749893 favicon of previous page is displayed on tab when you hit back button.
bug 752505 Copy Image broken on Nightly.

In Progress:

bug 707305 Re-enable building with –enable-incomplete-external-linkage.
bug 738228 Option to display used font faces [DOMi].
bug 746166 Remove use of cmd_backgroundColor from comm-central.

Ratty

Fixed:

bug 701432 Add support for fave icons on jump list uri entries.
bug 747774 The Windows 7 Jumplist is using the mailbiff icon, should use html-file.ico instead.
bug 748991 The Find in Page Dialog does not vertically center the highlighted result like the findbar does.
bug 752336 Location Bar doesn’t revert back to the correct url when you enter text then shift-middle click GO to open in a new tab.
bug 753272 bustage fix: make package fails due to bug 749018.
Lightning Integration /Support:
- bug 731264 Support with multiple toolboxes in MailNews due to Lighting Calendar and Task Tabs.
- bug 751217 In SeaMonkey, the Delete button in the Lightning Task Actions Toolbar doesn’t have an icon because it uses mail-toolbar.png.
- bug 753683 Simplify SeaMonkey handling of Lightnings customizable toolbars, Lightning part.
bug 694786 Remove hardcoded icon paths from notification.xml. Fixes the following as well:
- bug 511874 Notification bar should use 16×16 versions of icons.
- bug 751081 Fix typo from bug 595810 (chrome://global/skin/icons/question64.png should be chrome://global/skin/icons/question-64.png instead).

Needs branch approval:

bug 751081 Fix typo from bug 595810 (chrome://global/skin/icons/question64.png should be chrome://global/skin/icons/question-64.png instead) [Branches only patch from bug 694786]

In progress:

bug 663343 The “List all Tabs” menu should visually identify which tabs are on-screen (rather than scrolled off) [Needs UI consensus].
bug 751922 Asynchronously add favicons to back/forward and history menus.

To Do:

Port Thunderbird bug 360800 MDN confirmation dialog does not say which addresses the receipt will be sent to (can be multiple).

Investigating:

Spelling Preferences: Parse spellchecker dictionary names as BCP 47 language tags.

Other:

Did some reviews and coding mentoring.
Bug triage and Bug discussions.
End user support and PR in newsgroups and Mozillazine.

Ricardo

sgautherie

Fixed (or in-progress) SeaMonkey (related) bugs:
- bug 504730 [SeaMonkey] mochitest-browser-chrome, test_idcheck.xul: venkman.xul leaks 375 kB
- bug 635825 [SeaMonkey] mochitest-5: reenable test_notifications.html and test_prompt.html
- bug 647875 [SeaMonkey] mochitest-chrome: investigate test_crash_submit.xul failure, then reenable this test
- bug 730663 Port |Bug 708690 – Signed MAR files do not protect against applying an update for the wrong product| to SeaMonkey
- bug 739041 Port |Bug 482911 – [HTML5] Re-implement bookmarks.html parsing using the HTML5 parser| to SeaMonkey. (test_384370.js + 3 other failures)
- bug 743692 Port |Bug 493557 – “Recent Tags” and “Recently Bookmarked” are flipped when smart bookmarks are updated| to SeaMonkey
- bug 748610 [SeaMonkey, 2.10+] “Error: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/distribution/extensions/debugQA@mozilla.org.xpi”
- bug 749106 Port |Bug 746837 – Fix sessionstore to handle an exception thrown when attempting to focus a window that has been navigated| to SeaMonkey
- bug 749114 Port |Bug 737821 – [Firefox] Files which are already bundled with xulrunner are listed in package-manifest| to SeaMonkey
- bug 750656 Port |Bug 664918 – Infrastructure for media stream graph processing| to SeaMonkey
- bug 752211 Port bug 745254 to SeaMonkey
- bug 752216 Port |Bug 641892 – Support showing multiple popup notification icons at the same time| to SeaMonkey
- bug 752456 Port |Bug 751334 – Redundant TabView.init call in restoreWindow leaks the browser window when the window closes before delayedStartup was called| to SeaMonkey
- bug 753613 Stop using –disable-optimize for –enable-debug builds, in SeaMonkey
- bug 747668 Port |Bug 495277 – autocomplete.xml should not use new Function()| to SeaMonkey
- bug 752548 Use capturing phase for notification.xml handlers
Fixed (or in-progress) MailNews Core bugs:
- bug 745998 Port |Bug 739132 – –disable-necko-wifi causes “Error: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/components/necko_wifi.xpt”| to SeaMonkey
- bug 746745 [SeaMonkey] Space for moving to next unread doesn’t work (JavaScript error: chrome://messenger/content/mailWindowOverlay.js, line 2311)
- bug 718190 Intermittent orange on Windows | TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | test_over2GBMailboxes.js (NS_ERROR_FILE_NO_DEVICE_SPACE)
Fixed Core bugs:
- bug 741070 [SeaMonkey] browser_394759_basic.js (and browser_394759_behavior.js) fails
- bug 744663 test_websocket_basic.html: additional improvements after bug 621347
Fixed other projects bugs:
- [cZ] bug 748631 Bump ChatZilla compatibility for Firefox 15.0a1 / SeaMonkey 2.12a1
- [DOMi] bug 748634 Bump DOM Inspector compatibility for Firefox 15.0a1 / SeaMonkey 2.12a1 / Thunderbird 15.0a1 / (Gecko) Toolkit 15.0a1
- [Venkman] bug 738564 Venkman compatibility: Use ‘.*’ instead of ‘a1′ syntax, to support *-aurora/beta/release (but not *-central)
- [Venkman] bug 748625 Bump Venkman compatibility for Firefox 15.0a1 / SeaMonkey 2.12a1 / Thunderbird 15.0a1 / (Gecko) Toolkit 15.0a1

Stanimir

stefanh

tonymec

No change.

Any other business?

Geolocation
- Geolocation now works out of the box. MoCo turned it on by default for all applications that build off mozilla-central.
- For comm-beta all we need to do is (bug 494421) to add pref("geo.wifi.uri", "https://www.google.com/loc/json"); to browser-prefs.js. However we’re not even sure we are legally allowed to ship with the URL in, we might need to actually put in a pref to disable that in newer builds.
- No news to date. Callek will have to reach out to his MoCo legal contact again soonish.
Test failures
- qawanted, especially on Linux and MacOSX specific issues: reproducing and reporting would already help.
- Serge says that on Linux and MacOSX, he just needs someone to actually run the tests and report what they see (screen, console, etc). For example, there is a Mac test about Ctrl+W not working. This should be so trivial.
- tonymec suggests that any enthusiastic user, even non-technical, should be able to do some testing (litmus?) and not be scared by technical language and such.
- IanN suggests reaching out to the user community using the newsgroups and forums.
- Serge to do a write up and send it to Ratty to propagate to the community.
  - Ratty is still waiting for Serge.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15“

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Thunderbird Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-05-16T03:00:12+00:00

Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15

< Thunderbird | StatusMeetings

last meeting | index | next meeting »

Thunderbird Meeting Details :

Tuesday, 2012-05-97 16:30 UTC (9:30am Pacific, 12:30pm Eastern)
How to dial-in

Remember to use a headset and mute yourself when not talking

Feel free to ask questions in the meeting either by speaking up or by asking them in #maildev on IRC.

Other ways to get in touch with us can be found on our communications page

Agenda

Who’s taking minutes? –> Usul
Minute taking Schedule. Talk to Standard8 for schedule changes/additions.
Note: this meeting is for interactive discussion. Feel free to ask questions!

Action Items

Friends of the Tree

Thanks to our Friend of the Tree. When adding someone to this section, please get their T-Shirt size, phone number (needed for shipping!) and send it to abourcier@mozilla.com that she can send them a shirt!

Patrick Cloke (nominated by Florian). Patrick has been in the maildev community for a while; he started with some patches to lightning, and is now a chat/ peer. He’s the author of the IRC code that is now part of Thunderbird.

Thunderbird Development

For more details, see also the driver meeting notes.

Feature Work

Test Pilot Filelink (Big Files)

Our Dropbox implementation is not ready for release, so support has been disabled in beta until further notice.
Landed a fix that prevented users from easily updating their saved YouSendIt passwords if they’d gotten it wrong the first time (bug 753797)

Instant Messaging

Unified search results for IM conversations and email messages landed. Still polishing some details of it.
Updated the chat/ folder to take changes made to it for Instantbird.

App Tabs (GSoC Project)

The Thunderbird tabmail code is still being studied to determine how best to port Firefox’s pinned tabs implementation

Better Gmail Integration

Code being read

Schedule and Progress

Next merge date: 05 06
For information about channels, point people here – http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/channel/

Thunderbird 12 Thunderbird 13 Thunderbird 14 Thunderbird 15 Thunderbird ESR

Extension of the week

QA Updates

working on testdays for FileLink and IM.

Marketing Updates

working on the contributors recruitment campaign.
- up for grab posted
- Contribute blog post on its way with QA and Developers calls
- Polishing the new start page

Infrastructure Update

Datacenter move happening today.
A couple of things not quite working yet.

Build / Release Update

Web Update

ispdb has gotten Django 1.4 and browserid support added thanks to sergio
- production/staging of ispdb have been taken down for now, will re-stage it with moco IT soon, no production until it’s actually ready this time
Added geoip functionality to account provisioner server side
Tracked down some bugs in kitsune and other pages due to server moves

Documentation

Support

Next support day will be the day after TB 13 releases i.e. 1 day after TB13 release day June 5 which will be June 6, 2012

(If you support Thunderbird or write or translate documentation to help support Thunderbird, please subscribe to the tb-support-crew mailing list and briefly introduce yourself to the list)

1480 new support topics (1630 one week ago ) – Media:7-13May2012-GetSatisfactin-Thunderbird-1of2-2012-05-14_1603.png ;7-13May2012-GetSatisfactin-Thunderbird-2of2-2012-05-14_1607.png
Thunderbird 12 Support Issues
- Further issues? If so please edit the TB12 Support Issues page and add any issues or bugs found in TB12 and tag them tb12
See this week’s Support Appendix for full Get Satisfaction metrics and other support details
working on requirements for possible future integration of the Thunderbird Knowledge Base into SUMO

Upcoming events!

TB community day June 1st in Vancouver
TB Support Clinic in Vancouver modelled after the Firefox in person support event aka Firefox Clinic before Mozcamp Europe sometime Summer 2012

Lightning Updates

Status Updates

See the Mozilla Status Board for status updates specific to developers.

Roundtable Highlights

Attendees

usul, standard8, bienvenu, bwinton, mconley, rolandtanglao, andreas nilsson, sancus, mmecca, irving, jhopkins, mmecca

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15“

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Platform Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-05-16T03:00:10+00:00

Platform/2012-05-15

< Platform

« previous week | index | next week »

Platform Meeting Details

Tuesday 2012-05-15 – 11:00 am Pacific
Dial-in: conference# 95312
- US/International: +1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 95312
- US toll free: +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312
- Canada: +1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 95312
Warp Core Vidyo Room / SFO-Boardroom
join irc.mozilla.org #planning for back channel

Kilimanjaro

Product team working on solidifying requirements for “base camp”.
Still working toward larger Kilimanjaro goal.
Triage today at 11:30am. Conflicts with the daily mobile triage. Trying to find another time that would enable mobile folks to attend.

Notices / Schedule

Fennec Native 14 beta 1 is now live on Google Play!
- Bugs filed by following the link on the product page will have [Play] in the whiteboard
- With Fennec Native on Google Play, we’ll be including betaN+ blocking bugs during channel meetings, but we’ll continue triaging nominations and release blockers as part of mobile triage
- Fennec Native betas will have a weekly cadence after this week as with desktop, going to build no later than Wednesday for a Friday push
- We expect our next beta of Fennec Native to be multi-locale with the same 13 localizations as XUL Fennec previously

We’re now here in the schedule
FF13 beta 4 will go-to-build today (5/15). Please land any approved beta patches ASAP, and continue working on tracked bugs
- We should be looking for the lowest risk mitigating fix for remaining tracked bugs

Firefox Development

The work by a group of MSU students to get Firefox preferences “in-content” has mostly landed on trunk. Check out Jared’s blog post for more info. There’s some followup polish/theming work still remaining before we make the switch and remove the old preferences dialog.
FX-Team work week wrap up – read it, there’s good stuff in there!

Firefox Developer Tools

Developer Toolbar relanded. Preffed off, turn on devtools.toolbar.enabled to try it out.
Async web console starting to land, 2 of 5 patches landed.
Responsive Design Mode should be landing this week.

Add-on SDK

Performance

Perf+metrics work week this week in MV/SF
This week’s Snappy summary
Lawrence posted on hacks about Firefox 13 Snappy work.
Tim landed a fix to avoid setTimeout()s when handling tab clicks in bug 743877, which should significantly improve tab strip responsiveness.
Incremental GC making progress towards being turned on by default again (bug 750959, bug 752098).
Wladimir Palant (Adblock Plus fame) wrote a new Suspend background tabs add-on to halt activity in background tabs. This experimental add-on should give a sense of how we can improve lag due to background tabs.

GFX

Azure-Thebes will (hopefully) be turned on by default this week.
- This applies only to hardware accelerated computers on Windows Vista and 7.
- The net of this is that we’re going to be drawing fundamentally differently, and we can expect regressions in performance and drawing.
- It has a very simple pref for backing out, luckily.

JS

Layout

Video

DOM

WebAPI

Lots of work happening on security model, but still a lot of work remaining.
We will probably adjust the open-web-apps API to allow multiple apps per origin since the security model will support that. Might not implement the actual support in the initial release though.
The Open Web Apps API has been submitted to W3C and we’ve started receiving input.
Initial APIs for “system intents”, camera control and Alarm API being discussed on webapi mailing list.
Started implementing backend for doing apps-specific permissions.

Network

Identity

Firefox front-end team met with Ben Adida & Co. last week for an Identity swarm, made good progress on understanding how things work, and getting some initial code up and going to start flushing out issues (for both sign-into-browser and native sign-into-websites)

Plugins

Mobile

In light of the beta, please remember that one can have only one native Sync client per device. Please ping :ally if you have questions.
Testday on Friday please help promote it

Accessibility

No audible this week.

Tree Management

Switching windows 32-bit PGO builds to run on 64-bit machines this week bug 753132
Hoping to have signed OSX builds (for 10.8) on mozilla-central late this week or early next week bug 752613

Security

module owners please check your module for unassigned security bugs

For updates to meetings please see the Security Review Calendar

Bugs marked sec-review-needed that need to be scheduled

ID	Summary	Status	Priority
744967	Add plugincheck functionality to Add-on Manager	NEW	–
748945	Review iframe auto-height feature (part of seemless iframes)	NEW	–
748949	Review changes to Cache-Control: no-cache on https pages	NEW	–
749235	Security Review of Enable HTTP pipelining by default	NEW	–
749334	SecReview: webapps OS level integration : Maemo	NEW	–
749337	SecReview: Thunderbird should (semi-)automatically improve the security-related server configuration settings when it knows an improvement could be made	NEW	–
749339	SecReview: Thunderbird auto-configuration database should be expanded & updated by regularly spidering every domain on the internet (	NEW	–
749341	SecReview: Teach FileSaver to take URIs as well	NEW	–
749342	SecReview: “App-state” API, so that content knows when it becomes hidden etc.	NEW	–
749344	SecReview: WebUSB	NEW	–
749362	SecReview: WebBluetooth	NEW	–
749363	SecReview: Preffing out CSS should be easier	NEW	–
749364	SecReview: WebPrint (or WebIPP)	NEW	–
749365	SecReview: API for “home screen” app locking display, listening for “wake up” button, etc.	NEW	–
749368	SecReview: Use a pref to determine whether we auto-launch downloaded files	NEW	–
749379	SecReview: [WebAPI] Proper WebAPI permissions manager	NEW	–
749625	SecReview: (camera) camera support for desktop	NEW	–
749372	SecReview: Relax same-origin XHR restrictions for privileged applications	NEW	–
749378	SecReview: Network manager API	NEW	–
749221	Security Review of Media Plugin API (MPAPI)	ASSIGNED	–
749233	Security Review of turn on “don’t load tabs until selected” by default / Tabs on Demand	ASSIGNED	–
749355	SecReview: WebContacts (or Contacts+)	ASSIGNED	P1

Stability Report

Stability work week – June 11th 2012.
KaiRo has written a blog post on The Life Cycle of a Crash.

Socorro

New incremental release on Wednesday bring some improvements to the new Nightly Crash Trends report.
Plan for Socorro support for Rapid Beta stands, work is starting.

Desktop

Firefox 15

Trunk is pretty crashy – top issues over the past 3 days…
#1 – bug 654903- js::gc::PushMarkStack. Not a new signature but appearing in #1 spot.
- This and a couple other JS spikes seem to be related to incremental GC landed for the May 13 build and then backed out again.
#2 – bug 752309 – xpc::WrapperFactory::PrepareForWrapping.
#3 – bug 736695 – nsGenericElement::UnbindFromTree
#5 – bug 732897 – Makeday
#6 – bug 671468 – nsSocketOutputStream::Write(char const*, unsigned int, unsigned int*) (Correlation to Спутник @Mail.Ru and Yandex.Bar)
On dev-platform, bsmedberg mentiones that today he landed XPCOM string classes being infallible by default and alert him of any aborts seen as fallout from that.

Firefox 14

Crashes tracking Fx14
A couple of problems with AMD graphics cards bug 714320 and bug 700288 that we haven’t been able to fix.
bug 736695 – nsGenericElement::UnbindFromTree , when I open Customize Toolbar with Video DownloadHelper 4.9.8 installed. A problem for a while.

Firefox 12 & 13

top crashes that we wish we could do something about
bug 572011 – Crash @ nsDiskCacheStreamIO::FlushBufferToFile
bug 597260 – nsFileOutputStream::Write(char const*, unsigned int, unsigned int*)
top Flash hang: bug 726425 – a number of those reports don’t even have Flash in the stack, possibly our own code at fault?
bug 640904 – Crash in JSAutoEnterCompartment::enter – waiting on AMO review for fixed add-on

Mobile

Beta out today…yay!. Crash rate down on both trunk and aurora < 20 crashes per 100 ADU.

See Mobile Notes for Mobile specific Socorro notes

A good number of crashes were fixed last week; 3 day report will have some of the drop offs from the fixes and show better numbers of what crashes still remain. If you run into a crash:

please please please comment in the bug with STRs, or even approximate STRs.
please remember to checkmark the URL box at the very least if you can submit the crash report

some of the fixes got pushed to aurora last week, which should in turn make aurora with similar stability to nightly.

Aurora top crashes
- bug 740727 – crash in mozilla::layers::LayerManagerOGL::SetLayerProgramProjectionMatrix @ libpvrANDROID_WSEGL
- bug 743938 – crash in glClear @ WSEGL_GetDrawableParameters
- bug 731288 – crash @ libgui.so
Nightly top crashes
- bug 737128 – mozilla::gl::GLContextEGL::ReleaseSurface GL crash on Droid X
  - If you know STRs with a Droid X please comment in the bug
- bug 751967 – crash on new tab/google maps galaxy nexus, ICS, 5.03 build
  - If you know STRs please comment in the bug
- bug 736421 – crash in mozilla::layers::Layer::CalculateScissorRect @ CgDrv_Create on MB860 and LG-P99.
- bug 747746 – java.util.concurrent.RejectedExecutionException: at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$AbortPolicy.rejectedExecution(ThreadPoolExecutor.java)

Roundtable

myk: Apps considering providing updates in this meeting about ongoing development; feedback welcome on whether or not folks think they’d be useful.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2012-05-15“

Planet Mozilla Blog: Planet Addition: Nick Cameron

raccettura — 2012-05-16T00:09:49+00:00

Nick Cameron (feed) – Nick Cameron joined Mozilla in January 2012 and works on graphics and layout from Auckland, NZ. Previously, he has been working on research in type theory and language design.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Announcing Add-on SDK 1.7!

Dave Mason — 2012-05-15T22:57:51+00:00

The Jetpack team is happy to announce the release of Add-on SDK version 1.7! This version of the SDK is mostly a bug-fix release but with a few added features.

Some of the important features included in this release are:

Plural forms for localization – many languages treat plural forms of words in different manners. The SDK’s l10n functionality now supports those forms across languages.
Implementation of ‘Promise Abstractions’ – Promises provide an interface for interacting with an object that represents the result of an action that is performed asynchronously, and may or may not be finished at any given point in time. In the Add-on SDK, we follow the CommonJS Promise/A Implementation.
contentStyle/contentStyleField – this give you the ability to inject a CSS file into a web page.

For more new features and a list of the bug fixes that are shipping in this release, please see the Release Notes.

As of this writing the documentation for SDK 1.7 is not available in the usual place, however they should be available by Thursday, May 17th. I will update this post when they are live, but in the meantime you have two options:

view them on Github: [ Tutorials & Guides ] [ Addon-kit API Docs ]
download the SDK, activate the SDK environment and then run cfx docs to generate your own local copy of the documentation.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

post to our discussion group
chat with us on irc.mozilla.org #jetpack
report a bug
check out the source and contribute bug fixes, enhancements, or documentation

For more information on the Jetpack Project check out our wiki.

Benoit Girard: Off Main Thread Compositing (OMTC) and why it matters

benoitgirard — 2012-05-15T22:01:52+00:00

Like most desktop applications, Firefox is driven by an event loop. Currently this event loop is servicing a lot of events including page layout, drawing, image decoding and don’t forget JS. We do our best to handle events quickly (in a few milliseconds) and break up the ones that we know will take longer (such as image decoding). Any event, such as poorly written JS, that takes too long to process will cause the application to feel sluggish and will cause updates, animations and videos to pause.

Every web page is broken into a set of layers (backgrounds, canvas, video, web contents, position fixed element, elements that are being animated) by our layers system. When these layers are updated they must be flattened to the screen to show a final frame. This process is called ‘composition’. Currently this composition is driven by the main event loop. While compositing does add more load to the event loop from my experience the load it adds is often negligible. After all with hardware accelerated layers backends the work is mostly just queuing a few simple graphics command to the GPU.

Simplified painting pipeline (Desktop Current)

So why move compositing to a second thread if it’s relatively cheap? Because we need the event loop to be responsive to service composite events and any slow events (>15ms), such as a long JS script, will cause us to drop frames. By compositing on a separate thread we can still service layers update and keep the browser partially responsive even if the event loop is momentarily blocked by a long running script.

Simplified OMTC painting pipeline (Fennec Beta)

There is one catch however. If the main event loop is being hogged by an event then that will block certain updates, like page reflows, from reaching the compositor. However other types of updates can still be made while the main event loop is bogged down such as video which we decode in yet another thread, css/gif animations and plugins to name a few. Another use case is to support smooth panning and zooming on mobile. The goal we’re aiming for is to make Firefox more responsive.

The feature just shipped into the latest Fennec beta and provides a smoother experience while consuming less resources.

Simplified OMTC painting pipeline (Desktop/Fennec Future)

In the future we plan on landing more changes that will leverage this new architecture. We are considering many proposal shown above. Some are uncertain at this point such as having canvas workers. Right now our current focus is passing decoded video frames directly to the compositor and handling simple CSS animation asynchronously. These features will allow video and animations to perform smoothly over short periods of blocking similar to async scrolling on Fennec. We’re hoping to have some of these features landed in Q2 for mobile and desktop where OMTC will likely still be behind a preference until later this year. Stay tuned to these bugs to try out these features when they land.

Pascal Finette: My Open Innovation Article on Fast Company

2012-05-15T21:49:44+00:00

Head over to Fast Company to read my article on “5 Lessons For Using Open Innovation To Maximize The Wisdom Of The Crowd” - it’s one of my better ones (I think). :)

And please know - I wouldn’t have been able to write this article if not for the superior work of some of the smartest people I know. I couldn’t give them credit in my article, so I do it here:

John Lilly, who essentially developed the framework I lay out in the article. Watch his amazing talk about the “7 Lessons from Mozilla” at Wordcamp 2009, read his blog and follow him on Twitter. He’s one of the smartest and nicest people I know.
Asa Dotzler, who taught me Mozilla. His intuitive understanding of community and what it means to be a Mozillian formed my thinking about the power of being an open organization. You should read his blog and follow him on Twitter - he’s smart and outspoken.
Mitchell Baker, who keeps pushing me to think about what’s important, why it matters and how we can make it better - in the open. Every time I become comfortable with where I am and what I think I know, I sit down with her. She continues to challenge me in the very best possible way. Read her blog and follow her on Twitter if you want to understand Mozilla on a fundamental level.
Chris Beard and Todd Simpson, who in their capacity as my bosses allowed and encouraged me to experiment, try things out, risk failure and celebrate success.
Karim Lakhani, Eric von Hippel and Kevin Boudreau, who are way out there when it comes to think about open innovation and from whom I have learned so much. I wish I could spent more time in their proximity.
The whole Mozilla community which taught me The Mozilla Way.

I stand on the shoulders of giants.

about:mozilla: On the Way to 100%, Revamping Firefox Mobile for Android and more…

jan.bambach — 2012-05-15T21:16:39+00:00

about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

Firefox support questions: On the Way to 100%
If you ever need help with Firefox, the Firefox Support Forum is the place to go. In the community-powered support forum, everyone can help, including you. And everybody should be helped too. That’s why last year, the SUMO team set a goal for this year to achieve a 100% response rate, which means that every user who asked a question in our forum should get a response. But how close are we to the 100%? Find it out by reading David Tenser’s blog post or help by answering questions on the forums.

Visual Reboot of Firefox Mobile for Android

Firefox has always been a different browser, but with a recent strong wave of competitive browsers, all with similar features; design and product identity has become the differentiator. That’s why the Mozilla User Experience team revamped the design of the Firefox Mobile application for Android, and the results are stunning. Every single detail has carefully been elaborated, that’s why the new design isn’t just fluid, organic and unique to Firefox, but it also speaks strongly to the Firefox brand. Check out Patryk Adamczyk’s blog post to see what it looks like.

Windows on ARM Users Need Browser Choice Too
For the past eight years, Windows offered users a choice of browsers to navigate their digital lives. Prior to the launch of Firefox in 2004, Internet Explorer was really the only browser for Windows. Unfortunately, the upcoming release of Windows for the ARM processor could bring the digital dark ages back where users and developers didn’t have browser choices. But why does this matter to users? Check out Harvey Anderson’s blog post to find the answer.

The Web Will Connect our Future
Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, had the honor of delivering the opening keynote at a big event with a presentation titled “The Web Will Connect our Future.”. He shared with the audience that not only has the Web changed our lives once, but in mobile, the open Web is about to do it again. Check out his blog post to find out why he thinks that we all need to work together to stress the Web as a platform and to push over a few remaining hurdles like graphics and video and native device API access.

Desktop Apps with HTML5
One of the best things about HTML is that it’s never “done”. It’s been with us longer than most of the development technologies that we consider commonplace. Recently the Mozilla Apps Native Install Experience was introduced to the Firefox Nightly Channel. This functionality lets you install an HTML5 application with a native launching experience on your computer. All you need to do is to go to the Market Store, download an application and it will automatically show up in your Launchpad or in your program list. If you’re a developer, check out Joe Stagner’s blog post to see how it works.

Meet Some Mozillians
Bonjour Mozilla says bonjour to Poland, Ludovic & Zola and Janet Swisher. Read more about how these people are contributing to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* May 16, Hotel San Marco, Via longena 42, Verona, Italy jsDay 2012
* May 16, London, England Geek Bowling
* May 19, Taipei, Taiwan JSDC.tw 2012
* May 20, Chicago (Rosemont), IL Society for Technical Communication Summit
* May 23, Melbourne, Australia Web Directions Code
* See more on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s contributor engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue,
please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Benjamin Kerensa: CloudCache Giveaway

Benjamin Kerensa — 2012-05-15T19:04:18+00:00

As many people know I am a fanatic when it comes to web optimization and if my blog is taking more than a second or two to load I’m freaking out because I know how important load times are to end-users and that a few milliseconds could mean loss of a potential reader or new connection.

But more importantly load times also play a major role in how search engines rank you in results because in turn they consider slow loading websites to be of lesser quality to their users and rank accordingly in their algorithms.

I have been a big fan of the folks at NetDNA which offer the service MaxCDN and recently launched CloudCache two services aimed at producing top performance when it comes to serving content on your site. Some of the top sites on the internet rely on the technology that NetDNA offers to make their websites run blazing fast 365 days of the year.

I told my followers I would give something away when I reached 2,500+ people on Google+ and I recently passed this mark as such I am going to giveaway of Five CloudCache Basic Plans for an entire year totally free courtesy of NetDNA.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Firefox Support Blog: Firefox for Android tutorial – view desktop versions of websites with the Phony add-on

mluna — 2012-05-15T18:13:57+00:00

Firefox for Android launched the newly rebuilt Firefox Beta app on Google Play today! The following tutorial shows you how to install the Phony add-on for user agent switching on websites where you don’t want the mobile version.

This tutorial was created with androidscreencast.jnlp so there is added jerk and gradients that aren’t in the actual product. Enjoy the great new UI and performance (and Flash support) on your Android 2.2 phone or 7″ tablet.

Frédéric Buclin: How to require high code quality without discouraging new or occasional contributors?

Frédéric Buclin — 2012-05-15T17:56:44+00:00

During the week-end, I received a pertinent email from a former Bugzilla developer who replied to an email I sent to all reviewers about the pretty low activity in the Bugzilla project during the current development cycle. He argued that one of the reasons which made him go away, and which probably took some other contributors away as well, is our high code quality standards we have in this project. The point is that we deny review if submitted patches do not follow our guidelines or are poorly written compared to what we expect in our codebase. He suggested that reviewers should accept and commit lower quality patches, and file follow-up bugs to clean up the new code. I then brought this discussion on IRC with other core developers, and we realized how hard it is to define the right level of code quality. The problems are:

Some new features require some rewrite of some parts of the code to be easily extendable in the future and/or to reuse some existing code. These features could also be implemented without the code rewrite, which is easier to do for the contributor, but then would be harder to maintain, or would require to duplicate some existing code, which we try to avoid as much as possible. This is how Bugzilla 2.x was written, and it took us two full development cycles (Bugzilla 2.22 + 3.0) to clean up and rewrite the codebase to be able to implement new features in a reasonable way (the 2.x codebase became too ugly and complex to easily implement anything new on top of it). So the risk to accept such patches is that the codebase would become more messy again. But on the other hand, the risk is also to make contributors leave if we keep our high standards, because a rewrite is generally not something trivial nor exciting, and contributors generally do not understand why we reject a patch which does the job.
Accepting patches which are of lower quality and filing follow-up bugs to fix the new code before the next release seems reasonable only if the community around the project is large enough to have the manpower to do the job in the expected timeframe. The current Bugzilla team is very small, maybe 4-5 core developers + some occasional contributors helping with some not too hard bugs. This isn’t large enough to expect these follow-up bugs to be fixed promptly. But we also cannot release a new version with poor code in it, some of the reasons being security implications, performance issues, or possible regressions in some use cases. As the community is small, fixing these bugs would delay the next major release a lot, which is not a desirable effect.
Depending on how the submitted patch is written, it would take twice the time to review + rewrite the new code to match our standards compared to the time it would take for a core developer to write the patch himself. The lack of time being the main enemy, I personally wouldn’t want to spend more time on such or such feature because it’s not written as we would like it to be. The time spent to rewrite bad code means less time to work on other stuff.

So what’s the right threshold to not make new and occasional contributors go away without badly impacting our codebase? Which rules do other Mozilla and non-Mozilla projects use to solve this problem? Please share your experience with us.

Mozilla User Research: Visual Reboot of Firefox Mobile for Android

Patryk Adamczyk — 2012-05-15T17:52:18+00:00

Design is the Differentiator.

Firefox is a premium application with a strong and distinct brand. With a recent strong wave of competitive browsers, all with similar features; design and product identity has become the differentiator. When high performance and stability are expected, a smart user experience and an emotional connection to the brand is what drives users to use the product.

Firefox design is focused on a swift, direct mobile experience. Magazine like aesthetic, less emphasis on decoration with greater focus on content and the tools to ease its access. Forms are rendered with a fine balance of organic and geometric shapes to further echo the Firefox brand messaging. Controls and layout are minimal, with emphasis on function. The aesthetic design promotes interaction with clear, direct iconography, rendered with friendly and efficient forms.

The visual design has been carefully crafted to communicate Firefox’s character subtly through a tasteful aesthetic which accents the native design language. However there are areas of the Firefox aesthetic which were designed to further maintain a unique feel.

New Start Page & Interface Design

Colourful layout with large thumbnails (if available).
Unified curved tab design.
Awesome Screen data integrated into the start page.

Visual Design Differentiators.

Tab Shape

Fluid and organic, unique to Firefox.

Awesome Screen

Unique to the Firefox experience.

Orange Focus Highlight

Speaks strongly to the Firefox brand.
Future plan includes the transitioning of all native (blue in Ice Cream Sandwich) highlights to our Firefox orange.

Consistency and Polish.

Through iteration and testing we have refined the interaction patterns for both phone and tablet use. Resulting in a unified Firefox experience across the Firefox landscape while being conscious of user specific needs on each platform and form factor.

The visual design first seen in the refresh of Firefox Mobile on Android will evolve into the unified style spanning across all devices (phones, tablets, tablet PCs) and on many platforms. Resulting in a purpose-built UI, optimized for portrait and landscape orientations on phones and tablets; while still maintaining a quality and consistent user experience.

Visual Elements.

Layering

As an advanced web browser, Firefox gives the user various tools and options. These options are hidden behind the web content, invoked with a gesture (swipe). The rendering of these panels is darker appearing as if they are deeper in the Z axis, beneath the core content. The transitions simulate the movement of the view port to reveal more content.

Colour

On Android often instances of colour inconsistency exist between the flavours of Android. On many devices you’ll see at least 2 colours used for focus states. On Android 4.x devices you’ll see blue and orange (for legacy apps) while on skinned devices running Android 2.3.X, the user will experience the manufacturer’s brand colour and the native Gingerbread orange.

Aim is for a cohesive user experience on Firefox properties, leading with design that is unique to Firefox and doesn’t depend on manufacturer or Google Android skinning while maintaining familiar interaction elements.

A desaturated blue (silver) acts great as a field colour both for the Firefox logo and various text / media content. Use of a saturated blue over a gray allows for a friendlier experience. The hint of blue in the grays acts as a great high contrast complementary colour when used with the orange highlight.

Texture

Texture / noise has been introduced into the backgrounds for both greater aesthetic interest and reducing banding found in subtle gradients on some lower colour depth screens.

Hints at Interaction.

In a touch interface it is expected that everything can be interacted with, but good user experience should guide interaction and not promote trial and error pecking. With subtle lighting effects, touch elements will appear closer to the user on the Z axis and appear more pressable than other items. The reverse effect is applied to input fields, subtly carved into the chrome, hinting that the form can be filled; with text in this case.

Size

Size and spacing is based on physical measurements to optimize for scalability between various form factors. Due to larger real estate tablet can afford for larger touch targets and more easily accessible actions.

Phones

Bar Height: 7 mm
Input Field Height: 5 mm
Button Widths: 5 mm
Input Field Text Height: 7 pt

Tablets

Bar Height: 9 mm
Input Field Height: 7 mm
Button Widths: 9 mm
Input Field Text Height: 9 pt

Forms

All shapes and icons are rendered to have inviting feel to further engage the user:

Forms are rendered with soft edges
Corners possess a small radius
Objects possess realistic shading

Pressable Items

Any item that manipulates chrome should have some 3D styling, rising above the background. This can be accomplished with a drop shadow and / or bevel.

Input Fields

Any item that acts like an input field should be inset in the surface that it is set upon. The design’s aim is to invite the user to interact with the control but not feel it will work like a button since it doesn’t appear that it can be pressed down.

Carla Casilli: Learning, coding, systems of power, and Mozilla

carlacasilli — 2012-05-15T17:23:50+00:00

Starting this summer, we’re aiming to help create a group of webmakers. Building on Mozilla’s Manifesto—to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web—we’re rationalizing a set of core skills, developing learning objectives and outcomes associated with those skills and offering opportunities to try them out. This effort aligns extremely well with the development and promotion of #5 in our mission list: “Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.”

What’s a webmaker?
What do we mean by webmaker? Someone who contributes to the web but also someone who understands the web and its inherent power. Our focus is on moving people toward doing rather than perceiving but both are required. Experimentation is where we’re headed. Guiding people toward understanding the software that constitutes the web so that they can make more informed and educated decisions about not only how they interact with the web, but how they interact with the systems that lead to the power of the web. Yes, systems as we’ve been discussing in previous posts. (Avoiding the complex discussion of Foucault’s systems of power for now, thanks.)

Code is political
Code is political. While that may seem to be a polemical statement, it’s one that serves to inform the currently omnipresent drive to teach people to code. Code is enveloped in systems of power—systems of power that will increasingly play large roles in people’s lives. Understanding that you can create as well as consume seems a fair balance. More people having a literacy is something to be desired, not shunned or disdained. (More info here: Lawrence Lessig’s Code is Law)

What do we mean by literacy?
Traditional literacy lifts people out of poverty, modifies their worldviews, opens up new vistas and provides new opportunities for further enrichment, whether they be social, political, professional, or ideological. If you want your own proof, just search with this combination of terms “literacy and poverty.” Who’s to say that digital literacy won’t accomplish similar things? In the vein of the scientific method, why not test it out?

Literacy itself is a complex term that encompasses a broad spectrum. In our case, literacy is a basic communication skill, akin to numeracy or traditional language literacy. We’re not aiming to make everyone into Joycean code experimenters pushing the boundaries of language and comprehension, nor are we aiming to move everyone toward Hemingway-esque brevity and conciseness, but if some of you decide those pathways are for you, all the better. At least you’ll be moving forward with a broader understanding of what’s possible. And you will be making the decision for yourself, not having it handed to you by some faceless mega-corporation.

Our initial take on web literacy skills is bouncing along as an ongoing experiment (sounds familiar, right?). In the same vein as iterate often, we’re out there trying things on, seeing what feels right. Working with other organizations to leverage their understandings of web literacy and expand upon our own.

What we’re interested in doing with webmaking is shining a light into a place you may not have considered looking before. Showing you that that place is not full of monsters, is not incomprehensible, but is instead simply the exact same world you’ve been experiencing all along just translated into another language. Learning to code is a deciphering of sorts—a decoding of symbols. It offers a different lens through which to view the world.

Opportunity
This new knowledge lens may significantly alter the way you perceive the world; it’s hard to say how it will affect you. Perhaps that unknown quantity is precisely why Mozilla believes learning to code is something everyone should be afforded the opportunity to learn how to do. The operative word in that sentence is opportunity.

Knock, knock, knock.

Tagged: drumbeat, identity, inspiration, learning, literacy, mozilla, politics, social networks, software, system design, tools, webmaker, webmaking

Firefox Support Blog: The new Reset Firefox feature is like magic

Verdi — 2012-05-15T16:01:08+00:00

Planet Mozilla viewers – you can watch this video on YouTube.

A little more than two years ago when I joined the support team, one of the first things that struck me was that most every support procedure we had involved a long list of troubleshooting steps. The idea seemed to be, let’s try to identify the exact cause of the problem and just fix that. That sounds reasonable but the practical implication of that often isn’t: Is your software up to date? If yes, let’s turn off your plugins and see what happens. Did the problem go away? No? Does the problem happen in safe mode? If no, let’s try turning half of your extensions back on. What about a new profile? Great, now just copy places.sqlite from your old profile to your new profile.

What a mess. What mere mortal has the time, skill and patience to work their way though all that? And if the thing that needs fixing isn’t easily reproducible? Forget it. It’s now become a part-time job. I suspect that for many people, it’s just easier to switch to another browser since you’ve already got one installed on your computer. Problem solved.

So the support team worked with product and engineering to create the Reset Firefox feature. The first implementation of this is a button on the Troubleshooting Information page (about:support). What is does is create a new profile and migrate your bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. Everything else gets set to the defaults.

I have to say, this thing is like magic. You basically get a brand new Firefox installation without the penalty of losing all your data. This is especially useful as a quick fix for the thousands of posts we see on social media where people often express vague complaints about Firefox. “Firefox is slow.” “Firefox crashes too much.” “Firefox sucks.”

The big gap in the current implementation is that, for the most part, people won’t know about this feature unless we tell them about it. Future plans involve making it discoverable. Soon we’ll give users the option to reset Firefox when it crashes on startup for the third time. And the really big thing will be giving Windows users this option when re-installing Firefox. Maybe one day the phrase, “I tried re-installing Firefox but it didn’t do anything” will go away.

Read more about Reset Firefox on the support site and then download Firefox Beta and try it out.

Notes:

This may be broken in Nightly or Aurora. Only try this in Beta.
It only saves bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. You will lose your add-ons, Sync settings, open tabs and tab groups.
It only works with the default profile. If you’ve opened Firefox via the command line or shortcut with a profile that isn’t the default, you won’t see the Reset Firefox button.

Robert Kaiser: Weekly Status Report, W19/2012

KaiRo — 2012-05-15T14:34:17+00:00

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 19/2012 (May 7 - 13, 2012):

CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
More discussions and forming of a concrete plan for Rapid Betas on Socorro.
Found an interesting signature escaping problem in Socorro.
Did some triage of mobile crashes with Noaki and Sheila, with an eye on the upcoming beta.
Discussed and made a proposal for Java signature improvements.
Followed up on WebRT and B2G crash reporting process, will probably need some more poking until things actually happen there.
I tried to move things forward on potentially blocking old Flash versions with actively exploited security vulnerabilities, and involved the security-group in the discussions. I hope we'll come to a conclusion on this now.
Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
SeaMonkey:
When people saw a strange website reversal to old days, I poked IT people to get this resolved and they found a temporary solution. There's a larger problem behind this which doesn't only affect our site and which they are working on.
German L10n:
I synched up core and suite L10n to trunk once again.
Themes:
While the 2.9 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek got their AMO reviews, I started working on 2.10 versions fitting with current beta builds.
Various Discussions/Topics:
More datacenter move fallout, Android XUL Fennec display problems, stability work week planning, etc.

As we did get the OK for our stability "work week" (actually more of a meeting week) finally, I have now booked my flight for that as well as one more week leading up to that where I can meet with Mozilla folks in Mountain View and possibly San Francisco - and slightly more than a week of vacation following the event. I'm traveling on June 1, if you are in the Bay Area and want to meet between then and June 11, let me know!

Siddharth Agarwal: Assuming makes an ass out of everyone, or how Ruby's build system sucks

2012-05-15T12:30:00+00:00

At Mozilla, our build system has a firm rule we only grudgingly violate: explicit is better than implicit. What that means is that if we depend on a library foo and we don't find it on the machine we're building on, we fail instead of silently assuming the user doesn't want to build in support for foo. If the user really wants that, she would need to pass in a --disable-foo configure flag saying so. This means we know exactly what we're shipping as binaries, and users know exactly what to expect.

Once you spend a lot of time working with Mozilla code, you sometimes forget other projects don't follow such obviously important rules. Case in point: Ruby. A default Ubuntu install builds Ruby out of the box. Of course, when you then try to do anything remotely useful:

% gem install heroku

Ruby fails with a cryptic no such file to load -- zlib (LoadError).

Turns out Ubuntu doesn't come with the zlibg1 dev library, which means the Ruby build system assumes you don't care about zlib support and happily builds without it.

Great, so you installed the library and built Ruby again, and gem actually worked. Now, you try to log in to Heroku:

% heroku login

... and Ruby fails with yet another no such file to load -- net/https error. At least the error message is slightly less cryptic this time, since it tells you to apt-get install libopenssl-ruby. Which means you need to install the library and rebuild Ruby a third time.

God knows how many more libraries the build system's assumed I don't care about.

Laura Hilliger: Academic European Instructor Evil Robot

Laura Hilliger — 2012-05-15T11:04:49+00:00

WHOA! I know, I know, I’ve totally been slacking on my “Blog Every Single Tuesday” rule. I’ve been busy. Really busy, and I haven’t had a chance to actually think about what I wanted to write. Thus, I’m doing a roundup post. Here’s some brief insight into what I’ve been thinking about and doing:

Linking Past and Present
I’ve been reading a book about German Reform Pedagogy (really brief, dirty definition): the thought movement that happened circa 1900 to 1930s that changed the face of education. A LOT of the ideas we believe in for education, like learning through making, collaboration, interested-based learning, etc were being talked about in this time. A parallel thought movement (does the name John Dewey say anything to you?) called “Progressive Education” was happening in the US. They’re NOT considered the same movement by the German educational academics (even though they happened at the same time, and they were talking about the same things and concluding with the same conclusions. Also, if you click the English button on the Wikipedia article Reformpädagogik, you get the Wikipedia article on Progressive Education…) Anyway, I’m thinking about the connection between the discussion happening NOW and these movements from the 1900s. Specifically, I’m wondering if Georg Kerschensteiner, one of the leaders of the German Reform Pedagogical Movement, actually conceived the pillars of digital and/or new literacies in a time when RADIO was new fangled and cool.
Cultural Clashing
I live in Europe, so I’ve been looking at the landscape of web literacy and learning programs here on the home front. I talk to people a lot about the work we do at Mozilla, and I keep wondering how we can get the awesome energy of the North American continent’s movement in the educational realm to percolate here in Europe. There’s tons of good programs happening, but it seems like the cohesion of our community here is faulty at best. There are pockets of innovation happening, but we’re not yet playing the role we’re championing in the US and Canada. In London and Berlin we’re finding ways to bring web literacy to a number of different groups, but what about the rest of Europe?When I talk to people about web literacy here in Germany, they’re sometimes skeptical, something I find pretty unbelievable. There seems to be a lot of people that still believe that web literacy skills will be gleaned without guidance, that these skills are somehow given, not learned. This misguided idea that the new generation are “digital natives” seems to be influencing the learning landscape, and I want to step up and change that notion (with a little help from my friends, naturally).
Guiding the Guide
Been doing tons of thinking and work on helping informal instructors access Mozilla content. Lots of people are wanting to run their own hack jams and teach this or that techie thing to youth and adults. A lot of these people need a little help, so we’ve been creating materials that give them step by step guidance and activities that will help them hit the ground running. Call it curriculum, call it learning materials, call it hacktivity kit 2.0, the point is we’re trying to make some resources that help those active community members run their own events and teach people things without having to go crazy figuring out the all important “what will we do!?” question. We currently have a wiki up. It’s just temporary, not all slick and beautiful, but we needed a holding place for some of this stuff. You are welcome to edit and add to it!
Introduction to Web Native Film and StoryCamp
StoryCamp planning, preparation and production is coming along. We’re all over it like white on rice, and we’re building some kick-ass stuff. What’s really cool is that with this theme, I get to spend a bit of time looking at crazy films from the 50s, and that is a load of fun. I also get to repurpose a robot I drew a few weeks ago.

WebPageMaker Open Web Nice Robot concept drawing:

StoryCamp Robots Invade Everywhere Evil Robot concept drawing:

Muwwwhahahha! Actually, this whole project is awesome and awesome fun, having a blast! Here, check out some of our mockups And don’t forget feedback is always welcome!

hacks.mozilla.org: The Web Developer Toolbox: Raphaël

Jeremie Patonnier — 2012-05-15T07:13:21+00:00

This is the first of a series of articles dedicated to the useful libraries that all web developers should have in their toolbox. My intent is to show you what those libraries can do and help you to use them at their best. This first article is dedicated to the Raphaël library.

Introduction

Raphaël is a library originally written by Dmitry Baranovskiy and is now part of Sencha Labs.

The goal of this library is to simplify work with vector graphics on the Web. Raphaël relies on the SVG W3C Recommendation (which is well supported in all modern browsers) and falls back to the Micrsoft VML language in order to address legacy versions of Internet Explorer. It also tries to harmonize some working issues across SVG implementations such as the SVG Animations. As a consequence, Raphaël is a very nice wrapper to produce consistent kick-ass graphics all over the Web.

Basic usage

The library has very good documentation with many examples. Do not hesitate to use it extensively.

The following example will draw a simple red circle inside an HTML element with the id “myPaper”.

// the following example creates a drawing zone
// that is 100px wide by 100px high.
// This drawing zone is created at the top left corner
// of the #myPaper element (or its top right corner in
// dir="rtl" elements)
var paper = Raphael("myPaper", 100, 100); 
 
// The circle will have a radius of 40
// and its center will be at coordinate 50,50
var c = paper.circle(50, 50, 40); 
 
// The circle will be filled with red
// Note that the name of each element property
// follow the SVG recommendation
c.attr({
    fill: "#900"
});

Advanced usage

Despite the fact that Raphaël reduces the possibilities offered by SVG (mainly because of the VML fallback) it allows one to perform very advanced stuff:

Advance Matrix transformation
Advance event handler
Cross browser animations
Easy drag system
Path intersection detection

Raphaël is also extensible through an extension system that allows you to build custom functions.

For example, here’s an extension to draw pie charts:

/**
 * Pie method
 *
 * cx: x position of the rotating center of the pie
 * cy: y position of the rotating center of the pie
 * r : radius of the pie 
 * a1: angle expressed in degrees where the pie start
 * a2: angle expressed in degrees where the pie end
 */
Raphael.fn.pie = function (cx, cy, r, a1, a2) {
    var d,
        flag = (a2 - a1) &gt; 180; 
 
    a1 = (a1 % 360) * Math.PI / 180;
    a2 = (a2 % 360) * Math.PI / 180; 
 
    d = [
        // Setting the rotating axe of the pie
        "M", cx, cy,
 
        // Go to the start of the curve
        "l", r * Math.cos(a1), r * Math.sin(a1),
 
        // Drawing the curve to its end
        "A", r, r, "0", +flag, "1",
        cx + r * Math.cos(a2), cy + r * Math.sin(a2),
 
        // Closing the path
        "z"
    ]; 
 
    return this.path(d.join(' '));
};

Note: In the example above, you have to be familiar with the SVG path syntax (Raphaël will convert it to the VML syntax under the hood), but once it’s done you can reuse it as any other Raphaël primitive. Look at this extension working to draw a color wheel on jsFiddle.

Limits and precaution

If you are not familiar with SVG and/or want to support legacy MS Internet Explorer browsers, this tool is made for you. However, it’s a JavaScript library, which means that you have to know JavaScript to use it. You cannot use SVG and ask Raphaël to parse it and interpret it (to do that, it exists other libraries).

In terms of browser support, Raphaël gives you a large base. Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome 5.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

In fact, the only browser that can not take advantage of Raphaël is the native browser for Android 1.x and 2.x (and obviously many feature phone browsers). This is due to the fact that those browsers do not support any vector language. Android starts (partially) supporting SVG with Android 3.0 so take care if you want to work with all mobile devices.

Conclusion

Raphaël was the first library to allow web designers and web developers to use SVG in the wild. If you want to write some nice applications without the need of the full SVG DOM API or if you have to support legacy browsers, this library will give you some power.

In conclusion, here are some cool usages of Raphaël:

Paul Rouget: A brand new Firefox for Android

Paul Rouget — 2012-05-15T07:00:00+00:00

A brand new Firefox for Android is available.

And we need testers!

It's muuuuch faster than the previous versions
Download it here (market link)
Report bugs here (please :D)
More info here (official announcement)
It's the same Gecko than you can find on Desktop
Screenshots and article about the User experience.

Robert O'Callahan: Sad And Pathetic Machines

Robert — 2012-05-15T06:07:04+00:00

On Saturday I visited a friend’s house to see if I could help them with slowness problems on their home computer. This was a six-year-old machine running XP with 448MB RAM. I observed that on startup Windows Update would run and while running, pretty much all the RAM in the system was consumed by Windows, wuauclnt.exe and svchost.exe (which assists Windows Update). During this time, starting Firefox or IE took minutes; the machine would thrash itself senseless. This state lasted for quite a long time, about half an hour, probably exacerbated by my attempts to get stuff done. Once it subsided, Firefox started quickly and ran well.

This is apparently a known problem and some kind of Microsoft regression.

Under these conditions, Firefox startup time and other metrics are bound to be awful.

Update I forgot to mention, but the Microsoft malware checker was also running at the same time as Windows Update and contributing significantly to resource usage. I guess it checks the downloaded and installed updates for malware...

David Humphrey: Focus and Select: a cross-browser bed time story

david.humphrey — 2012-05-15T03:27:24+00:00

Here’s an annoying little DOM’ism that stumped me last week (don’t worry, there’s a happy ending if you keep reading). In Popcorn Maker’s UI I wanted to fix a few places where we have textboxes that contain data from json manifests. When you click on such a pre-populated textbox, it’s nice if the contents of the textbox are selected. And when you click again, it’s nice if the selection is removed and you instead position the cursor.

These are nice enough that one would sort of expect them to just work, and as such, that the DOM would actually allow you to do it. Well, it’s easy to do on Firefox: just add a focus event to your input element, and call element.select(). Done.

Now test in WebKit and it doesn’t work. Sniff around the web a bit and you’ll uncover a nasty 4-digit WebKit bug from 2008 that causes mouseup to undo your selection.

“That’s fine,” you say to yourself, “just stop the mouseup event from doing its thing and clearing the selection.” This is what everything on the web I could find said to do. The trouble is, I want to not only select the contents of the textbox on first click, but I want the opposite on subsequent clicks.

In the end, cross-browser compatible code means unnecessarily elaborate code, but here we are. I’ll leave this for the next person who hits my same edge case–aka the default way a textbox should function. Here’s a little jsfiddle demo of it running, and here’s the code:

var selectaBox = (function(){

  function __highlight( e ){
    var input = e.target;
    input.select();
    input.removeEventListener( "focus", __highlight, false );
  }

  function __ignoreMouseUp( e ){
    e.preventDefault();
    var input = e.target;
    input.removeEventListener( "mouseup", __ignoreMouseUp, false );
  }

 function __addListeners( input ){
    input.addEventListener( "focus", __highlight, false );
    input.addEventListener( "mouseup", __ignoreMouseUp, false );
 }

 return function(){
   var input = document.createElement( "input" );
   input.type = "text";
   input.addEventListener(
     "blur",
     function( e ){
       __addListeners( e.target );
     },
     false
   );

   __addListeners( input );

   return input;
 };

}());

var s = selectaBox();
s.value = "This is some text."
document.body.appendChild(s);

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Project Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-14

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-05-15T03:00:03+00:00

WeeklyUpdates/2012-05-14

< WeeklyUpdates

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Dial-in: conference# 8600
- US/International: +1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 8600
- US toll free: +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600
- Canada: +1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 8600

All-hands Status Meeting Agenda

Items in this section will be shared during the live all-hand status meeting.

Friends of the Tree

Everyone who worked to get a live WebM stream up during this weekend’s WebFWD Hack Day – https://twitter.com/airmozilla/status/201446072730656768
All of IT/Operations for their hard work & effort over the last three months moving data centers. They worked odd hours, often over evenings and weekends to minimize disruption. Out of the hundreds of websites and services moved, few needed downtime!

Upcoming Events

This Week

This week, mobile and Apps QA needs help in mobile web compatibility testing – find problems in top sites that do UA sniffing or use webkit prefixes in firefox mobile!
- See here for how to get started

Monday, 14 May

Tuesday, 15 May

Wednesday, 16 May

Thursday, 17 May

Grow Mozilla meeting at 10 AM pacific
- Topics include using Mozilla Spaces for community building and growing community building skills with Mozilla Brain Builders
- Full agenda and dial-in information

Brownbag Title	Presenter	Time
How is UX different than UI?	Brandon Schauer	12:00pm PST

Friday, 18 May

All day Firefox mobile beta test day
10:00 AM PDT SecReview: Social API

Next Week

Product Status Updates (voice updates)

Firefox Desktop

Speaker Location: toronto (johnath)

Some highlights from the Firefox work week:
- Scratchpad backending to github gists
- Jetpacks in scratchpad
- Task-specific icons in Windows 7 jumplists
- Finalized interactions and designs for the new downloads manager
- Sync meet-up and discussion to evaluate how to move forward with a smaller core, by moving data handling to components and allowing the Sync team to concentrate on the real Sync functionality
- Session Store meet-up and discussion on how to move forward with Speedy Session Restore as well as SS2 (rewriting SS).
- Initial explorations of a Fennec reading mode (post-1.0)
- Implemented Windows 8 appbar
- Roll your own one-off, bespoke debuggers in the scratchpad.
- Responsive Design tool for web developers
- Honza made Firebug’s HTTP Monitor a standalone component, and it can now remote-monitor fennec, too
- Gavin gave a great talk about code review
- Tim Abraldes demoed the Web App runtime
- Margaret walked us through Hacking Fennec
- Brian Bondy updated the status of our Windows 8 work
- Felipe found and fixed memory leaks with about:cc
- Dietrich walked through the state of the browser components team
- David Dahl went meta, and talked about giving Firefox talks in our community

Also, check out the MSU student project on in-content preferences for Firefox

Firefox Mobile

Speaker Location: toronto (johnath)

Going to beta this week!
Why are you even looking for another bullet point, here?
Going. To. Beta. This. Week!

Thunderbird

Speaker Location:

Older Branch Work

Speaker Location:

Summer Code Party

Speaker Location: Matt T in Toronto

The Mozilla Summer Code Party = teaching the world the web this summer. With tools and projects that make it easy and fun.
Kicking off June 23. Formal public announcement coming May 22.
In the mean time: help beta test these new webmaker projects?
The goal: learning by making. Starter projects and games that help people learn HTML & CSS by getting their hands dirty.
Let us know what you think. Do they work? Are they clear? Fun?
- Try them out here
- Let us know what you think here

Identity

Speaker Location:

Services

Speaker Location:

Speakers

The limit is 3 minutes per speaker. It’s like a lightning talk, but don’t feel that you have to have slides in order to make a presentation.

Title	Presenter	Topic	Media	More Details
WebFWD Team Presentations	Cheerleader: Diane Bisgeier	We have the WebFWD teams in town – and today they will do a 30 sec elevator pitch presenting their projects	http://cl.ly/GbD6/WebFWD%20Teams.pdf	https://webfwd.org/portfolio/
Marketplace Mozillian Preview	Justin Scott	Reminder that we need your help testing our app Marketplace	https://marketplace.mozilla.org	https://wiki.mozilla.org/Marketplace/Mozillian_Preview
Reset Firefox is awesome magic!	Michael Verdi	Demo new Reset Firefox feature in Firefox 13	http://youtu.be/SSr2u1wMoFg	http://support.mozilla.org/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems
Your Title Here	Your Name Here	What are you going to talk about?	Links to slides or images you want displayed on screen	Link to where audience can find out more information

Introducing New Hires

New Hire	Introduced by	Speaker location	Will be working on
Who is the new hire?	Who will be introducing that person?	From which office will that introduction be transmitted?	What will the new person be working on?
Simon Bennetts	Yvan Boily	Mountain View	Security Automation
Rehan Dalal	James Socol	Toronto	SUMO Engineering
Vladimir Vukicevic	JP Rosevear	Toronto	Engineering Director
Andrew Overholt	Johnny Stenback	Mountain View	Engineering Manager
Marshall Culpepper	Faramarz Rashed	Mountain View	Software Engineer

Introducing New Interns

New Intern	Introduced by	Speaker location	Will be working on
Who is the new intern?	Who will be introducing that person?	From which office will that introduction be transmitted?	What will the new person be working on?
Benjamin Peterson	Dave Mandelin	Mountain View	Platform Team
Thaddée Tyl	Matthew Noorenberghe	Mountain View	Firefox DevTools Script Team
Lindsey Kuper-you may recognize Lindsey from such films as “I Missed The Nerd Cave” and “Back From the Future-The Prequel”	Dave Herman	Mountain View	Research Team
Eric Holk- you may recognize Eric from such indie pop hits as “I know Where You Were Last Summer” and “You’d Actually Do That Again?”	Dave Herman	Mountain View	Research Team
Devdatta Akhawe	Sid Stamm	Mountain View	Research/Privacy
David Zbarsky	Faramarz Rashed	Mountain View	Platform Team
Xiao Meng Wei (Eric)	Kevin Brosnan	Mountain View	QA Team
Zack Carter	Dan Mills	Mountain View	Browser ID
Andrew Hurle	Matthew Noorenberghe	Mountain View	Firefox Team

Roundtable

<meta>

Notes and non-voice status updates that aren’t part of the live meeting go here.

Status Updates By Team (non-voice updates)

Firefox

Platform

Services

Messaging

Mobile

IT

MDN migrated out of SJC1 to SCL3, virtually zero downtime
many smaller/older services migrated out of SJC1, mostly to PHX1
Sheeri Cabral and Pete Fritchman represented Mozilla IT at http://www.picconf.org/

Release Engineering

QA

Test Execution

WebQA

Affiliates
- No updates
AMO/Marketplace
- [1] shipped last Thursday
Firefox Flicks
- Shipped the wrap-up page
Mozilla.com
- shipped 2.4 bugs
Mozillians
- Shipped a very minor release on 2012-05-09
MDN
- no release last week due to server migration
Socorro
- No release last week.
SUMO
- Continuous Deployment; no updates
MozTrap
- Working on WebDriver migration
Webmaker
- Started testing https://make-dev.mozillalabs.com
Wiki

QA Community

Automation Services

Automation & Tools

Security

please note we are changing from whiteboard tags to keywords for security markings
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security_Severity_Ratings
- Use both keyword and whitboard tag until Fri-May-18 as our transition period so we can verify searches work properly

Engagement

PR

Events

Creative Team

Community Marketing

Support

Metrics

Evangelism

Labs

Apps

Developer Tools

Add-ons

Webdev

L10n

People Team

WebFWD

Foundation Updates

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/WeeklyUpdates/2012-05-14“

QMO: Firefox mobile testday Friday May 18th

kbrosnan — 2012-05-15T01:06:57+00:00

The Firefox mobile team will be holding a testday celebrating the beta release of the new Firefox mobile for Android. This version has been in development for several months now and solves a number of our most frequent feedback issues. Startup time has been dramatically reduced and we now have Flash playback on phones.

We need assistance testing website compatibility on mobile, reviewing and verifying fixed bugs and runing and help reviewing our Litmus testcases for Firefox mobile.

As usual we can be found in the testday IRC channel (click the link, choose a name and ask about helping). Coordination and details of the test day can be viewed at https://etherpad.mozilla.org/testday-20120518.

When: May 18, 2012.

Nicholas Nethercote: Additional Update on Leaky Add-ons

Nicholas Nethercote — 2012-05-15T00:35:04+00:00

I wrote last week about leaky add-ons. Specifically, Kyle Huey landed a patch that in most cases prevents zombie compartments, which are the most common kind of memory leak in add-ons. However, this change itself caused a different memory leak in some add-ons built with versions 1.3 and earlier of the Add-on SDK. I described this as “two steps forward, one step back”.

Happily, Kyle landed a patch that slightly delayed the cutting of the chrome-to-content references. This has the following consequences.

It doesn’t compromise the “two steps forward”.
It fixes the “one step back”.
It should reduce the potential for similar, as-yet-unknown backward steps.
The repacking of add-ons with newer versions of the Add-on SDK is now less urgent than it was. It’s still a good idea, though, because older version had some other, albeit much smaller, leaks.

This is good news. Firefox 15 is scheduled for release on August 28. Assuming we don’t hit other problems with these changes prior to release, for users with add-ons there’s a good chance that Firefox 15 will use less memory and suffer fewer annoying pauses.

Once again, it would be great if users of Nightly builds, particularly those that use add-ons, could pay attention to memory consumption and file bugs for any bad behaviour. Thanks!

Michael Verdi: The new Reset Firefox feature is like magic

Verdi — 2012-05-14T23:59:29+00:00

Planet Mozilla viewers – you can watch this video on YouTube.

Read more about Reset Firefox on the support site and then download Firefox Beta and try it out.

Notes:

This may be broken in Nightly or Aurora. Only try this in Beta.
It only saves bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. You will lose your add-ons, Sync settings, open tabs and tab groups.
It only works with the default profile. If you’ve opened Firefox via the command line or shortcut with a profile that isn’t the default, you won’t see the Reset Firefox button.

John Hammink: Part 3: Updating your Gingerbread Android SGS2 to ICS

John Hammink — 2012-05-14T22:08:48+00:00

It's worth mentioning that now that we're a few more months out on Boot 2 Gecko, we're seeing real Community involvement; our presence at Latin American Mozcamp last month really illustrated to us how passionate the wider world is about our little OS.

At the same time, the code base is evolving, and so we're gradually phasing out support for Gingerbread (2.3) Android for our Samsung Galaxy S2s and moving toward Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) distribution instead. Thus, you need to know the steps for upgrading your phone, and backing up your core Android. Please note: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. To do this:

1. Download the file I9100XXLPQ_I9100OXALPQ_XEO.zip from here.

2. Create a directory and extract the zip. From the resulting archive, extract also the *md5 file (you can ignore the others). You should have 8 resulting files (you can ignore the dll):

$ ls -l
total 1245632
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla    131072 Mar 8 09:19 boot.bin
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla 19103964 Mar 8 09:22 cache.img
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla 494711000 Mar 8 09:19 factoryfs.img
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla 100264444 Mar 8 09:19 hidden.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mozilla mozilla 637614157 Mar 13 03:25 I9100XXLPQ_I9100OXALPQ_I9100XXLPQ_HOME.tar.md5
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla 12583168 Mar 7 18:59 modem.bin
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla   1112064 Mar 8 09:19 param.lfs
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla   1310720 Mar 8 09:19 Sbl.bin
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mozilla mozilla    276480 Mar 13 03:26 SS_DL.dll
drwxrwxr-x 3 mozilla mozilla      4096 May 8 14:10 tmp
-rwxrwx--- 1 mozilla mozilla   8387840 Mar 8 09:19 zImage

3. Plug your phone in, and reboot your phone to download mode:

$ adb reboot download

4. Now, from that directory where you extracted, flash your phone:

$ heimdall flash --primary-boot boot.bin --cache cache.img --factoryfs factoryfs.img --hidden hidden.img --modem modem.bin --param param.lfs --secondary-boot Sbl.bin --kernel zImage

You should now be running ICS on your device.

Now you get to do the clockworkmod setup all over again! To do this, you must install the B2G kernel, which contains clockworkmod (backup and restore). To do this:

Assuming you have already built B2G for Galaxy S2 ICS:

5. In your devices Android OS Settings, enable USB debugging from Settings=> Developer options. Then, from your B2G build directory:

$ adb reboot download

$ sudo heimdall flash --kernel boot/kernel-android-galaxy-s2-ics/arch/arm/boot/zImage

6. Next, you need to back up your android installation:

$ adb reboot recovery

Select "backup and restore"=> "backup". After backing up, reboot.

7. Last, but not least, install latest B2G:

$ adb reboot download

$ make flash-only (you should now be running B2G)

$ cd gaia

$ make install-gaia

Now, you're running gaia. To restore Android, just do

$ adb reboot recovery (and restore your image)!

On another note, heimdall can be made to run on Mac - but you need to unload the Kies extensions - or not install Kies on your Mac at all!

Firefox Support Blog: What’s Up With SUMO – May. 14

Verdi — 2012-05-14T21:46:49+00:00

Big things this week

Notes from this SUMO meeting (video recording didn’t work).
Rehan Dalal joined the sumodev team!
We need your feedback on article titles by Thursday. We’ll start renaming articles on Friday.
We answered 100% of questions asked in the support forum last week!
Current SUMO development sprint – 2012.9
Next SUMO meeting – Monday, May 21st (call in details & meeting notes) at 9am PST. Please add your comments, questions and updates to the wiki. You can also participate in #sumo during the meeting. We’re going to record and post a video of the meeting.

hacks.mozilla.org: Desktop Apps with HTML5 and the Mozilla Web Runtime

Joe Stagner — 2012-05-14T19:16:14+00:00

Desktop Apps with HTML5

One of the best things about HTML is that it’s never “done”. HTML has been with us longer than most of the development technologies that we consider commonplace. (.NET, ASP, Java, PHP, etc.)

The latest incarnation of HTML, HTML5 has been the source of a great deal of buzz in the software and information industries. When we say “HTML5″, we’re implicitly referring to the “stack” of HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

At Mozilla we often refer to this collectively as the “Web Run-Time” or WebRT for short. Mozilla’s apps initiative, including the Web Runtime is documented here.

Skeptics like to say “HTML5 is not ready”. This week I saw an article declaring HTML5 won’t be “ready” for another 10 years. To which I ask “ready for what?” Of course there are many APIs that are still under development, but for many scenarios HTML5 is ready now. For many other scenarios its ready for development now and will be ready for general public use in the near future.

Recently the Mozilla Apps Native Install Experience was introduced to the Firefox Nightly Channel. (Read here for more information about the Firefox release channels.)

This functionality lets us install an HTML5 application with a native launching experience on Windows or Mac (Linux and Android coming).

One great way to do this is to simply list your app in the Mozilla Marketplace. The Marketplace will be open to the general public soon and developers can submit their app now at the Marketplace Ecosystem Portal. All you need besides an app to submit is a set of BrowserID credentials.

An HTML5 App that targets the Mozilla Web Runtime includes a manifest file.

The manifest is simply a JSON file that declares certain data about the application.

Here is the manifest file from a sample app. You can read more about the Mozilla App Manifest here.

    {  
      "version": "1.0",  
      "name": "KO Round Timer",  
      "description": "A Workout Timer for Fighting Athletes!",  
      "icons": {   
        "128": "/images/icon-128.png"  
      },    
      "developer": {  
        "name": "Joe Stagner",  
        "url": "http://koscience.com"  
      },  
      "installs_allowed_from": [  
        "http://timer.koscience.com", 
	"https://marketplace.mozilla.org"   
      ],    
      "default_locale": "en"  
    }

JSON does not need to be formatted with CRLFs. The above JSON is only formatted to simplify display.

Note line #12 above which specifies where the app can be installed from.

The Mozilla Web Runtime includes an apps object (winbow.navigator.mozApps) The mozApps object (currently implemented in Firefox Nightly on Windows and Mac) has a method to install an application. We’ll look at code that uses that API in a minute.

If you want your app to install from the Mozilla Marketplace you don’t need to write any install code. When you list your app in the marketplace, the marketplace creates a listing page for your app and that page includes an install button.

The generated code that is invoked when the Install button is clicked tells the Runtime to install the app. The Runtime then fetches the manifest for the app and, among other things, checks to see it the app allows installation from whatever domain is requesting the install.

As you can see in the manifest listing above, line 14 specifies that the app may be installed from “https://marketplace.mozilla.org”.

But you might want to let users install your application from other domains, for example your own web site.

You can see line 13 in our sample manifest, listed above, that “http://timer.koscience.com” is also specified as a valid “install from” location. I can specify as many domains as I like to be authorized to install the application from and wildcards are supported.

If we want to install the app from our own web site however, we need to implement the install logic ourselves.

We could create a page similar to the app listing page on the Mozilla Marketplace, or could make the app “self installing” meaning that we could implement installation logic in the app itself.

Take, for example, the Workout Timer app shown below.

Notice the row of navigation buttons at the bottom of the timer.

The last one to the right says “Install Me”.

The install button should only appear if the app is running in an environment that supports the mozApps runtime. Since this app (K.O. Timer) is an HTML5 app it can run in any HTML5 compliant browser but will only be “installable” if it is running in a browser / runtime with mozApps support.

We also don’t want the install button to appear if the app is already installed.

Here is a JavaScript method to test both runtime support and install state.

If runtime support is present and the app is not install then an install button is displayed.

In some scenarios you might choose to forgo the display of an optional install button and simply start the installer when the app is not already installed.

(This code is using jQuery)

function TestAppInstalled() {
    if ((!navigator.mozApps) || (!navigator.mozApps.getSelf)) {
        /*-----------------------------------------------------------+
        || Test to see if the Mozilla Apps Web Runtime is supported
        || HACK: Testing for either mozApps OR mozApps.getSelf is a 
        || hack. 
        || This is needed because some pre-beta versions of Firefox 
        || have the object present but nit fully implemented.
        || TODO: Update when Firefox Desktop & Mobile are complete.
        ------------------------------------------------------------*/
        return;
    }
 
    var MyAppSelf = navigator.mozApps.getSelf();
    MyAppSelf.onsuccess = function() {
        if (! this.result) {
            // Application is not "installed"
            $('#InstallButton').show();
        }
        else {
             // This "MozApp" is already installed.
        }
        return;
    }
    MyAppSelf.onerror = function() {
        alert('Error checking installation status: ' + 
               this.error.message);
        return;
    }
}

When the user clicks on the install button the following code is called.

$('#InstallButton').click(function() {
    var installation = navigator.mozApps.install(
                "http://timer.koscience.com/kotimer.webapp");
    installation.onsuccess = function() {
        $('#InstallButton').hide();
        alert("K.O. Timer has been successfully installed.....");
    }
    installation.onerror = function() {
        alert("APP: The installation FAILED : " + this.error.name);
    }
});

So when the user navigates to the K.O. Timer app (timer.koscience.com) in a browser that supports mozApps (currently Firefox Nightly) and the user clicks on the “Install Me” button the mozApps runtime starts the installer.

After the user clicks “install” button in the dialog pictured above, the installer is called and, when completed, the user has a native launching experience.

On Windows you get a desktop shortcut.

As well as a Start Menu item.

And, of course the app is now in the user’s Mozilla MyApps collection.

It’s important to remember that, while these launchers have been created on the user’s system the application itself still exists in the cloud. A developer can choose to add “off line” functionality to their application by other HTML5 features like AppCache, LocalStorage or IndexedDB.

The ability to provide native launchers for HTML5 apps, coupled with the huge HTML5 apps distribution mechanism that will be available when the Mozilla Marketplace become available to the general public (in the near future), creates great opportunity for developers building standards based apps.

Kartikaya Gupta: Web scale

stak — 2012-05-14T19:15:07+00:00

I've heard the phrase "web scale" come up a few times recently, and it's kind of been simmering in my mind, so here are some random thoughts to help exorcise it.

Web scale is huge. When you scale things up to the web, you're often scaling things up by a factor of millions or more. There's a huge difference when you're dealing with things at that scale. Events that have a one-in-a-million chance of happening actually do start happening when you're at web scale. This is both bad and good.

Companies like Google and Facebook like operating at web scale, because it gives them a lot of power. They are able to take little itty-bitty pieces of information about their users that individually are almost worthless, but in aggregate is worth billions of dollars. Their users pay a cost in terms of privacy; many do this by choice. However, there's also a different cost that is paid by a few, the cost of a one-in-a-million catastrophic event. If Google accidentally loses the data of .0001% of their users, they might not care very much or try very hard to fix it. At web scale, though, that .0001% is a lot of users, and those users basically get shafted. That's why web scale is scary.

But the same one-in-a-million events also work in our favour. There are lots of stories out there of somebody needing some help, reaching out on the web, and finding it. People separated by continents coming together to work towards a common goal. That, too, is a function of web scale. It may not be easy to find someone on your street or in your town who shares your particular goal, but on the web, you can find those people and make things happen. That's why web scale is good.

The web reminds me of the famous quote by Archimedes: "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world." The web is like that lever; it provides the potential to move the world, but only to those who can wield it. Personally I don't believe that such power should be concentrated into the hands of a few. The web should remain accessible to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they're from, the language they speak, or anything else. It's the only way to prevent an imbalance of power and keep the playing field even.

Easier said than done, though. At web scale the only way to accomplish that is to empower the users themselves. If you put out a product for five individual users, it's easy enough to customize it to suit their individual needs. If you put out a product for five million users, it's impossible. Even a well-understood thing like language localization becomes hard at web scale, because you might find that one of your five million users only speaks languages you don't do localization in. The only way to do it is to give your users the power to do it themselves.

That's why maintaining open standards and decentralizing systems is important. They shift the balance of power back to the users where it's sorely needed. If you're building a product, they let you avoid forcing your users into becoming victims of your scale. It's just one of the many reasons I'm glad I work at a place like Mozilla, where ideas like user sovereignty are built right into our mission and manifesto. But Mozilla operates at web scale too, and we have to be careful that we don't end up victims of our own success, by growing too big too fast and forgetting that scale changes everything.

Gervase Markham: The ‘other-licenses’ Directory: Don’t Use It

gerv — 2012-05-14T18:36:29+00:00

This is a public service announcement. There is a top-level directory in mozilla-central (and similar repos) called “other-licenses”. Don’t put any more code in it. Really. There’s now even a README saying so.

Longer version: this directory is not for non-MPLed code, it’s for non-MPL-compatible code, of which we have very little. There is some stuff in there which shouldn’t be, but let’s not make it worse, OK? :-) Keep your code where it logically lives; don’t make your life harder than it needs to be. If you really think you are importing code which needs to be in there, you should be talking to licensing@mozilla.org first (as with any code import) and explicitly saying you think that this is where it should go, so they can tell you that you’re wrong ;-)

Greg Wilson: Why We Built It

Greg Wilson — 2012-05-14T18:26:28+00:00

If you want to know why we created The Architecture of Open Source Applications (now in two volumes), you need look no further than the descriptions of other books about software architecture on Amazon. Here’s part of the blurb of one that appeared last year:

Specifically, the book shows you

What software architecture is about and why your role is vitally important to successful project delivery
How to determine who is interested in your architecture (your stakeholders), understand what is important to them (their concerns), and design an architecture that reflects and balances their different needs
How to communicate your architecture to your stakeholders in an understandable way that demonstrates that you have met their concerns (the architectural description)
How to focus on what is architecturally significant, safely leaving other aspects of the design to your designers, without neglecting issues like performance, resilience, and location
What important activities you most need to undertake as an architect, such as identifying and engaging stakeholders, using scenarios, creating models, and documenting and validating your architecture

Did you notice that “the architecture of 10 (or 20, or 50) actual systems” wasn’t on this list? You won’t find that in this book, either, or this one, or this one. I haven’t read the upcoming third edition of this one yet, but I used to have the first and second on my shelves, and it didn’t “show the blueprints” either. If any ambitious grad student is reading this, and looking for a great thesis topic, comparing what software designers actually talk about to what’s in the standard textbooks on the subject would, I think, be very interesting…

Taras Glek: Snappy, May 10: Suspending activity in background tabs

tglek — 2012-05-14T18:06:52+00:00

Tim landed a fix to avoid setTimeout()s when handling tab clicks: bug 743877. This should significantly improve our tab strip responsiveness.

Incremental GC is making progress towards being turned on by default again: bugs 750959, 752098.

There was also progress on cancellable SQL (bug 722243). This should result in faster shutdown.

Progress was made towards fixing cache locking, bug 722034.

Lawrence posted a summary of snappy work that went into Firefox 13.

LagBlock Plus

Some of the lag in Firefox is caused by background tabs processing timeouts willy-nilly. We are working on teaching Firefox to cope with overactive background tabs in bug 715376. The plan is to allow Firefox to throttle/group background events, especially in tabs that are CPU hogs.

To help us along, the author of Adblock Plus released an experimental addon that freezes activity in background tabs. Since this addon halts all background tab activity, it is a useful gauge of baseline performance that we’ll try to get asymptotically close to. It is also helpful for isolating responsiveness issues that are not caused by background tabs.

Mitchell Baker: ISOC Hall of Fame and Grad School Memories

mitchell — 2012-05-14T17:17:58+00:00

After I posted the ISOC piece, I got an unexpected message from an old, old friend. Apparently he was part of the Internet Society Hall of Fame process. This brings back so many memories. The person in question has been deep in IETF related topics for many years. In addition, he was one of the most generous people I’ve ever known about sharing his understanding of technology and his resources. Many years ago when I was in grad school he gave me keys to his office, set aside an old piece of technology for me to use and provided the basic support I needed.

As a result, my graduate school notes were all taken on an old, otherwise-decommissioned CP/M machine with 8″ floppy drives. As it turned out, my preferred study partner in grad school was also using such an ancient machine, and it mean we could share notes. My study partner was used to preparing “briefing books” for governor – level public officials, our our law school notes increasingly took on the look of briefing books as years went by. He was also the only other person I knew in my class to took 4 years to complete law school, so we both started together and finished together. (I spent the extra year living and traveling in China, he spent it getting an additional Master’s degree.) That extra year was pivotal for me, changing by worldview in so many ways.

Today the near-ubiquity of the network means it’s hard to imagine being far, far way from global communications systems. My time traveling in China (including Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Burma, Thailand, and Nepal, before cell phones and before the Internet is something I treasure. I came back from my longest trip to find both of us in our 4th year of law school (imagine being proud of that ). And to find the greatest measure of success: we had each learned each other’s most effective techniques. When a question came up, we would find him reasoning from the principles he remembered, and me leafing through the briefing book to find the materials we had already prepared. This was one of our finest moments: we had taught each other a whole new set of tools.

And then I’d bicycle through Berkeley back to “my” office. Sometimes I’d be alone there. Sometimes my friend would have given a set of keys to others and I’d find new people there. (If you happen to know “gumby” you’ll know what I mean.) We were above the pizza parlor and the California Girls massage studio, where bats appeared each evening off the fire-escape. I saw my first Mac in this office. I first came across email here (gumby, again!). I first encountered the IETF (long before the Web) here. I learned what an extraordinary place MIT is, especially at night during finals. At some point the office moved to slightly more upscale setting (no pizza, no massage). People came and went though, each bringing something.

I’m still not as generous as this friend with my personal space. I need more privacy that he did. But office space, and sharing resources, and connecting people, and wanting people to build on whatever resources I can bring to the party — I learned a lot about this from the friend in question. It’s not what people think of as a “law school education.”

I went to grad school at Berkeley Law (known as Boalt Hall School of Law in my day); one of the great legal institutions in the US. I was fortunate; the University and the State of California invested in me. I’m proud of being a UC Berkeley grad. I’m a little stunned by what I’ve been able to achieve with it. And there, generally unseen but critical nonetheless, I learned to share. In some ways this is the most rewarding.

I’ve found that sharing — sharing wildly, sharing boldly, and reveling in what others do with the sparks I send their way — is liberating. It’s powerful. And it makes me part of a community of people that gives me hope for the future.

Nathan Froyd: statement wrappers have been deprecated

Nathan Froyd — 2012-05-14T16:34:46+00:00

It’s a lot of fun removing old code; it’s less fun when removing that old code breaks lots of things. That’s what happened when bug 589032 was checked in to mozilla-central last week. We had deprecated mozIStorageStatementWrapper over a year ago; bug 589032 removed mozIStorageStatementWrapper in favor of using mozIStorageStatement directly.

As there have been a couple reports of breakage (which likely means there’s a lot more breakage pending), and I have claimed in the bug that fixing said breakage is a straightforward process, here’s the quick-n-dirty guide to doing so. (Warning: may contain bugs or be incomplete. Please note any oversights in the comments.)

Code that created wrappers:

var wrapper = new Components.Constructor("@mozilla.org/storage/statement-wrapper;1",
                                         Ci.mozIStorageStatementWrapper,
                                         "initialize");
function createStatement(db, aSQL) {
  return new wrapper(db.createStatement(aSQL));
}

or perhaps:

var wrapper = Cc["@mozilla.org/storage/statement-wrapper;1"]
                .createInstance(Ci.mozIStorageStatementWrapper);
wrapper.initialize(statement);

should be replaced with:

function createStatement(db, aSQL) {
  return db.createStatement(aSQL);
}

Of course, that’s almost not worth having a separate function for.

Nearly all of the methods that you were calling on the wrapper remain unchanged, with the exception of:

foo = wrapped_stmt.execute();

That should be replaced with:

foo = stmt.executeStep();

Statements have an execute() method, but it does something slightly different than the wrapper’s execute() method.

Finally, where you finalize your statements (you are finalizing your statements, right?):

wrapped_stmt.statement.finalize();

is now simply:

statement.finalize();

As I said earlier, please note any omissions or errors in the comments!

Mike Hommey: With a little help from the kernel

glandium — 2012-05-14T16:21:42+00:00

[ Disclaimer: simplified, high-level view ahead. ]

When a program reads or writes data at a given virtual address, it uses instructions telling the CPU to do so. When the CPU doesn’t know the address, it faults. When it knows the address, but its access rights don’t allow the read or write operation the program wanted, it faults, too. Operating systems do trap these faults, and the system kernel handles them, allowing the program to continue.

As a virtual address can point to a various range of different things, the kernel keeps track of what address ranges are backed by what. The most typical backing is physical memory: a given virtual address corresponds to a given physical RAM address.

Other typical backings include zero-memory (memory full of zero), copy-on-write, file-backed mappings (mmap with a file descriptor), etc. Or a combination of those.

When a file is mapped into memory by a program, the program may access data from that file through “standard” reads/write to memory, and the kernel does its job of getting the data from disk, putting it in physical memory, and telling the CPU to look there.

When physical memory becomes short for the demand, the kernel may choose to throw away anything that it can get back in physical memory later, like file-backed mappings, which can be read again from disk when needed. Another strategy is to move parts of physical memory to disk. This is “swapping” or “paging”.

Anyways. When faulty.lib loads a library from a Zip archive, it reserves (shared) memory for the uncompressed library, and marks it as non-readable and non-writable. When code or data from the library is accessed, the kernel handles the CPU fault, and ends up throwing a segmentation fault signal (SIGSEGV) to the process. The process handles the signal, and fills the memory buffer with parts of the uncompressed library that are necessary, and flags them with the appropriate access rights. On further accesses to the same location, the already uncompressed data will be accessed directly.

The downside of this approach is that besides paging/swapping, there is no way to get rid of the unused parts in case of memory pressure. And since Android devices don’t do paging/swapping, it’s effectively wasted memory.

The facility we’re using on Android for that shared memory, ashmem (currently in staging for mainline kernel), has a mechanism that could almost help us: a program can “unpin” ashmem ranges, indicating to the kernel memory regions it is allowed to throw away when it is under memory pressure. Further accesses to memory that the kernel threw away are like accesses to anonymous memory for the first time: zeroed-out.

If the program does NULL checks, it can figure whether the kernel may have thrown data away. But in faulty.lib’s case, that’s not quite possible. Any part of the code in a library may directly jump into a region that the kernel freed, and the resulting zeroed-out memory will just be executed instead of being filled.

So, in faulty.lib’s case, it would be interesting if the kernel had a special backing for such userspace-filled memory regions, where it would consider throwing them away like it does for “unpinned” ashmem. Afterwards, accesses to these memory regions would trigger some signal for the program to fill the memory again.

The current proposal, now part of a plumber’s wishlist thanks to Lennart Poettering, involves a new flag for madvise() and would make the kernel send a SIGBUS signal to a process when memory is accessed after the kernel has thrown it away. This proposal has received some interest from Andi Kleen.

And it would be useful for more than just faulty.lib: application caches (images, network, etc.) (although ashmem fulfills that need to some extent), JIT code, live decompression of content other than libraries, you name it.

Web FWD: WebFWD Summit in Full Flight

2012-05-14T16:18:15+00:00

Our Summit is going strong: after a day of hands-on learning, our teams have spent Saturday huddled in clusters, engaging new and current contributors, and metabolizing the bagels, pizza and candy to keep the fires burning.

Kicking off with workshops was the right move as this allowed the teams to digest new learnings for the hack day on Saturday.

Learnings? There were lots. On Friday we opened with marketing & communications: learning how to hone in on core messages and empower users to tell your story with WebFWD’s own Diane Bisgeier , and exploring the best ways to acquire users with Jane Finette who heads up user engagement at Mozilla.

Our teams went on to have some serious user experience (UX) analysis and evaluation of their websites by Mozilla UX experts Jennifer Morrow aka Boriss and Brian Dils ( a Mozillian with past stints at Adobe, Logitech and PayPal). The focus was on simplifying, which can be done with some simple tools not requiring fancy focus groups or labs. Prime example: the “Think Aloud Test” where you simply have an outsider look at your page and share every reaction aloud they have as they navigate the site. Effective and, significantly, scrappy—the currency of startups.

Next up were tech deep dives guided by Mozilla developers Myk Melez, Anant Narayanan and Fred Wenzel, who helped our teams with issues around web runtimes, scaling and sage wisdom around using tools your community wants to use (sounds obvious, isn’t always).

Rounding out the day were sessions with WebFWD’s own Pascal Finette and Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer Jim Cook, who described his pattern of working for successful underdogs: Intuit (which challenged Microsoft), Netflix (which beat out Blockbuster), and now Mozilla (taking on walled gardens of the web). Pascal and Jim challenged the teams’ assumptions about who their customers are, and how much value they may place on what offerings.

Thus after a full Friday, our teams came to Saturday’s work day energized by new ideas for positioning their projects, with a full day to hackfully apply what they’d absorbed. Sunday was a chance to refine their pitching - which you can hear at 11am PST Monday at the Project Meeting on Air Mozilla. Onward!

Can you guess what our teams are listening to here?

Michael Kaply: How My Site Was Hacked

Mike Kaply — 2012-05-14T15:22:26+00:00

So in case anybody cares, what happened was that I apparently have a theme that got hacked. It appears to be a theme called super blogger had a helper.php file in it’s images directory which allowed files to be posted into that directory.

Using that uploaded file, extra code was added to my functions.php file in my standard theme which opened a backdoor and gave free reign.

Many thanks to Alex McKee who helped me track things down.

I recommend reading this post from Dave Meehan for more detail.

FYI, a couple things that should have clued me in (which I’ll look for in the future). First, I started getting an error on my admin console about extra data sent before the headers. I stupidly went into functions.php and fixed it (even working with 8Bit support) without noticing the added code. Second, in the source to my pages, there was a misspelled “Wordpres Counter.” That should have clued me in as well.

Identity at Mozilla: Streamlining Login with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service APIs

2012-05-14T15:01:03+00:00

A new feature landed in Persona last month that promises to make the sign-in process even smoother by asking users to consent to site-specific Terms of Service and Privacy Policies as a native part of the login flow.

This means that sites using Persona can easily present their own terms of service and privacy policy to users in an obvious, seamless, and uniform location. Moving user consent into the sign-in dialog also lets websites get rid of their “I agree” checkboxes, while still being certain that users were informed of and consented to the site’s terms on every sign-in.

Supporting this API is dead simple, saves users a click, and means one less form for websites to manage. We think it makes sign-in easier for everyone, and we’d love to see more sites using this new, optional feature. To lean more, check out our documentation and let us know what you think via our mailing list, IRC channel, or by tweeting with the #mozpersona hash-tag.

Identity at Mozilla: Streamlining Login with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service APIs

2012-05-14T14:25:06+00:00

Brian King: Gdansk Goodness – Aviary.pl In Action

Brian King — 2012-05-14T13:38:40+00:00

A few weeks ago I attended the Aviary.pl Mozilla community meetup in the beautiful city of Gdansk in Poland. Big thanks to the community for the welcome and organisation. I was there on behalf of the Mozilla Reps Council to observe and report back on how this successful community is running and to run some new ideas by them and inform about how the Reps program fits into the new Mozilla universe.

Where would you like to go?

Structure

The format of the weekend has not changed much since and is as William Quiviger wrote about in 2010. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Aviary.pl Crew in action

In summary:

Day 1 : Meet in the late afternoon / early evening and catch up, talk, hack together.
Day 2 : Day of sessions, conversation, status updates, and more.
Day 3 : Voting in the new board and goal setting for the next 6 months

It was just the right balance between getting work done and collaborating and learning from each other. On Saturday evening after dinner we settled into some game playing (board and video) that showed the great camaraderie that exists in the team.

Governance

Aviary.pl is a structured organisation with a board, a board audit committee, and members.

3-member Board (see the new board)
A board audit committee
Members

The board and audit committee are rotated every two years. Aviary.pl tried and failed to become a registered non-profit organisation in Poland once before and during the weekend documents were prepared to make a second application. The main reason for this is to accept money more easily. I know that other Mozilla communities are wondering whether to do this in their country. You should examine if you really need to do it, and if you do to expect a certain amount of administrative overhead.

Many Mozilla communities have problems attracting and keeping new members. What I liked about Aviary.pl in this context is that they have a set process for new recruits that includes mentoring for 6 months which in general seems to lead to a better retention rate.

Guests

One thing that worked really well was the presence of invited guests from outside the Mozilla project. Members of the Gnome, Opera and Kaszëbsczi language communities brought a fresh perspective to proceedings. Also present was Lukasz Kluj who works for Lewis PR that does PR work for Mozilla in Poland.

Kashubian (Kaszëbsczi) Language

Yurek Hinz, among other things, works promoting the Kashubian language. He talked to us about his experience on getting the language integrated into Firefox, both the challenges and opportunities for a small language. Some interesting random points:

In the 2002 census, 53,000 people in Poland declared that they mainly use Kashubian at home.
Currently 3 active members of the team working on the Firefox localisation
After many false starts, it reached beta in 2011 and full version in 2012 listed at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html
Not getting ADU stats from Mozilla yet, we don’t know the number of users currently
Supporting languages like this really differentiate Mozilla over other browser and software vendors where they only support languages based on market forces

In Summary

Aviary.pl is working well. It is made up of dedicated individuals. In numbers it is strong, yet as always new contributors are welcome. The community was established in 2004 making it one of the more mature communities. As with all established Mozilla communities, it faces challenges in adapting to new Mozilla projects and priorities while at the same time keeping on top of localisation work. I gave my thoughts on how Aviary.pl can rise to the challenge and they have already been moving in that direction with outreach and development efforts.

[More Pictures]

Learning from the Aviary.pl crew (somethin-else.org)
Gdansk: 5 free things for visitors to do (cbsnews.com)

Niko Matsakis: Vectors, slices, and functions, oh my!

2012-05-14T13:36:00+00:00

I wanted to bring together the various ideas around vectors and function types into one post. The goals of these changes are

to achieve orthogonality of the pointer types, so that leading &, @, and ~ sigils are the only way to indicate the kind of pointer that is in use;
to help pare down on the proliferation of subtle variantions on types, such as the 5 different function types currently available.

The proposal

The Rust type system would be described by the following grammar. In this grammar, I have included all optional portions except for region bounds. I indicated those types which could have a lifetime bound associated with them by writing (/&r) in the description (a lifetime bound indicates the lifetime of any pointers embedded within the type itself; this is not related to the changes I am discussing here so I won’t go into detail):

M = mut | const | ""                  // immutable by default

K = send | copy | move | ""           // move by default

T = () | int | uint | float | ...     // scalar types
  | @MT | ~MT | &r.MT | *MT           // pointer types
  | id<T*>                            // enum, resource, class (/&r)
  | id                                // type variable
  | [T]                               // slice type (/&r)
  | substr                            // string slice type (/&r)
  | (T*)                              // tuple type
  | (T "*" N)                         // fixed-size array
  | {(M id: T)*}                      // anonymous record types
  | U                                 // dynamically sized types

U = fn:K(T*) -> T                     // closure types (/&r)
  | id:K<T*>                          // iface instances (/&r)
  | vec<MT>                           // vector type
  | str                               // string type

Dynamically sized types

The types described by U are separated out because, unlike the other types listed, they have “dynamic size”—that is, the size of an instance of U will vary from instance to instance. As a result, the U types are somewhat “second-class” when compared to the other types:

Type variables cannot be bound to dynamically sized types.
Expressions whose type is a dynamically sized type are generally prohibited.

There is one exception to these rules. Literal expressions of dynamically sized types are permitted, as the compiler can readily compute their size. The literal forms of the various types U are:

Type            Literal form
----            ------------
fn:K(T*) -> T   fn:K(x, y) -> T { ... }
fn:K(T*) -> T   id (where id is a fn item)
id:K<T*>        iface(v)
vec<MT>         [M ...]
str             "..."

If it seems useful, we could lift the restriction that type variables cannot be bound to dynamically sized types and instead use some sort of kind to mark variables that may accept dynamically sized types (or to mark those that may not, depending on what we feel the defaults ought to be).

Vectors and slices

These basically work in the same way as currently proposed, but the syntax has changed. A vector is written vec<T>; note that unlike other types, vector type parameters have a mutability, so you might have vec<mut u8>, for example.

Slices can be created by using the [:] operator, which works just as in Python. So [1, 2, 3][-1:] returns a slice containing [3], [1, 2, 3][1:-1] returns [2] and [1, 2, 3][2:1] returns an empty slice. The slice operator can be applied to both vectors and slices. We could conceivably allow it to be overloaded.

Vectors may be added to slices. The type of the resulting vector is taken from the left-hand side. So adding a @vec<mut u8> to a [u8] yields a (longer) @vec<mut u8>.

Fixed-length arrays

The type (T * N) represents a fixed-length array. Here T is another type and N is a constant expression. This is primarily intended for C compatibility: a fixed-length array has no length field and is simply represented by N instances of the type T laid out one after the other. In most ways it is precisely equivalent to a tuple. There is no literal form for such arrays: they are in fact supertypes of tuples of equivalent size, and so share the tuple syntax (v1, ..., vN). We can introduce a macro for repeating the same element N times to avoid repetition.

Fixed-length arrays are indexable and sliceable but their contents are not modifiable. If modification is desired one can create a simple one-entry record.

Note: I think this idea of having fixed-length arrays and tuples be closely related makes sense. I’m mostly trying to keep things simple and not introduce too much machinery for an edge case. But maybe there is a problem with it.

Closure and iface instance bounds

Both the closure and iface instance types feature a bound K called a “kind bound”. These types are unlike the other types because they are “opaque” to the compiler: that is, the compiler does not know the types of the data that is contained within. The bound K puts a restriction on those types so that additional operations can be permitted.

For example, if you have a closure x of type fn:send(), then the compiler knows that whatever data is closed over by x is sendable. The compiler can therefore permit x to be sent between tasks. Similarly the iface type to_str:send describes an instance of some type which is sendable and implements the to_str interface.

If no bound is specified, the default is move (which is the most general). This simply states that the closure may close over arbitrary data.

As today, the “sugared closure” form {|x| ...} would be inferred to some form of “pointer to closure”. That is, it could result in @fn, ~fn or &fn, depending on the expected type.

There is no type that represents a “closure that accesses variables by reference and not by copy”. Sugared closures become the only way to construct such a closure: if the expected type is &fn() they will construct a “access-by-reference” closure and the if the expected type is @fn() or ~fn() they will not. This seems non-ideal but equivalent to the situation today.

Bare functions

The type of “bare functions” (that is, function items which do not close over anything) is simply fn:send(T*) -> T. To use a bare function as a closure, you must prefix the bare function with an appropriate sigil (&, @, or ~).

For example, the following snippet uses a function inc() as the argument to vec::map:

fn inc(x: int) -> int { x + 1 }

fn inc_all(vs: [int]) -> [int] {
     vec::map(vs, &inc)
}

Here the expression &inc has the (fully elaborated) type &static.fn:send(int) -> int. This is a subtype of the expected type that vec::map requires: &fn:move(int) -> int.

To send a bare function between tasks you might write:

fn task_body() { ... }

fn spawn_task() {
    task::spawn(~task_body)
}

Representing closures

The representation of closures will change somewhat. Before a closure was the pair of a function pointer with an environment pointer. Now a closure will be a pointer to a structure like:

struct closure {
    void *fptr,
    type_desc *td,
    ... // (closed over data)
};

I thought at first that LLVM might not be able to track a function pointer in this case, but experiments suggest that it can. In general, LLVM does a good job of tracking and constant propagating alloca’d memory with precision.

Conceivably, it might be slower to perform an extra load before the call (that is, to call c->fptr and not c.fptr) if the closure pointer is not in cache. But reasoning about the cache without experimenting is always risky, and this particular load seems unlikely to matter, as the closure will soon be accessing its environment, and in that case you’d have to bring the environment into cache anyhow.

There is one unambiguous, if minor, downside. In the old scheme, bare functions used as a closure of type fn@ or fn~ could pair the function pointer with a NULL environment. But in this new scheme a @fn or ~fn will require allocation, because the runtime will expect to be able to free such pointers like any other pointer. Such pointers are quite rare though compared to &fn types, and something like &inc can be pre-allocated statically (actually we could use tagged pointer tricks, I suppose, but it doens’t seem worthwhile).

Pros and cons

To me the real question is whether the system feels simpler on net given the introduction of dynamic size types. I think it does, but obviously this is a subjective question. To me, the benefits of the following are pretty substantial:

one function type instead of five;
types like @fn(int) -> uint and @vec<int> seem to have a clear meaning once you are accustomed to @ meaning pointer, vs fn@(int) -> uint and [int]/@;
the difference between vectors and slices (and strings and substrings) is clear, currently I think there is plenty of room for confusion.

Jan Odvarko: Monitor HTTP Traffic on Mobile/Fennec

Honza — 2012-05-14T11:19:04+00:00

I have been recently working on an extension (code name HTTP Monitor) that can be used to intercept HTTP traffic of a browser tab. The extension is based on Firebug's Net panel and is on its way to be embedded in Firefox by default.

This post explains how to use HTTP monitor to intercept HTTP traffic on mobile with Fennec (Firefox for Android) installed.

Monitor HTTP traffic on mobile

HTTP Monitor is Firefox extension and so, you need Fennec installed on your mobile phone. Fennec is compatible with Android 2.2 and above devices.

If you have a compatible device go ahead and install Fennec (you need the Nightly channel).

In case of remote debugging you need to install HTTP Monitor extension on both sides: client and server. In this case, we want to monitor HTTP traffic on mobile (server) and check all results on desktop machine (client).

There are couple of preferences you need to set through about:config.

Server (mobile):
extensions.httpmonitor.serverMode set to true (you need to restart the browser)

Client (desktop):
extensions.httpmonitor.serverHost set to IP address of your phone (10.0.3.110 in my case).

In order to find IP address of your phone follow Settings > Wireless Controls > Wi-Fi settings and tap on the network you are connected to. It'll pop up a dialog with network status, speed, signal strength, security type and IP address.

As soon as you are all set (extension installed and preferences set) you can start Fennec on the phone and load a page. In my case I loaded mozilla.org.

Start also Firefox on your desktop machine and open HTTP Monitor console: Web Developer -> HTTP Monitor. There should be a Connect Me button at top left corner of the window.

Both the IP address and port number comes from preferences. Connect your phone and click the other: Select Tab button to pick a tab opened on your phone.

Now reload the tab on your phone and watch the result on the desktop!

Mobile HAR File

Here is an online HAR file showing mozilla.org page load on Samsung Galaxy Nexus:

Further Resources

Source code
Download (always use the latest release)
Report an issue

Vladan Djeric: More Telemetry from Super-Slow Startups

Vladan Djeric — 2012-05-14T10:55:30+00:00

Last week, I revisited the issue of super-slow startups by poring over another batch of Telemetry data from February/March of this year. There were 2263 Telemetry submissions matching the following criteria:

uptime < 5minutes
firstpaint > 30 seconds
uninterrupted startup
Windows OS
containing “appUpdateChannel” field (Firefox 11+)

I further limited my investigation to submissions with fewer than 5 addons, bringing the total down to 1209 such Telemetry submissions — a decidedly small number compared to the number of daily Telemetry submissions over a 2 month period. I was motivated to take another look at super-slow startup reports because Telemetry now reports Firefox startup metrics separately: select performance histograms from startup are now reported separately, as are slow SQL statements from startup.

As in the previous analysis, part of the startup woes seen in these reports can be blamed on Firefox occasionally trying to restore the previous session before painting the UI. There is a fix available in bug 715402 but it hasn’t landed yet. However, my overall impression is that these super-slow startups are primarily caused by very slow computers or computer resources temporarily being in very short supply while Firefox is starting. As such, we may not have many options for helping these users. This is a fairly typical timeline of a very slow startup:

14.406s                         main
51.110s                         createTopLevelWindow
62.344s                         firstLoadURI
62.543s                         delayedStartupStarted
62.547s                         firstPaint
62.584s                         sessionRestoreInitialized
62.614s                         sessionRestoreRestoring
62.684s                         delayedStartupFinished
62.688 s                        sessionRestored

It takes 14 seconds just to reach Firefox’s main and then another 37 seconds to create the top level window, strongly suggesting an over-loaded system. It would be nice if we could confirm this through Telemetry, for example by gathering Firefox page fault stats but it seems that’s pretty tricky to do on Windows. Another very common pattern in the reports (also seen in the sequence above) is that the first real URI (not about:blank) most often starts to load before first paint is complete (bug #).

Slow SQL statements and other Firefox I/O activities definitely do contribute to the super slow startup times but, as before, their totals are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the total time required for startup. In particular, STARTUP_NETWORK_DISK_CACHE_OPEN and STARTUP_CACHE_DEVICE_SEARCH frequently appear in super-slow startup reports, contributing several seconds each to startup times. Additionally, MOZ_SQLITE_COOKIES_READ_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OTHER_READ_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OTHER_SYNC_MAIN_THREAD_MS, MOZ_SQLITE_OPEN_MAIN_THREAD_MS also very commonly report multi-second values. Surprisingly, it also seems very common in these reports for Firefox to read over a megabyte from the cookies.sqlite database during startup alone. This flurry of activity likely comes from the first URI (the homepage?) being loaded and the previous session being restored.

Interestingly, the addons system also seems to be a source of slow main-thread SQL during startup:

RELEASE SAVEPOINT ‘default’
INSERT INTO locale (name, description, creator, homepageURL) VALUES (:name, :description, :creator, :homepageURL)
DELETE FROM addon WHERE internal_id=:internal_id

I believe these SQL statements are associated with addon updates during startup. There may be an opportunity to improve performance by moving more of these operations to a background thread.

Finally, there also appears to be lock contention between the main thread and the async thread on cookies.sqlite DB accesses, e.g. the following statements:

SELECT name, value, host, path, expiry, lastAccessed, creationTime, isSecure, isHttpOnly FROM moz_cookies WHERE baseDomain = :baseDomain

SELECT name, value, host, path, expiry, lastAccessed, creationTime, isSecure, isHttpOnly, baseDomain FROM moz_cookies WHERE baseDomain NOTNULL

This analysis was a lot quicker than the last since I had scripts for sifting through the data and generating the reports. The next step will be to follow up on some of these issues (homepage load before first paint, lock contention, synchronous SQL). Ideally, it will eventually be possible to automate analysis of Telemetry data and have scripts automatically flag troublesome SQL queries or regressions in reported startup times.

Jeff Hammel: Automation and Testing : Overhaul of Talos Configuration

k0s — 2012-05-14T09:03:16+00:00

Automation and Testing : Overhaul of Talos Configuration

Last week I pushed a fix to bug 704654 that fixes a number of issues, conceptual and user-facing, with how Talos handles configuration. I've had an idea on how I wanted to do this for a few months now, but it has always been tabled. But with my (joking, sorry) pledge to Bob Moss to fix all bugs in Talos by the end of quarter.

I had a free weekend so instead of killing the prerequisite bugs as I usually do I decided to tackle the problem in one go. My goals:

remove the need to edit several different configuration to change a configuration basis. Most .config edits needed to happen in 5 places (formerly 6). This is not only prone to human error (which I and others have been guilty of many times), it is a discouragement to change default configuration.
consistent and declarative serialization/deserialization. Serialization in PerfConfigurator was mostly awful, scanning through line by line and looking for particular strings in (basically) an if-else tree, often depending on particular whitespace or other subtle (and undocumented) formatting issues. While the .config files conform to YAML, we don't make use of this for de/serialization. In addition, while in run_tests.py we allow command line overrides for the YAML items, we do not post-process them as we would in PerfConfigurator.
consistent error checking. Currently some of our config-checking is in PerfConfigurator and some is done in run_tests. This opens the possibility that either case may miss cases where the other one would find it. If you call run_tests.py with a .yml file, you will not get the checking done for the combination of command line items and the .yml configuration that is done in PerfConfigurator. Since we process a lot of command line items into resulting configuration, this can lead to interesting results (e.g. while --activeTests is a command line item for run_tests.py, it is not used, anywhere). In general, configuration should be checked in one place before any program logic takes place. While this patch doesn't completely address this issue, it a big step forward and should pave the way for future improvement.
configuration should be declarative. You should get what you expect from configuration, not inconsistent results. If you edit a (e.g.) .yml file with the existing Talos, you have no real way to know if the keys you add or edit are going to be used by run_tests.py (and what format they should be in, etc.) Having a basis for configuration gives a single place to denote what is expected (and thereby what isn't allowed) and the form that it is supposed to be in. It is also nice to have all configuration in a single place instead of having to look at a bunch of config files for the basis as well as all over the code to see what is expected and how it is processed.
allow running directly from run_test.py . For particular (e.g. production) systems, it may be advisable to use tuned (.yml) configuration files to have highly customized runs (note that we don't do this and use (remote)PerfConfigurator in all cases for reasons that may be infered from the above). However, for a typical developer, there is little reason to run PerfConfigurator -e `which firefox` -a ts --develop -o ts.yml && talos -n -d ts.yml for a particular run. Instead, the entirety of this may be invoked with this patch as talos -n -d -e `which firefox` -a ts --develop -o ts.yml in a one-step process. (Note that we're still dumping to ts.yml though one wouldn't have to if the result is intended as ephemeral).

I hear people prefer blog posts with pictures, so with no reason here is a bunch of cute foxes:

I've moved the basis of the Talos configuration to PerfConfigurator.py instead of some combination of .config files, PerfConfigurator.py, and run_tests.py. This gets rid of the duplication between the various config files as well as the command line options. In fact, there isn't much left of the configuration files

I don't like configuration to live in code, and so empathize with those who look at this cautiously from that point of view. However, PerfConfigurator following my rework isn't so much configuration, but a configuration basis. Given the goals above, some piece of code has to validate a given configuration, has to know what data is in a configuration, and has to provide whatever command line options are used to front-end the configuration. The previous incarnation of Talos and PerfConfigurator had a significant amount of code to this end, but it was both spread out and incomplete. So I don't think putting it all in one place is a big conceptual change. Having a piece of code that knows the allowable form of configuration gives great power and having the code all in one place just makes it more human-readable.

The unofficial history of Talos configuration, as I understand it, goes something like this: Initially, there was one configuration file. You copied it, edited it by hand, and ran your tests on it. At some point, this became cumbersome, and PerfConfigurator was created to automatically fill in values from a set of command-line choices, and in addition allow the values to be marked up a bit. The road was already paved for some part of configuration basis living in code versus in the .config file. Then, as the need to run tests in different configurations grew, .config files flourished to this end. I'd like to think the changes for bug 704654 as the next logical step in Talos's configuration evolution.

Longer term, we'd like to remove even more of Talos's configuration and replace .yml files with command line options. The complexity of configuration will be managed by mozharness .

John O'Duinn: R.I.P. Carroll Shelby

John — 2012-05-14T05:43:01+00:00

On Thursday, 10-may-2012, Caroll Shelby died, aged 89.

Originally a chicken farmer, he became a race car driver until 1959, when heart problems brought his successful racing career to an end, so he switched again to focus on designing and building powerfully fast, brash, muscle cars that he loved to drive, including some great icons:

AC Cobra/Shelby Cobra

Ford Mustang GT390 (made famous by Steve McQueen in the movie “Bullitt“.)
…and several other Mustang-variants.

Dodge Viper

Ford GT

Even at 84 years of age, while a consultant on developing the new high-powered Ford GT, he still loved driving fast, and test drove the new Ford Mustang GT500 on a race track at 150mph.

I didnt realize until today that he was also one of the world longest living heart transplant recipients, having received a heart transplant in 1990.

A more detailed bio is available on his Shelby-America company website, on Wikipedia, The New York Times and The Washington Post .

Nicholas Nethercote: Browser flavours

Nicholas Nethercote — 2012-05-14T01:07:17+00:00

My daughter Keira turns four in a few months. She’s been practising reading the letters on my Firefox hoodie. On Saturday, we started with the front.

Keira: F – I – R – E – F – O – X

Me: What does that spell?

Keira: Firefox!

Then we moved to the back.

Keira: M – O – Z – I – L – L – A

Me: What does that spell?

Keira: <pause> Vanilla.

It’s clearly time to rename “add-ons” as “crush-ins”.

Michael Kaply: My Site Was Hacked

Mike Kaply — 2012-05-14T00:12:30+00:00

My WordPress site was hacked and apparently over the past couple days there was an embedded iframe that was causing a virus to be sent down. I did not totally determine what happened, but I’m continuing to investigate. I removed some bad code I saw.

Please make sure you use antivirus and your definition are current. If you do get a warning on any page, please let me know so I can investigate.

Thanks.

Firefox Support Blog: Firefox for Android tabbed browsing screencast

mluna — 2012-05-14T00:05:06+00:00

Firefox for Android has been rebuilt for high-performance browsing and quick start-up. The engineering and design teams also simplified the tab switcher with larger thumbnails and complete integration with Synced tabs from your desktop or tablet. Get a quick overview of tabbed browsing in the following screencast.

This screencast was created with androidscreencast.jnlp so it’s no match for the super-smooth experience you’ll get when you download the new Firefox Beta on Google Play later this month.

Mitchell Baker: Internet Society Hall of Fame

mitchell — 2012-05-13T22:13:08+00:00

A couple of weeks ago the Internet Society started a Hall of Fame at its 20th anniversary gathering.

The best part of the event for me occurred at the Gala dinner. That’s when they got the groups of Hall of Fame members on stage. Most importantly, they started with the Pioneers group. A few of the pioneers are no longer with us, Bob Kahn couldn’t make it, and there were undoubtedly a few people who could have been included but weren’t. Even so, it was a visceral moment for me. There, on stage together, was the greatest concentration of the designers and creators of the Internet that we’re likely to see together.

The Internet has proved to be a revolutionary technology. And everything we’ve built with the web sits on top of the Internet. The principles of decentralization, freedom at the edges, the ability to innovate, leadership by action rather than status are all reflected in the early work of this pioneer group. Not to mention the development of the key technologies. I feel very fortunate to have been in the audience at that moment. I’m very grateful to Walda Roseman of the Internet Society for not letting me miss the event.

The Hall of Fall Induction Ceremony was also fun. I am of course very honored to be included in the initial class of people included in the Hall of Fame. It’s a great honor and reflects all that we’ve achieved with Mozilla as well as whatever particular talents I bring. The Hall of Fame induction ceremony was invitation-only I believe, and much smaller than the dinner. Not every member of this class of Hall of Fame members was there, but a bunch of us were. (Here’s a photo of most of us who were at the event.) Each of us was asked to give 1 to 2 minutes of comments. Most spoke for longer. I think Brewster gets the award for the closest to 1 minute I don’t know if these comments were recorded. I’ve looked a bit online but haven’t found these. I did find a set of pictures of most of us as we made our remarks (scroll down a few rows to find these). Many of the speakers described what it was like in the early days and how they came up with their inventions. Steve Crocker talked about the RFP process and its relationship to the development of standards. Randy Bush talked about the people — in particular the women of Africa and Asia — who weren’t represented in this class. Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf talked about the organic nature of the web and the internet, respectively. Vint told some jokes as well.

Nancy Hafkin and Elizabeth Feinler both accepted the award only on behalf of groups they had worked with, identifying the women they though should be there with them. This interested me a great deal. There were 3 women in the Hall of Fame group; I’m the third. I had thought about accepting the award not solely for myself but ended up talking about the Web and our goals for building openness and opportunity instead. (For some reason I was the first of the Hall of Famers to speak at the ceremony.) I spoke about how the Internet was always there — available, decentralized, open to exploration and innovation — as we began to build the World Wide Web. Both the other women were quite explicit that they were accepting on behalf of a group.

I almost didn’t get to these events. I first heard about the event in February, when Walda asked to speak at the event opening on Monday morning. I declined because I was at MozCamp LatAm for the weekend before and that was too important to miss, even for something else very special. In February I also heard about the Internet Society’s planned Hall of Fame. I had missed the public call for nominations, so I immediately started lobbying for someone (not me) to be included. Eventually I was told it was too late for this year, I should submit my nomination during next year’s process. The Internet Society folks suggested I speak at the closing event on Tuesday, and we managed to make that schedule work. It was only later that I learned that I had been included in the Hall of Fame and that the ceremony as well as the talk would be so special.

I gave a 15 minute closing keynote. I followed Francis Gurry, the director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization. In turn, I was followed by Vint Cerf, who closed the entire event.

QMO: Mobile Web Compatibility Testing – We Need Your Help!

Jason Smith — 2012-05-13T17:14:11+00:00

Hi Firefox Mobile Testers,

We need help testing top sites on firefox mobile to capture site compatibility problems. This testing involves visiting a select list of top sites and providing feedback on whether a site renders correctly (CSS & layout) and whether it functions correctly. Why is this important? See this post for more information on why this testing is important to do.

Here are the steps to test:

Install a nightly build on your Android device
Launch Firefox Mobile and go to this URL
Click on the URL that is shown to open the site in a new tab and try it out
Go back to the original tab and provide your feedback
File bugs in the fennec native evangelism component on site compatibility problems

For step 3, trying it out means looking for things such as:

If I went to site on firefox mobile and the android stock browser, are they the same? Does firefox mobile perform at the same level of quality or better than the android stock browser? Why or Why not?
Looking at the layout of the site, does anything not look right to you? For example, does the layout of the buttons make sense? Does the color make sense? Do pop-ups come up correctly? Do videos play?

On step 3, if you land on a site that you don’t understand, then you can select skip to get a different website to test.

Don’t know how to file a bug in step 5? To get started, create an account on bugzilla here. Then, select file a bug. Select Fennec Native. Then, in the component field, select Evangelism. In the version field, select Firefox 15. In the Hardware field, select ARM. In the OS field, select Android. Then, provide a short summary of the problem in the summary field. In the description, provide reproducible steps, the expected results, the actual results, and any additional notes with noting. If you have any screenshots of the problem, then attach them to the bug.

We would greatly appreciate your help doing the testing task above! If you have any questions, then send an email to Jason Smith and Aaron Train with your questions.

Bonjour Mozilla: Chapeau le Dino !

clarista — 2012-05-13T08:00:00+00:00

(Photo : Firefox_Photos)

Décidément, quel talent ! Après le beanie, Janet Swisher a tricoté un nouveau bonnet charmant : un passe-montagne en forme de dinosaure Mozilla.

Bonjour Janet, et bravo !

Once again, what an impressive talent! After the beanie, Janet Swisher has knitted another lovely hat: a Mozilla-dinosaur shaped balaclava.

Bonjour Janet, and bravo!

Firefox Support Blog: Firefox for Android Sync screencast

mluna — 2012-05-12T22:59:17+00:00

Firefox for Android has been rebuilt with a native front-end for performance and usability. The new app includes an update to the killer Sync feature that brings your tabs, bookmarks and settings from your desktop and tablet to your smartphone.

This screencast provides a high-level overview of Sync setup and use. It also shows how easy it is to completely clear all of your private data, history, bookmarks and top sites from the app when you want to.

This screencast was created with androidscreencast.jnlp, so there is some jerk and gradients that don’t reflect the true beauty and feel of the new mobile browser. Enjoy it on your Android 2.2 smartphone when the Beta lands on Google Play later this month!

Tom Schuster: How the bad JSAPI is hurting us

2012-05-12T17:02:00+00:00

The JSAPI has been relatively stable since it’s incarnation together with the first version of JavaScript in 1998. At least till 2008 when we started doing some rather deep changes with the introduction of compartments, the removal of threads and more. In the most cases for more safety, speed and less memory usage. But you could probably still understand code written in that dark ages.

And in 1998, it probably only made sense to use C and thus also design a C API. So and that’s what we are left with today. Luckily not for too long anymore!

It’s time for a new API.

I agree to this sentiment wholeheartedly.

So let me enumerate two recent examples where a better and safer API could have stopped us from introducing bugs.

Case 1: off-by-one errors in JSClass initialization - Bug 747617

Every JavaScript object has a JSClass, this class describes how the object should behave when used in certain situations. It also holds some bits of information that are the same for every JavaScript object of that class. For example the class name, which you can get in JS by using Object.prototype.toString.call. But the main purpose is to implement special behavior for these object, through the usage of “hook”s. For example when you have a bit of experience with the ES5 specification, that’s what we use to implement pseudo internal methods like [[Construct]] (sort of at least). Because we obviously can’t use C++ virtual functions we are left with functions pointers in a struct. Because we can’t really enforce strict initialization rules and type checking failed, we actually assigned some the wrong function (or NULL) to some hooks after removing one function from the struct and not updating all uses in the correct way. This broke an old hack to support document.all("elementID") from ancient IE.

Case 2: JSVAL_IS_OBJECT - Bug 752226

So when I told you that JSVAL_IS_STRING checks if a Value (our way to represent the different types in JavaScript: Undefined, Null, Boolean, String, Number, and Object) is a String, and JSVAL_IS_NULL checks if a Value is null. What would you think is the purpose of JSVAL_IS_OBJECT? If you thought it’s checking if a Value represents an object you were right, but this is only one part of the answer. It also returns true when you actually passed a Null primitive to it. D’oh. This is kind of similar to the typeof operator, which also returns “object” for null and objects. This could have been a mistake, because Brendan already used that API in the wrong way when implementing JS. (Here is the implementation of typeof in Mozilla 1.0). So lets get to actual issue here. After you checked if something is an object it’s obviously okay to use JSVAL_TO_OBJECT and just do what ever you want with it. (JSVAL_TO_OBJECT is used to get a JSObject* out of the Value, like the name suggest this represent an actual object in JS). Of course a lot of people forget that this API returns a null pointer when you use it with a null primitive. When removing all the uses of JSVAL_IS_OBJECT, I noticed at least 5 places where this check was missing and would lead to null pointer dereference crashs. The correct way to check if something is an object would have been !JSVAL_IS_PRIMITIVE, obvious right?!

There are probably a lot of other cases of bugs that were introduced because of our bad API. I can think of at least three more, which often showed that the most developers using the API, don’t really know what they were doing, but can you blame them with functions like JSVAL_IS_OBJECT?

Here is a little gem Wes Garland shared with me that shows the bad zen of the JSAPI.

No, your method does not return false, you are simply making the JS engine stop dead in it’s tracks. If you want your JS function to return true, you need to make its implementation return JS_TRUE while setting *rvalp to JSVAL_FALSE.

Mozilla IT: SQL Injection at Reddit

Sheeri — 2012-05-12T14:03:54+00:00

Reddit takes SQL injection very seriously.

How seriously?

Check their headers:

scabral-07890:~ scabral$ curl --head www.reddit.comHTTP/1.1 200 OKContent-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8Set-Cookie: reddit_first=%7B%22organic_pos%22%3A%201%2C%20%22firsttime%22%3A%20%22first%22%7D; Domain=reddit.com; expires=Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:59:59 GMT; Path=/Server: '; DROP TABLE servertypes; --Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 13:54:20 GMTConnection: keep-alive

scabral-07890:~ scabral$

A colleague at PICC showed me this!

Wladimir Palant: Preventing background tabs from wasting your computer's resources

Wladimir Palant — 2012-05-12T11:27:49+00:00

Taras recently blogged on how websites manage to ruin Firefox performance by continuing to do something even though their tab is no longer active — they keep updating the view that you cannot see. He wondered whether it would be possible to suspend these tabs from an extension. I looked into this and there is a way to suspend all timeouts for a tab — something that an extension could use. Getting the details right wasn’t quite trivial but I think that my extension gets it right now: Suspend background tabs. Enjoy!

This doesn’t completely disable all activity in the background tabs of course. Network requests will continue, videos will also keep playing. So I might implement some improvements in future. However, please have understanding that this is a very low priority side-project for me. So it’s best if you bring your code. The current code is here.

Firefox Support Blog: Firefox for Android getting started tutorial

mluna — 2012-05-11T23:58:58+00:00

The new Firefox for Android has all the functionality of the XUL implementation with tons more speed and support for Flash. In addition, the UI has been redesigned to streamline the menus and put them all in one place. On gingerbread, you’ll find them in the hardware menu key. This tutorial shows the app on ice cream sandwich, with the menu in the upper-right.

This tutorial was created with androidscreencast.jnlp, so the jerk and gradients are due to the frame-rate of the screencast. Get the awesomely smooth experience on your Android 2.2 device when it hits the Google Play store later this month.

Dan Mosedale: Real-time remote code-reviews: shared screens & video chat

Dan — 2012-05-11T23:45:22+00:00

I’ve been involved in development processes that involve reviewing code for people who are not nearby for a bunch of years now. Recently, Alan and I have been experimenting with code-review using video chat & shared screens, and we’ve found some significant advantages.

This works particularly well for large patches, largely because of the very fast feedback loop and almost total lack of context-switching, which can carry very high costs.

This didn’t totally surprise me when I realized it, but another thing did: I started looking forward to large code reviews, rather than dreading them. My current feeling is that a lot of this is because they suddenly felt like a normal social interaction, and one where I got to learn a bunch about some new code and be helpful to the person working on it as well. The key part of that last sentence is the “normal social interaction” piece, I think. Which is to say that hearing someone’s voice, seeing their face, and being able to just talk through issues feels viscerally much much more efficient and fun to me than stuffing the same interaction through a very high-latency ASCII pipe.

Previous to this, when I did code reviews, I could be reasonably quick (mostly) turning around simple reviews, and painfully slow with larger ones. Being slow on large patches was tremendously painful in the sense that it was surely frustrating and demotivating for the folks who had contributed the large patches, and I often felt overwhelmed by large reviews looming on my to-do list and guilty for not having gotten to them yet. But now that I tend to look forward to code reviews, my turnaround time is now much happier for everyone involved.

One downside of this mode, however, is that since it requires technological and time coordination between the folks involved, for the most part, it’s hard to include onlookers who are interested in learning from the review. This is why I’m trying to get into the habit of doing the short stuff the usual way.

I’d be very interested to hear other people’s experiences with real-time remote code-review…

Michael Bebenita: *JS: Low-Level JavaScript

Michael Bebenita — 2012-05-11T21:53:33+00:00

What would JavaScript look like if you added low level features to it? Well, three weeks ago, Shu-yu Guo and I set about to find out. We prototyped the idea with two different languages, *JS based on JavaScript and heap.coffee based on CoffeeScript.

Both are typed dialects of JavaScript that offer a C-like type system with manual memory management. They compile to JavaScript and let you write memory-efficient and GC pause-free code less painfully. This is early research prototype work, so don't expect anything rock solid just yet. The research goal here is to explore low-level statically typed features in a high-level dynamically typed language. Think of it as inline assembly in C, or the unsafe keyword in C#. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.

You can play with *JS compiler online or check out the source on github.

Sean McArthur: Firefox for Windows on ARM

2012-05-11T21:52:01+00:00

Firefox for Windows on ARM:

Asa Dotzler:

On ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers so there’s no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.

This is huge. It’s not that it’s difficult to make a Metro-style app. It’s that some core underlying APIs that users take for granted aren’t available. An easy one to notice: Firefox on ARM won’t be able to dynamically load and execute generated code; commonly known as JIT compilation. JIT compilation of JavaScript is how all modern browsers are able to make JavaScript run so quickly. Users will certainly notice that Firefox seems slow, and think it’s all Mozilla’s fault.

Then, John Gruber points this out:

In other words, Microsoft is setting policies for Windows for ARM that are a lot like Apple’s policies for iOS. These policies and restrictions make just as much sense for Microsoft as they do for Apple.

I can never understand people who have the mind of “that’s fine, it’s better for the parent company.” It’s also worse for the user. The policy that Apple has for the iOS store is just as bonkers.

Greg Wilson: Teach Teachers What They Use, Teach Kids Where They Are

Greg Wilson — 2012-05-11T20:11:38+00:00

Gary Stager isn’t the first person to point out that we’ve been dumbing down computing education for the last 30 years—that we’ve gone from teaching kids how to program to teaching them how to use Excel to teaching them how to use iPads. (My five-year-old didn’t need to be taught…) What people mostly aren’t asking is why this has happened, but I have a theory. I think teachers are teaching the computing that they use themselves, because that’s the most economical thing for them to do: they use Word to make hand-outs, and Excel to manage grades, so they’ve already invested in proficiency, so they can put together lessons in less time. They don’t use Logo (or Scratch, or Python, or whatever) in their own work, so teaching it requires more effort.

Which makes me wonder how successful current “programming for everyone” efforts are going to be. I doubt most teachers are going to want to hack their classes’ web sites (and even if they do, their schools may not allow them to). I’m even more skeptical of the idea that teachers will program in their day-to-day work any time soon.

(“But wait,” you say. “Most Latin teachers don’t speak Latin at home. And there aren’t a lot of physics teachers building lasers in their dining rooms.” True, but those are recognized, accepted specialties within teaching right now: they aren’t trying to gain ground, just hold onto what they have.)

Now let’s shift focus a bit. My 14-year-old nephew is on the web, creating content, almost daily, but “on the web” isn’t quite accurate. He’s actually on Facebook: along with GMail, YouTube, and Minecraft, that’s pretty much what the web consists of for him (at least that he’ll admit to his uncle). We already know that if we want to teach kids, going to where they are works better than bringing them into an artificial environment and giving them artificial tasks. I therefore think that if we want the 95% who aren’t already keen on hacking to care enough to do it, we need to teach them how to hack the places they already are. Having everyone build their own Facebook plugin would (a) take far too long to pay off and (b) be unsafe (imagine you’re Facebook’s director of security and someone tells you that 100,000 high school kids are about to build plugins for your site). But what if we made a generic plugin that allowed people to build and run WebScratch programs inside Facebook, with access to (some) FB content? I know, I know, there’s no such thing (yet) as WebScratch, but you get the idea: if we could create, test, and deploy this that makes it easy for them to build that, what would “this” and “that” be?

(“But wait”, you say, “Facebook is a closed pseudo-monopoly. We shouldn’t be supporting them!” I agree, but (a) going into a slum in Rio de Janeiro to teach the kids who live there doesn’t mean you support the idea of slums, and (b) they won’t understand why “closed” is bad until they understand more about the web in general, and open in particular, and they won’t learn either unless they care enough to learn in the first place.)

So, question #1 is, “What can we teach about computing and/or the web that will appeal to teenagers, but will also be useful to classroom teachers?” And question #2 is, “What plugins can we build that will allow learners to hack where they are?”

Naoki Hirata: How you can help improve your bug reports for Fennec…

shizen008 — 2012-05-11T19:23:15+00:00

Logs and screenshots really help when looking at bugs for developers as well as QA. There are free apps out there that will do these things.

For logs, there is an app called alogcat ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jtb.alogcat&hl=en )

that will allow you to share or save your logs after you hit the menu button.

As for taking screenshots, it’s gotten even easier than having to install android sdk. There are free apps out there on the market such as screenshot ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geeksoft.screenshot&hl=en ) as well as pay for screenshot capture apps that do not require root ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardkim.android.screenshotitfullnoroot&hl=en )

Having mentioned these, I am not endorsing any apps one over the other… if you find a favorite one that shows/shares logs or screenshots, I say go for it!

Filed under: mobifx, mobile, Planet, QA, QMO Tagged: mobifx, mobile, Planet, QA, QMO

Mozilla Web Development: Better Know a WebDev: K Lars Lohn

groovecoder — 2012-05-11T19:08:42+00:00

This week’s special guest on Better Know a WebDev, K Lars Lohn!

What do you do at Mozilla?

Officially, I am the the Software Architect for the Socorro project. Unofficially, I spread chaos and confusion as a self proclaimed Cowboy Programmer. I proudly stand as the only member of Webdev that does no Web development. My work is all behind the scenes at the server and daemon level.

Socorro was handed to me in May of 2008 as a non-working system that needed to be functional for the June Firefox 3 launch. Even with short schedule, I met the deadline, but the result was a pure unadulterated hack. With ambiguous to nonexistent specs, I continued development as a solo performance art piece. Some features still in use today went from concept to production in less than thirty minutes. Eventually, a team formed around me and we began the slow process of applying standards and retroactive forethought to the codebase. Today the system serves terabytes of data and handles millions of transactions per day.

Any fun side projects you’re working on?

All of my side projects are fun, but they’re not all software related:

I run a wholesale nursery specializing in roses. I’ve literally thousands of varieties in a rose garden that spans an entire acre. I’m a plant nerd with seven greenhouses and an appetite for strange plants.
I’m constantly tinkering with my 2008 Harley FX-STB. I added a USB port to it. I’m writing software to monitor engine performance and tweak the fuel injectors. Maybe I can find a way to make a B2G app for it.
I play Baroque oboe and recorder for my own amusement. I’ve also just placed a foot in the world of electronic instruments with a Yamaha WX5 MIDI woodwind instrument that drives a synth. I’m suddenly writing MIDI interface code in Python.

How did you get started in web development or programming?

I’ve been captivated by computers and programming since 1974 when my high school math lab got its first timeshare account on the local university mainframe. I wrote games. By 1992, I had educated myself out of the local job market moving to the proverbial Silicon Forest of Oregon.

My first actual Web development project was in 1999 when I opened the nursery. Written in C++ with Rogue Wave and Microsoft tools, it was brittle, but fast. I rewrote the system in 2002 using an open source stack: Python, Apache and Postgres. In the era of Netscape and IE6, I learned very quickly that I am not a user interface designer: getting a consistent and aesthetic user experience is hard. My career doing user facing web design mercifully ended when I sold the retail part of the nursery business in 2007.

How did you get involved with Mozilla?

In the mid aughts, I worked for Oregon State University at the Open Source Lab. My fearless leader volunteered me to work on Mozilla projects. At the time, Mozilla was primarily hosted at the OSL. On leaving the University in 2006, I ran into Shrep, then CTO of Mozilla, at OSCON and he offered me contract work. I converted to full time employment in 2008.

What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?

I was asked to review the work being done in Ramora, a version of AMO. I thought what they were doing with MySQL was absurd and I expressed the sentiment giving some suggestions as to an alternative direction that could work better. I also recall pointing out the flaws in my own method: too many joins for MySOL to handle. I expected to start a lively discussion, but the debate never came and I forgot about it. I was horrified to discover a month later that my word had been taken as gospel. It was implemented and sent to production, warts and all. I shudder to think of how long it took the AMO team to undo that ill advice.

What’s something you’re particularly proud of?

I was instrumental in the creation of DBTools.h++, an object oriented database abstraction class library in C++ for Rogue Wave Software in the early nineties. Think of it as a C++ version of SQLAlchemy, created ten years before that software came into existence. The class library became very popular with phone companies, airlines and investment banks. This evolved into a lucrative career for me later in the decade doing lectures and code reviews for Rogue Wave customers. Imagine me in my Harley t-shirt and jeans walking into a Wall Street investment bank ready to critique code written by the suits…

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?

In Socorro-land, I’m excited about the adoption of Configman. The project started as a unification library for configuration and became a dependency injection framework. With the ability to load classes at run time, Socorro will be able drop in storage schemes, alternative processing algorithms, or swap out any number of other subsystems. Configman is the key that gives Socorro the ability to scale from a tiny installation receiving a handful of crashes per day, to huge systems like ours that processes millions.

What question do you wish you’d been asked?

There is great wisdom in the aphorism, “everything old is new again”. Just like most aspects of human endeavor, programming is subject to the whims of fashion. Perfectly legitimate languages and engineering practices fall from favor because something new and shiny comes around. The old technologies are a gold mine of ideas and techniques that can solve today’s problems. Take time to explore Lisp, Smalltalk, APL or even Fortran. Don’t let dogma limit freedom of expression. Monoculture is a bad idea in software engineering just like it is in agriculture.

What kind of app do you want to see on Boot2Gecko?

Good Lord, I can’t just think of just one. I want a full spectrum of apps on B2G. GTD (Getting Things Done) software plays an important part in my daily life. Omnifocus is what keeps me tethered to iOS. Liberate me!

Michael Kaply: Customizing Firefox – Hiding Private Browsing

Mike Kaply — 2012-05-11T18:27:25+00:00

Update: I was reminded that using visibility: collapse for menu items leaves them in the key navigation. Instead, you should use hidden=”true” or in places that doesn't work (context menus) display: none.

In my previous post, I showed how to setup a basic extension in Firefox. Having this extension will allow us to do some Firefox customization. Before I get into this post, though, I wanted to clarify one thing. I had you put your XUL overlay in the root directory and point your content directory to ./. I did that to make things simpler but in practice you'll want to separate your files. The structure most commonly used is a chrome directory with a content subdirectory underneath. In that case, the directory in the chrome manifest would be chrome/content/.

With that out of the way, let's customize Firefox. We're going to prevent a user from accessing private browsing. We need a disclaimer here, though. We are not removing private browsing, we are just removing access. So if the user has an add-on that invokes private browsing, or if they have access to about:config, they can still turn on private browsing. For any of these customizations, there's an expectation that the right things have been done to prevent the user from accessing functionality via other means.

The first step to removing functionality from the browser is to understand the different ways a user can access that function. For private browsing, there are three entry points, the Start Private Browsing menu item on the Firefox button, the Start Private Browsing menu item under the Tools menu and the keystroke Ctrl+Shift+P (command+shift+P on Mac). We'll need to handle each of these cases and prevent the user from accessing them.

In my previous post, I said that we needed the ID of an item in order to customize it. There are two ways to find the ID. One is to use the DOM Inspector and the other is to search through the Mozilla source code. I prefer to search through the Mozilla source code because it usually gives me a lot more information. Here's how I locate what I need.

The Mozilla source code is hosted in a tool called MXR and can be easily searched. The first thing you want to search on is the text of the menuitem you're trying to remove. So we'll search on Start Private Browsing. What we're looking for usually is a DTD file that has the same text as the menu item. This will help us find the actual menu item. In this case, that file is browser.dtd:

<!ENTITY privateBrowsingCmd.start.label "Start Private Browsing">

The information we actually need is the label on the left. By using that as a search term, we can find the menus that have this as their text. So we search for privateBrowsingCmd.start.label. This looks a lot more promising. We see references to browser-appmenu.inc and browser-menubar.inc. These files contain the menu items we're looking for. So let's look at one of those menuitems:

<menuitem id="appmenu_privateBrowsing"
          class="menuitem-iconic menuitem-iconic-tooltip"
          label="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.label;"
          startlabel="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.label;"
          stoplabel="&privateBrowsingCmd.stop.label;"
          command="Tools:PrivateBrowsing"
          key="key_privatebrowsing"/>

There is one of the IDs we need - appmenu_privateBrowsing.

So if we add this to our XUL overlay:

<menuitem id="appmenu_privateBrowsing"
          hidden="true"/>

It will hide the menu item on the Firefox button.

If we look further at this menu item, though, it will give some more interesting information. In particular it tells us that when this menu item is invoked, it calls a command - Tools:PrivateBrowsing. What if instead of hiding each menuitem, we could simply disable that command? It just so happens that you can do exactly that.

Commands are XUL elements for invoking operations from multiple sources. Because command is a XUL element, we can override it just like any other element. So let's find this element by searching the source code. In browser-sets.inc, we find this:

<command id="Tools:PrivateBrowsing"
         oncommand="gPrivateBrowsingUI.toggleMode();"/>

So we can prevent access to private browsing by simply overriding the oncommand:

<command id="Tools:PrivateBrowsing"
         oncommand=""/>

or we can even display a message when private browsing is invoked:

<command id="Tools:PrivateBrowsing"
         oncommand="alert('Private browsing has been disabled by your administrator.')"/>

By changing the command, we can prevent the various menuitems and keystrokes from invoking private browsing at all. This keeps us from having to worry about disabling the keystroke. If you do run into a case where disabling the command is not enough, search for the key value in the file browser-sets.inc. Usually it's just a matter of setting the command on the keystroke to nothing:

<key id="key_privatebrowsing" command=""/>

Occasionally keys use oncommand, so you'll need to set that to nothing instead.

There's still one more menu item, though, so let's go back to our first search and take a look at browser-menubar.inc.

<menuitem id="privateBrowsingItem"
          label="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.label;"
          accesskey="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.accesskey;"
          startlabel="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.label;"
          startaccesskey="&privateBrowsingCmd.start.accesskey;"
          stoplabel="&privateBrowsingCmd.stop.label;"
          stopaccesskey="&privateBrowsingCmd.stop.accesskey;"
          key="key_privatebrowsing"
          command="Tools:PrivateBrowsing"/>

All we need from here is the id. So let's add that to our XUL overlay:

<menuitem id="privateBrowsingItem"
          hidden="true"/>

And there you have it. You've disabled access to private browsing.

Using this process, you can find and customize or disable just about any menuitem in Firefox.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Add-on Compatibility for Firefox 13

Jorge Villalobos — 2012-05-11T18:05:02+00:00

Firefox 13 has been in beta for a while now, so this blog post is a bit overdue. Here’s an almost comprehensive list of the changes that went into Firefox 13 that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 13 for Developers, so you should read that too.

General

New Tab Page. This is a major new feature, but can also break add-ons that overlay about:blank. The good thing is that this feature makes it easier to create a customized new tab page. All you need to do is set the browser.newtab.url preference to the chrome URL you prefer.
Remove “lateness” argument for setTimeout and setInterval. This was a non-standard feature, where an additional argument was passed to setTimeout and setInterval callback handlers, indicating how late they were being called. For example, if you call setTimeout with a waiting time of 0, the callback will always be called late because there’s a minimum waiting time of a few ms.
Remove support for globalStorage. window.globalStorage is no more. For local storage alternatives, please read this article.
Replace livemarks with asynchronous load-on-demand livemarks. nsILivemarkService is now deprecated, in favor of the asynchronous mozIAsyncLivemarks.
Remove excludeItemsIfParentHasAnnotation query option. This is a query option that could be used on Places queries. It has been dropped now.
Implement HTML to plain text conversion as a DOM walker. nsIScriptableUnescapeHTML is now deprecated in favor of the new nsIParserUtils.
Drop support for prefixes from border-radius* and box-shadow. This means you should no longer use -moz-border-radius and -moz-box-shadow. If you do, make sure that you are also using the non-prefixed equivalents.
Markers in places popup views are broken. This makes some significant changes in how Places popups work internally, so if you overlay or override them, you need to look into this.

XPCOM

Merge nsIPrefBranch2 with nsIPrefBranch. The very commonly used nsIPrefBranch2 is now deprecated. If you have preference observers, you’re using this interface. It still works as it always has and there are no plans to drop it in the near future. However, it’s best that you begin moving away from it.
Mandatory ASLR on Windows for binary components. This is very important if you have binary components. My understanding is that the default compile options include ASLR, but you should still verify that your components load correctly. More details in this blog post.
Merge nsIAccessNode and nsIAccessible. nsIAccessNode no longer exists.
Remove FileError. nsIDOMFileError no longer exists.

New!

Add about:compartments page. This makes it much easier to hunt for zombie compartments, which you should always do when testing your add-on. Instead of the very verbose about:memory, the new about:compartments shows a simple list of existing compatments, which is much more easy to follow and understand.
Allow the source code editor of Scratchpad & StyleEditor to be themed.
Split -new-instance flag out of existing -no-remote flag. This separates the idea of starting a separate Firefox instance and allowing that instance to receive command-line input after being launched. It might still not be fully finished according to the latest comments.
Provide internal API to get canvas image data as nsIInputStream. This creates a nice new shortcut for getting image data out of a canvas.

Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 13, I’d like to know.

We will be doing an automatic compatibility validation and upgrading for add-ons on AMO that are compatible with Firefox 12, sometime in the next 2 weeks. I’ll also be working in Firefox 14 compatibility so that it doesn’t come in as late as this one.

Mozilla User Research: Lessons Learned from Researching in China, Japan and India

Diane Loviglio — 2012-05-11T17:52:49+00:00

Carissa Carter, a design researcher, formerly from Herman Miller, shares what she learned from doing research in Asia for a full year.

Her top 5 lessons learned were:
1) Understand the enhanced impact of recent history.
2) Find the momentum of the population.
3) Tap into self-perceptions.
4) Use images as language.
5) Know what you’re up against and leverage it.

We also talked about best practices around incentives, translators and scheduling. In China for example, if you interviewed a CFO and a designer at the same company, and you spent an hour with each and each interview was extremely valuable, you would give the CFO a bigger and better incentive. And actually the incentive is viewed more of as a gift – a token of your appreciation – not payment for your time. Physical size matters too, it’s not just the cost of the gift, it has to be bigger in size. They gave planners with the company logo and shinny gold zippers and edges to the CFOs and a shiny jump drive to the lower status participants.

As for translators, she cautioned us to spend time picking the right one, since that person is channeling your questions to the participants. She tried using a real time translator, but that didn’t prove to be useful, nor does a translators that asks a question and then tells you the answer afterwards in front of the participant, because that is too slow. For participants who spoke English, she was the primary interviewer, but the local researcher still comes along so that afterwards they can shed light on why the participant made that face as he answered your question or why his answer was actually even more significant than you originally thought.

Scheduling is easy when you know your way or when you are driving yourself around, but in India for example, the traffic is so congested, that something that is 10 minutes away on a map, maybe actually take an hour to get to, so work with your local researcher for scheduling too.

There are so many more details in her talk, it’s definitely worth watching her talk and reading her slides. Thanks, Carissa!

Planet Mozilla

Benoit Girard: Dev Tip: Debugging optimized code without a clobber – Rebuilding a module without optimization

Irina Sandu: Android and mobile browsing insights – Week 20

David Boswell: Grow Mozilla discussion this Thursday

Lawrence Mandel: Sign in to Telemetry with Persona

Tom Schuster: Short update of what the JS team is at

Gervase Markham: Mobile Market Reports

Wim Benes: Mozilla bij Open Overheid Congres

Gervase Markham: Welcome To Life

Nicholas Nethercote: MemShrink progress, week 47–48

Add-ons

Compartment-per-global

Memory Reporting

Bug counts

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Jetpack Project: weekly update for May 15, 2012

Project News

Quick Stats

Meeting Brief

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: SeaMonkey Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

SeaMonkey/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15

Contents

Agenda

Action Items

Status of the SeaMonkey Buildbot Master and Tree

Release Train

Extensions Compatibility Tracking

2.x (Last, Current, Next)

2.9

2.Next

Feature List, Planning

Roundtable – Personal Status Updates

Aqualon

Callek

ewong

IanN

InvisibleSmiley

KaiRo

mcsmurf

Misak

Mnyromyr

MReimer

Neil

Ratty

Ricardo

sgautherie

Stanimir

stefanh

tonymec

Any other business?

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Thunderbird Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2012-05-15

Agenda

Action Items

Friends of the Tree

Thunderbird Development

Feature Work

Better Gmail Integration

Schedule and Progress

Extension of the week

QA Updates

Marketing Updates

Infrastructure Update

Build / Release Update

Web Update

Documentation

Support

Lightning Updates

Status Updates

Roundtable Highlights

Attendees

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Platform Meeting Minutes: 2012-05-15

Platform/2012-05-15

Contents

Kilimanjaro

Notices / Schedule

Firefox Development

Firefox Developer Tools

Add-on SDK

Performance

GFX