Planet Mozilla

Mary Colvig: We’ve got some busy Personas designers!

Mary Colvig — 2010-02-10T00:22:11+00:00

Drum roll please….we’re up to 50,000 Firefox Personas! “Peace and Calm” was the magic 50,000th Persona. What better way to celebrate the hard work of our Personas designers than by showcasing your favorite? It’s not too late…just add your pic to our Flickr pool! (Note: turns out that “personas” is a very popular tag on Flickr.)

Here are some of my favorites…

kevingo75 showing off Firefox Robot

Regnard Raquedan dons the Minefield Persona

Bob Chao's wearing his own design Sunny Foxymosa

QMO: Results of OOPP Testdays So Far

juanb — 2010-02-09T23:40:52+00:00

Last week we held a series of testsdays on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday so we could get more eyes on out of process plugins (OOPP), a feature that was turned on the trunk nightglies on 1/28. We were hoping to try these builds, report problems, have those problems fixed overnight, and re-try them. So far we have found 16 bugs.

Today we held another testday, and we'll continue on Wednesday and Friday between 9am and 1pm PDT. We are hoping that tomorrow's nightly builds will contain fixes which should allow us to test past some common hangs and crashes while loading Flash and Silverlight.

Tomorrow's testday details.
Last week's testday results.

Blog of Metrics: An Improved Experience for New Users of Firefox

Ken Kovash — 2010-02-09T22:50:15+00:00

Over the past year, we set out to identify and solve any possible pain points that might arise during a person’s experience downloading and installing Firefox (previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here). Thanks to feedback from users, and some resulting product changes, we can now safely say that there are no issues confronting new users when installing Firefox for the very first time.

How do we know this?

Last week, we re-ran our installer feedback mechanism for a short period of time. If a user clicked “cancel” while walking through the Firefox installer, they were asked if they wanted to provide feedback.

After making an initial round of product improvements based on our first time feedback (March ‘09), here are the transformed feedback results from our more recent efforts (both July 2009 and last week):

While we still have plans to tackle the remaining big slice of the pie (see concluding paragraph), we were able to successfully solve the red and green pie slices from last time. In our latest feedback results (pie on the right), the big pie slice now represents nearly 100% of the total feedback (the previously seen categories virtually evaporated). One way to interpret this is that we’ve now successfully identified and resolved 3 of the top 4 issues originally encountered by users.

Here were the specific actions we took addressing those red and green slices (details are in bug 508684):

Don’t Want Firefox as Default

People indicating this issue were missing the selection option earlier in the installation process, arrived at the end, and mistakenly believed that we were making Firefox their default without being given a choice. So, we added the choice to the final step in the installer:

Confusion About Updating-Upgrading-Installing

We did a few different things to help address this area of confusion. First, we added content to mozilla.com and prominently displayed it on the main Firefox product pages seen by existing users:

Second, within the Firefox installer, we changed the Install button to say “Upgrade” instead of “Install”:

Thanks to Rob Strong, the Firefox team, the Funnelcake team, John Slater, and Laura Mesa, among others, for implementing the changes highlighted above.

Lastly, there remains one outstanding problem for installers of Firefox – “it tells me to close Fx, but it’s not open” (the big pie slice in the charts above). This issue affects people who already have Firefox and are attempting to reinstall it, and as we’ve noted previously, this cohort becomes fairly frustrated during the experience. Some fixes are starting to be contemplated (e.g., bugs 496207, 544356)… and I’ll make sure to talk more here once some progress is made.

Jay Patel: Developing the MDN brand

Jay Patel — 2010-02-09T22:31:17+00:00

As Chris Blizzard blogged about a few months ago, we’re in the process of creating the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to help unify a diverse, global developer community and give them a strong identity within the ever-growing Mozilla universe. The MDN will serve key developer segments including those working on the Web, Add-ons, Mobile and Applications. With early feedback and an initial roadmap, the Mozilla developer marketing team has been busy executing on a number of projects to help make the MDN a reality in 2010.

We have made a lot of progress this year with the redesigned Hacks blog and web developer outreach, but we haven’t spent a lot of time discussing what the MDN will look like in terms of structure or brand. We know it may take a while to figure out the right structure for our developer communities, but we can definitely make a huge impact early on by defining and developing the MDN brand. Since MDN will serve as the official Mozilla “developer brand”, creating a strong identity is an important step in establishing the new name and concept within the Mozilla community. That is why we have kicked off the logo design process with Studio Number One (SNO) and plan to share the concepts with you soon. If you’re interested in learning more about the process, check out the MDN logo design brief we provided SNO to start things off.

For those not familiar with the origins of the Mozilla dino logo, it was created in 1998 by Shepard Fairey and his BLK/MRKT design firm. Most people know him for his more recent Obama “HOPE” poster, but the Mozilla community has been familiar with his work for years.

Fairey made a huge impact in the early days of the Mozilla project and his work is evident in the original Mozilla website design, many mozilla.org t-shirts, the Mozilla “hack” brand (which we borrowed for the Hacks web developer blog) and of course the Mozilla dino that lives on as the symbol for Mozilla today. I am very excited that we are working with his current design firm SNO to create a new identify for the MDN.

We will have a set of MDN logo concepts later this week and I will blog more about them so that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts. The Mozilla developer marketing team has given the SNO team three unique design directions to explore after our initial round of brainstorming and I can’t wait to see what they come up.

The MDN logo design project will be followed by a complete redesign of the developer.mozilla.org website in preparation for rebranding the site from MDC to MDN. While we may be changing the look and feel of the website, the awesome documentation we currently have available on MDC isn’t going anywhere. All the great developer notes, tutorials and web reference pages will be accessible from the /docs section of the MDN website. The community will have a chance to provide their feedback during the MDN website design project as well, so stay tuned.

For more information about our MDN plans, you can track the various projects and programs on our wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN

Taras Glek: Static Analysis Articles

tglek — 2010-02-09T22:22:40+00:00

A really good ACM article about static analysis from Coverity’s perspective has been making rounds in Mozilla. What struck me most was the following paragraph:

At the most basic level, errors found with little analysis are often better than errors found with deeper tricks. A good error is probable, a true error, easy to diagnose; best is difficult to misdiagnose. As the number of analysis steps increases, so, too, does the chance of analysis mistake, user confusion, or the perceived improbability of event sequence. No analysis equals no mistake.

My personal view has been that “dumb” analyses are the most effective ones in terms of mistakes spotted vs time wasted writing/landing the analysis. It is interesting to see that sophisticated analyses are difficult to deploy even for Coverity.

In other news, LCA 2010 was my favourite conference so far. I met a number of awesome developers there. Mozilla’s static analysis work finally got mentioned in LWN!

David Ascher: Ikea Canada: WTF?

david — 2010-02-09T18:47:28+00:00

A few months ago, we needed more desks for our office, so I figured I’d order them from the Ikea website. Easy to do, except that the Ikea.ca store doesn’t work with US credit cards, and our corporate card is a US card. So I bite my tongue about the craziness of e-commerce in Canada, knowing it’s not just an Ikea problem, and I use my personal card, and will deal with expensing it internally. Annoying, but oh well.

Then I’m blown away because delivery takes eons, because the desks have to come from the “online distribution center” in Quebec (”it’s Canada, so it’s got to be close, right?”), and not from either of the two warehouses within 20 miles of the delivery address (who do have the items in stock!). But I’m busy, so I live w/ the delay. Environmentally criminal, but oh well.

This month, we need more desks, and I’ve learned my lesson, so I know to take time out of my weekend to go to Ikea, order the desks and chairs. After about 45 minutes in the store, it looks like we’ll have delivery on Tuesday morning. A few high-end desks and what seems like their most expensive chairs, but I have a soft spot for Ikea, and their furniture is working out fine for us.

Turns out the chairs aren’t in stock, so they have to be scheduled for delivery a few weeks out and delivery has to be charged separately. Annoying, and a bit more expensive, but oh well.

Monday, they call and say that we hadn’t talked about delivery times (we had), and we reschedule it for the same day/time. Seems disorganized, but oh well.

Tuesday, they come and call my cell to let us know they’re downstairs, but I’m on the phone on an important call, and I thought it was someone else, so I figure I’ll get the message when I’m done with my call. By the time I get off the phone, I’m told they went on with their route, and I need to reschedule another delivery, which will cost me $75. Frustrating, but I blame it on the olympics and how it’s messing with deliveries everywhere, and blame myself for not taking the call, but oh well.

I call back to reschedule, and I’m told that I need to go back to the store to reschedule, because I need to pay for another delivery. WTF? After a bit of back and forth with the CSR, I ask to talk to a manager, and I’m told to do that I need to go to the store. WTF? I then ask about canceling the order, and I’m told that, you guessed it, I need to go back to the store.

Oh, if I want to lodge a complaint, I can do it on their website. I’ll definitely be sending them a link to this page.

I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend. What I’m not sure of is where I’ll get the next batch of furniture from. What a totally horrible customer experience, just because they don’t have a system for paying over the phone (or, hey, the internet?!?!) for silly delivery fees.

Just Browsing: Prism, Firefox 3.6, OS X and dependentlibs.list

Matthew Gertner — 2010-02-09T16:28:45+00:00

As we prepare to go live with Prism 1.ob3, I should mention that there is an issue with using the Prism extension in Firefox 3.6 on OS X. Prism uses the Firefox runtime (meaning the XUL, XPCOM and other libraries) for apps it creates. There is a small bug in Firefox 3.6 that prevents the libraries from loading on OS X. See bug 542004 for more information. The bug is currently nominated for inclusion in 1.9.2.2 (I guess it’s too late for 1.9.2.1). If someone is reading this and has the power to make this happen, please keep in mind that this issue is currently preventing Prism from running properly in Firefox 3.6 on Macs.

The good news is that there is a workaround that Mac users can use while waiting for a fixed version of Firefox 3.6. Just download the file dependentlibs.list and place it in your /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS folder (or equivalent if you don’t have Firefox installed in the default location).

Mark Surman: Need feedback: generic Drumbeat slides

msurman — 2010-02-09T16:02:59+00:00

With Drumbeat gathering steam, a number people have asked for generic slides that they can use to spread the word. Which is amazing. I’ve taken a first shot at generic Drumbeat slides plus a voice over here:

You can also download the slides (PDF) or view the open video (ogg theora). The open video is actually nicer to watch than the embed above.

My goal with this version is to get feedback from people so that I can then do something more polished. I have two questions:

If you were in the audience, does this presentation provide you with a good intro to Drumbeat? If not, what additional topics would you want to see covered?
As a presenter, do the slides plus my voice over give you what you need to give a talk? If not, what else could I provide?

There are a couple of people who have offered to give Drumbeat talks in late February. So, I’ll take comments for a week or so and then post a revised slides in remixable form.

Filed under: mozilla

Dwayne Bailey: Virtaal supports Haitian Creole through Machine Translation plugin

dwayne — 2010-02-09T13:35:12+00:00

Update: Originally published on 2006-01-26 but somehow I didn't get this pushed on to the RSS feed so I've published it with a newer date.

Virtaal, a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, has been providing translators with Machine Translation suggestions through its plugin system. We've just committed a new Machine Translation plugin that allows Virtaal to use Microsoft Translator's new Haitian Creole translation engine.

The Microsoft Translator plugin has been waiting for the next major release as we didn't want to introduce any User Interface changes. But the usefulness of this tool in the current Haitian crisis means that we've released it so that people can use it and benefit from the feature.

How does this help?

Any software that needs to be localised into Haitian Creole can now be more easily translated in Virtaal with Haitian Machine Translation support.
Documents (OpenDocument Format and wiki texts) can be translated into Haitian Creole using Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit's txt2po and odf2xliff converters.

How do I use the plugin?

You have two options:

Windows: Download our special Virtaal .exe for Windows.
Linux: Copy the Microsoft Translator plugin into your plugin directory (on Linux this is /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/virtaal/plugins/tm/models/

How to use the plugin?

You'll need to define Haitian Creole as a language in Virtaal

Bottom Right > New Language Pair...

Add Missing Language...

Name 'Haitian Creole' and language code 'ht'

Ensure that the plugin is enabled. Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins > Translation Memory > Configure... Ensure Microsoft Translator is checked.

Open your file and begin translating, I'm using the tutorial Help > Tutorial and as you can see I'm getting Machine Translation suggestions from Microsoft for Haitian Creole.

Chelsea Novak: Namoroka Update

Chelsea Novak — 2010-02-09T13:15:24+00:00

We’re almost at the end of the Support Namoroka campaign and are tantalizingly close to our goal of $10,000 for the Madagascar Fauna Group, who support lemurs throughout Madagascar. (In fact, we’re at more than 80%!)

You can help us during this last week of the campaign. The best thing you can do to help us hit our goal is to donate.

If you’ve donated already, thank you! You can do us one more solid by spreading the word via Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, etc. If you’re short on creativity, you can just say this:

“Celebrate Firefox 3.6, Namoroka and help Mozilla support Malagasy lemurs! http://bit.ly/6lOsol”

You can also support the campaign with a parks affiliate button on your blog or website.

We’ve had some really amazing feedback from the Mozilla community and the public at large. Please help us hit our goal, celebrate Firefox 3.6 and help some adorable primates in Madagascar.

about:mozilla: Weave APIs, Android, mjs, plugins, Twitter, Bugzilla, GetFirebug.com, UX update, and more…

deb — 2010-02-09T12:11:39+00:00

In this issue…

Weave Sync APIs + developer resources
Mozilla Labs, following on last week’s launch of Weave 1.0, has now released its first set of developer resources including the Weave Sync + User APIs, documentation, and Python + JavaScript client libraries. The hope is that developers will use these resources to increase the number of places you can easily and securely access your personal data whether or not Firefox is available. “This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide users access to their stored data from other devices and environments.” The team has also released a number of early prototypes and pieces of sample code.

Firefox on Android progress
The project to port Firefox to the Android operating system is progressing well, and the team recently posted an update. “After working out a few kinks, I got our first page load,” writes Vlad Vukićević, “Mouse events sort of work, toplevel windows sort of work, keyboard doesn’t work yet but shouldn’t be hard to hook up. This is running in an emulator at the moment for ease of debugging, but it’s working just fine on physical hardware as well.” Check out Vlad’s blog for the full story.

Simple vector and matrix math for JS
“One common thread running through the many different and interesting WebGL projects out there is that they all need to do vector and matrix math, do it quickly, and do it in JavaScript. Since this is such a crucial part of a successful WebGL program, I’ve put together a small package that I’m calling mjs. mjs is designed around speed and simplicity.” Vlad Vukićević has posted more information about this library on his weblog, including code samples, performance testing results, and links to the code and documentation.

Enabling Firefox plugins on mobile devices
An experimental feature is available to Nokia N900 users that will turn on plugin support in Firefox on their device. Aakash Desai has posted instructions on his blog, along with a warning that this is currently intended for development and testing only.

Video demo of Firefox on Nokia’s N900
The Firefox team has released a quick video tour of our first version of Firefox on the Nokia N900. Check it out on Caitlin’s weblog.

Visualizing the Firefox Twitter community
Tara Shahian is working on a Twitter visualization that captures the unique and multi-dimensional nature of our community, our conversations, and the energy that flows through our tweets. “As you know, there are some incredibly complex and mesmerizing data visualizations out there… my goal is to create a similarly stunning Twitter visualization that is also built on open web technology.” Tara is looking for ideas and feedback for this project, so head over to her blog post and get inspired.

Mozilla sponsors GNOME accessibility
The GNOME Foundation announced a $10,000 grant from Mozilla to advance accessibility work. “The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser”. See the full press release for details.

“Bugzilla for Humans” video
Johnathan Nightingale has put together a fantastic video introduction to Bugzilla, the Mozilla project’s bug tracking system. “Bugzilla is the devil we know. It’s more complicated than we’d like, it’s pretty intimidating to new users, and adding features can be a slog. It’s also essential to the way we manage our project at scale, and enough of our project’s history and daily activity lives there that understanding it is not really optional. Certain edge cases aside, you can’t really be effective in the Mozilla project without at least a passing ability to wade through Bugzilla.”

GetFirebug.com redesign!
Following hard on the heels of the recent Firebug 1.5 launch, the Firebug team has redesigned the GetFirebug.com website with a whole new look and a brand new (and very fiery) icon. Neil Lee, part of Mozilla’s Webdev team, has posted more details. “Even with intense competition from tools integrated into other web browsers, Firebug is still the leading web development tool in use with nearly two million active daily users. Its web site needed to reflect Firebug’s capabilities more clearly. The primary goals were to make the site easier to use and to highlight Firebug’s many positive qualities.”

Firefox UX team update
Alexander Limi and the Firefox User Experience (UX) team has posted an update about recent progress and UX priorities for the upcoming Firefox release. “Last week, we narrowed down the priorities for the next release of Firefox — which may be a 3.7, may be a 4.0 — in this document: UX priorities.” Limi’s post goes on to outline the main priorities which include: a new theme, home tab and app tabs, notifications, extension manager redesign, and download manager and MIME type improvements. Other ongoing projects include resource packages, Mac installer improvements, and tab matching in Awesomebar.

Helping users avoid Firefox fraud sites
Harvey Anderson, part of Mozilla’s legal team, has written about what Mozilla has been doing — and will be looking to do in the future — in response to user reports about fraudulent sites that try to trick people into paying for Firefox or downloading malware branded as Firefox. “Long term, to really scale to meet this problem, we’re going to need to explore alternative approaches that utilize organizations like Stopbadware.org, so users can be notified in advance when they end up on these sites. In combination, we may also need more messaging to warn users about the subscription traps that exist. In the interim, however, we’ll continue to utilize the tools we have so fewer users are scammed and more get the really great product contributors have created.”

Software releases
* Thunderbird “Lanikai” Alpha 1
* Processing.js 0.4

Upcoming events
* Feb 19 – Testday: OS Testing with Mobile Firefox
* Mar 5 – Learn how to testscript your add-ons
* Mar 19 – Improve the quality of QMO
* Apr 2 – Litmus 2 development review

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning.

If you have any news, announcements, events, or software releases you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

Mark Surman: Why is there flash video on my blog?

msurman — 2010-02-09T11:45:02+00:00

A number of people have asked me: why do you still have Flash based videos on your blog?

The answer: my blog is hosted on wordpress.com, which strips out the video tag and also does not (yet) have it’s HTML5 video player. There is a trick to get around the video tag being stripped for self hosted WordPress, but not for wordpress.com.

The good news is that WordPress is working on their own HTML5 video player. Also, there is a bug filed to fix the issue of stripping out the video tag. Also good: wordpress.com automatically encodes everything you upload to Videopress into Ogg Theora. So, when HTML5 video does arrive, it will be Ogg ready.

As a happy wordpress.com customer (love the service) with a fair bit of traffic at commonspace.wordpress.com it’s worth it to me to wait around until the HTML5 video issue is fixed. In the meantime, I am posting all of my videos directly to wordpress.com using Videopress (and their Flash player) and also providing a link to the Ogg Theora version for people who would rather watch my videos natively in the browser.

PS. If anyone has a workaround that doesn’t involve leaving wordpress.com, would love to hear about it.

Filed under: mozilla

Ludovic Hirlimann: What is the best bleeding edge

Ludovic Hirlimann — 2010-02-09T09:12:44+00:00

At the moment If you want to run a bleeding edge version of Thunderbird, you need to choose between running 3.2x and 3.1x builds. In fact, it appears that most people willing to run bleeding edge are now running 3.2x builds.

Whilst our most dedicated testers are running 3.2x builds, the engineering team is working on bringing features and bug fixes to the 3.1x branch. There's a discrepancy here. This means that the issues that might exist in 3.1x have a greater chance to be discovered after releases rather than before. It's easy to fix that, instead of running 3.2x builds, we would like our bleeding edge user to use the 3.1x builds (you can find them at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/). By doing this simple switch you'll help to make the 3.1 series a great series.

Li Gong: China Construction Bank Supports Firefox

lgong — 2010-02-09T09:04:19+00:00

China Construction Bank (CCB), which is the second largest bank in the world (by market cap) and has the second largest online user base in China, yesterday announced that their personal banking site has solved the web compatibility problem and now supports Firefox. If you read Chinese, you can see CCB’s own announcement at http://www.ccb.com/cn/ccbtoday/20100208_1265610102.html and another report at http://bank.baidu.com/2010-02-08/122642441.html.

With such a move, CCB became the first major Chinese bank to support Firefox. This is very significant and positive news for Mozilla, because online banking has been the most visible area of web incompatibility problems in China. Until now, all major Chinese banks supported an IE-only solution with ActiveX-based technology, forcing users to use Microsoft Windows/IE and seriously lagging behind their international peers. CCB’s breakthrough represents just the beginning of this ground shift and we fully expect that other banks will follow suit in the coming months.

matthew zeier (mrz): Phoenix to San Jose, in 18ms

mrz — 2010-02-09T04:41:30+00:00

[root@ip-ns01 ~]# mtr www.mozilla.com --report
ip-ns01.phx.mozilla.org           Snt: 10    Loss%  Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
10.8.75.1                                     0.0%   0.4   0.4   0.4   0.4   0.0
v500.core1.phx.mozilla.net                    0.0%   1.1   1.3   1.0   3.1   0.6
xe-1-1-0.border1.phx.mozilla.net              0.0%   0.7   0.7   0.7   0.8   0.0
64.124.201.177                                0.0%   1.1   1.1   1.1   1.1   0.0
ge-0-3-0.mpr3.lax9.us.above.net               0.0%   9.4  13.0   9.4  44.3  11.0
xe-0-1-0.er1.lax9.us.above.net                0.0%   9.5  13.7   9.4  51.4  13.3
xe-0-1-0.mpr1.lax12.us.above.net              0.0%  94.3  21.3   9.3  94.3  27.8
xe2-3.cr01.lax01.mzima.net                    0.0%  10.0  14.0  10.0  23.0   4.6
xe1-0.cr01.lax02.mzima.net                    0.0%  16.9  15.7  10.2  22.8   4.8
te1-3.cr02.sjc02.us.mzima.net                 0.0%  18.1  22.5  18.1  30.0   4.9
ge1-mozilla.cust.sjc02.mzima.net              0.0%  18.4  18.6  18.4  19.1   0.2
v8.core2.sj.mozilla.com                       0.0%  18.4  19.7  18.2  30.8   3.9
mozcom.acelb.sj.mozilla.com                   0.0%  18.5  18.6  18.4  19.5   0.3

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Contributing to the Mozilla Foundation

Nick Nguyen (osunick) — 2010-02-09T01:08:14+00:00

The following is a guest post from Chelsea Novak, Marketing and Fundraising Manager at the Mozilla Foundation

A few add-on authors have asked about directing contributions to the Mozilla Foundation. You definitely can- if you’re an add-on author and
interested in directing your contributions to the Mozilla Foundation, it’s simple and easy to do. Just set the PayPal e-mail to accounting@mozilla.org and contributions to your add-on will be directed to the Mozilla Foundation PayPal account.

You can add the following text to your add-on description so that contributors know where their money is going:

“All contributions for this add-on go to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. Learn more at www.mozilla.org/foundation.”

If you have any questions about the Foundation or our activities, please contact us at donations@mozilla.org or ping us in the #foundation IRC channel.

ShareThis

Jono S. Xia: Two opinions on 3.6 tab behavior

jonoscript — 2010-02-08T23:11:20+00:00

My wife strongly dislikes the new Firefox 3.6 tab behavior (where tabs opened from links appear immediately to the right of their parent tab, instead of at the extreme right of the tab bar).

I do like the new behavior, because by keeping related tabs closer together, it reduces the amount of time I have to spend interacting with the tab-bar scroll buttons (my least favorite UI element in all of Firefox).

She dislikes it for consistency reasons: when you open a new blank tab, it still appears at the far right. So now tabs can appear in two different places, depending on where you opened them. It violates the principle of consistency, which is generally considered one of the most important UI principles. This inconsistency hasn’t really bothered me personally. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s because opening a tab through a link, and opening a new blank tab, feel like different actions to me. There’s a difference in what I’m thinking about. But I can certainly understand how it feels like a consistency violation to other people.

My wife also doesn’t like that there’s no way to change Firefox back to the old behavior without going through about:config. (If you’re interested: type “about:config” in the location bar and hit enter, then do a search for a preference named browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to True or False, as you like.)

Alexander Limi: Firefox UX Team update: Ramping up for the next Firefox release

Alexander Limi — 2010-02-08T22:55:00+00:00

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

As promised last week, the Firefox UX team will post weekly updates on what we’re up to. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, we’ll try to post more about what we’re about to do — which is usually a bit more interesting and higher-level, as well as gives you the chance to engage with us while we’re “in-process.” It will hopefully also give you a bit more insight into how we do our work. Our current focus areas can be found at UX priorities for the next Firefox release, as usual.

Previous week

Highlights from previous week’s activities:

Jinghua, Boriss & Limi performed the first usability study on URL bar behaviors & expectations performed in downtown Mountain View. Definitely a success, but needs a second session to have enough subjects for meaningful analysis. Limi will follow up on this, probably next week — since it’s not directly part of the upcoming focus areas.
Both Alex Faaborg & Stephen Horlander did some major bug filing and also updated and consolidated all the wiki pages & mock-ups. Full details.
Limi completed his Resource Packages update, now includes inline definitions of resources. The only thing missing is a defined behavior when two packages override the same path, as detailed by Laurence Rowe in bug #529208. We’re ready to get this started, look for a post in dev.apps.firefox soon for the next steps.

This week’s meeting

We had discussions around the following:

App tabs: Handling drag events when there’s no Home tab visible: Outcome: Surface drop zones when dragging event starts, in practice this means temporarily compressing the tab closest to the app tabs area to make room. When app tab is moved into this area, it changes shape to indicate that it’ll become an app tab.
App tabs: Opening a new window when app tabs are defined: Outcome: Similar to how BarTap works, don’t load the app tabs until they are activated, but keep them around. This should probably be added as a general tab capability, since we want to use this for session restore, optimizing memory use for long-lived tabs in marathon sessions, etc.
Doorhanger Notifications: Problems with notifications from the Firefox menu: Outcome: There won’t really be any notifications coming from the Firefox menu, major updates have a dedicated, modal window already (make sure it’s modal), everything else is site-specific, so will originate from the site area. Once we have a messaging channel (home tab), we can kill off the dedicated “you’ve been updated” page for minor updates — but keep for major versions to surface new features.
Discussion on Linux theme defaults: Outcome: No matter what defaults we choose to ship, we’ll need to be able to draw in the title bar. Faaborg will follow up on this, and make sure bugs are filed.
How to handle all the bugs in a given UX focus area: Outcome: Some discussion around using whiteboard tags to keep track, but has been abused in the past in attempts to associate unrelated bugs with a feature. Easier & more predictable to define a “meta-bug” for the feature (example) and then mark all the relevant bugs as blockers for the meta-bug. A good separation is to split it into “design bugs” & “implementation bugs.”; Goal: Have the meta-bugs with all bugs connected for our projects by the end of the week.

Individual goals & focus areas this week

Jennifer Boriss: Extension manager: more mockups to do and some use cases previously unhandled, start the category association Mechanical Turk study to help determine what (if?) categories will be useful. Starting a week-long sprint for find on page — Paul O’Shannessy is willing to take up the development gauntlet but wants an outline.
Alex Faaborg: First draft of the Firefox menu & full Weave UI, possibly reorganize list of dialogs to kill for the Doorhanger Notification project.
Stephen Horlander: File more bugs, coordinate with Dão/Gavin on resourcing, designs for download panel.
Alexander Limi: Publish Download Manager Improvements article to site — guest starring Mr. Stephen Horlander. Get Resource Packages resourced (hah!) & post to dev.app.firefox about it. Get the results of the Test Pilot study on menu item & keyboard shortcut frequencies, if possible. File meta-bugs to keep track of all remaining projects.

This week’s activities design sessions

The current week is mostly about getting a lot of administrative stuff in shape in addition to the design work we do individually, so there’s only one UX-related session reserved this week:

Wednesday: Kept open for a general design session, should we need one. Nothing scheduled yet.

Let us know what you think of this new format. Anything missing? Anything that you think is redundant? Send an email to limi@mozilla.com with your feedback.

Chelsea Novak: Contributing to the Mozilla Foundation via AMO

Chelsea Novak — 2010-02-08T22:28:31+00:00

A few add-on authors have asked about directing contributions for add-ons to the Mozilla Foundation. You definitely can! If you’re an add-on author and interested in directing your contributions to the Mozilla Foundation, it’s simple and easy to do. Just set the PayPal e-mail to accountingATmozilla.org and contributions to your add-on will be directed to the Mozilla Foundation PayPal account.

You can add the following text to your add-on description so that contributors know where their money is going:

“All contributions for this add-on go to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. Learn more at www.mozilla.org/foundation.”

If you have any questions about the Foundation or our activities, please contact us at donationsATmozilla.org or ping us in the #foundation IRC channel. Thanks to Nick and Shawn for this idea!

hacks.mozilla.org: About:hacks newsletter – issue 2

Alix Franquet — 2010-02-08T22:02:54+00:00

Last week we sent out the second issue of about:hacks, Mozilla’s newsletter for web developers.

Here are highlights from the topics covered in this new issue:

Firefox 3.6 released: what’s new, how to give feedback
Firefox for the Nokia N900 with Weave Sync released
Developer Tools: Firebug 1.5
Demos: an HTML5 image editor and uploader, a WebGL demo
Behind the Scenes: Firefox release timeline, experimenting with sound and light
New on MDC: Firefox.next, WebGL docs
Hacks blog redesign

If you do not subscribe to about:hacks, you will find the second issue in the archives. If you enjoy the content, consider subscribing to make sure you receive the third issue, coming in March.

Finally, we’d love to get your feedback on the newsletter: what do you like, what would you change, what topics would you like us to cover. Please take a minute to fill out the feedback form.

Robert Kaiser: Weekly Status Report, W05/2010

KaiRo — 2010-02-08T21:40:04+00:00

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2010 (February 1 - 7, 2010):

Releases:
I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.3 builds, which are now available on FTP as well as the beta update channel for testing by our community, offering well over 100 bug fixes. If things go well, we should be able to release this update in sync with Firefox 3.5.8 on February 16th.
The 2.0.x nightlies now carry a 2.0.4pre version number, but we have no firm schedule for the following updates yet (will coordinate with Firefox, possibly also Thunderbird drivers on that).
Work on 2.0.3 also included putting up a first version of the release notes.
I also tried to let the release process generate 64bit builds for Linux this time, those are fully experimental and will only appear as "contributed" builds though, they have no official status at all.
Build Infrastructure:
The move of our core buildbot master code to a shared location could be completed, Thunderbird will look into using the same code in the future and we closely mirror the Firefox setup now, making it easier for people patching their side to fix ours as well (and the other way round).
Revision reporting on packaged tests is now both generic and respecting applications that are built from different repositories as the platform (like SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).
Additionally, I continued working with Mozilla teams to get SeaMonkey data up on the graph server, which needed a firewall rule and a correction on the staging server's database, but testing looks good now and we should be able to go live on the real server soon.
Download Progress Windows:
I created screen shots of some additional proposals for improving the progress windows, requested ui-review on them to see which one wins out with our "UI tsar", and finally implemented the winning proposal in a patch, which should be very close to positive review by now.
Build System, Packaging:
After a few runs on the Mozilla Messaging try server, I could finalize the patch for merging our package manifests and also make Mac use a manifest, get reviews and check it in.
Another patch I worked on is about making branding usage fit Mozilla standards more closely, which should also ease the life of people wanting to ship suite versions with a different branding than the official "SeaMonkey" trademark designs.
Some discussions about build system variables reminded me that I should re-test and attach the papering-over patch for mailnews Qt port bustage which I've had locally for quite some time now.
SeaMonkey L10n:
Starting with SeaMonkey 2.0.3, the language packs are marked compatible with all 2.0.* versions.
Also with this release, Japanese is joining the collection of officially available localizations.
This was also the first time I played with and used the new L10n sign-off dashboard for a release - further opt-ins / sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.0.x will all run through this tool now. See the m.d.l10n thread for more details on using this tool.
Various Discussions:
2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, new machines, FOSDEM, places history changes, module ownership, mozilla.org planning and "Mozilla" vs. "Firefox" websites, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, langpacks and switching, etc.

I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.

Mozilla Labs: Bespin at the Mountain View JavaScript Meetup

2010-02-08T21:31:24+00:00

Patrick, Joe and I will be talking about/demoing Bespin at the Mountain View JavaScript meetup, this week on Wednesday at 7pm. If you’re in the Bay Area, we hope to get a chance to meet you there!

Chris Cooper: Tackling the Release Engineering:Future queue

Coop — 2010-02-08T21:22:27+00:00

The Release Engineering:Future bugzilla component alternately inspires feelings of sadness, loathing, and contempt…and that’s just within the RelEng team!

I’m certain most developers first response to having their bug moved to the Future queue is, “Oh, look, my bug has fallen down a well.” Historically speaking, that may not be far from the truth.

What goes in Future?

Why does the Future component make people get punchy? For a long time, the Future component has lacked a decent description, so developers don’t know what it means when their bugs are moved there. Many have started hording their gigawatts in anticipation.

Bugzilla currently has the following small description of the Release Engineering:Future component:

“For longer term projects that have been agreed should be done, but have no immediate plans to so. These are not be part of the regular recurring triage. Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter also go here.”

Despite the grammatical errors, this description is mostly accurate, but what does it actually mean:

Triaged bugs with no immediate owners go here.
Sadly, most enhancement bugs end up here unless they will make the core release process better, more streamlined, etc. quickly.
Bugs that are blocked on longer term projects in other groups go here until there is something for RelEng to do.
Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter (or later) also go here. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

Remember: this description is for the Future component ONLY. The RelEng team continues to pick up and work on bugs that need to get done on a daily basis.

I’m thinking about how to improve this description, and will get the description updated in Bugzilla once I have achieved some rough consensus. In the meantime, I’ve posted this description of the Future component in the wiki as an ongoing reference.

The (Ever-Increasing) Numbers

At the time of writing, the Release Engineering:Future component has 343 bugs in it. This number has grown steadily over the past year despite having more release engineers on staff, and having made a great many improvements to our release automation and our continuous integration infrastructure.

Our turnaround time for bugs in the Future component is also not stellar. At our urging, the Mozilla Metrics team recently started setting up a dashboard to give us various statistics on our Bugzilla usage. Bugs don’t get fixed in the Future queue, so it’s hard to make truly accurate assessments here, but there are a lot of aging bugs in there. According to the numbers, fully 50% of the bugs in the Future component are older than 1 month and more than 25% are older than 6 months. How this compares to other teams or areas, I can’t say, but it certainly makes me empathize with developers who feel their Future-ed bugs have gone walkabout.

If it makes you feel better in a sadistic way, the majority of bugs filed by RelEng team members go directly into the Future queue. We’re not overly happy about it either.

I have a way? Is that better than a plan?

Things are getting done, though. For example, over the past month, the number of non-Future, release engineering bugs that are actively being worked on has gone from a low water mark of 130 up to over 200 today. For comparison, over the same period, the total number of bugs in the Future queue has slowly crept up from a low of 302 to 323. Mozilla is growing along so many axes that sometimes it feels like keeping the increase in the number of Future bugs to a linear relationship rather than exponential one is an accomplishment in itself.

So how do we stop the increase and start wrestling the Future component back under control?

The first step is triage. Starting this Thursday, February 11th, the RelEng team is going to have bi-weekly triage meetings to specifically prune down the Future queue.

As part of the triage, we’re going to be touching every bug and updating the whiteboard field with searchable tags. Our goal here is to make it easy to find classes of bugs in the Future queue so that duplicates and overlap can be easily eliminated, and fixes can be batched as much as possible.

We’ll be keeping a list of the tags we’re using in the wiki in case you want to follow along.

There are some classes of bugs that we won’t be able to eliminate (e.g. future goals), but hopefully within a few months, we’ll have the Future queue back under control.

It won’t be a quick fix, but it’s one we’re committed to.

Jeff Walden: Brief talk on ES5 and Mozilla support for it

Jeff — 2010-02-08T20:32:42+00:00

I gave a three-minute not-actually-lightning-talk-but-let’s-call-it-that-anyway on ECMA-262 5th edition, what’s in it, and the state of Mozilla’s support for it at the Mozilla weekly meeting this week. It’s probably old hat if you’ve been following the standard closely, but if you haven’t it gives a short and sweet overview of what’s new; there’s a three-minute video of the actual talk on the meeting page (start at around 7:00 into the complete video). If you’re strapped for time, view the slides and turn off stylesheets (View > Page Style > No Style in Firefox) to see notes on what roughly accompanied each slide.

Carsten Book: Back from FOSDEM 2010 !

cbook — 2010-02-08T19:37:13+00:00

Hi,

during the Weekend i was in Brussels, Belgium and visited the FOSDEM 2010 !

I was a great experience and a very great conference and great to meet a lot of coworkers and friends from all across Europe and the rest of the world !

Also of course Mozilla had a booth at FOSDEM !

Mozilla @ FOSDEM 2010

We got a lot of visitors and was awesome to talk with the Community and have to say the Mozilla Community just rocks !

Also my talk about the Open Source Meetups in Germany, togehter with Florian, worked great and you can find the slides here !

A big thanks to everyone who made this Weekend possible, especially to William Quiviger!

William always at work

He worked basically around the clock on the weekend to make our Booth, Hotels, the Saturday Event etc possible – William just rocks !

- Tomcat

John O'Duinn: Welcome to Rail Aliiev

John — 2010-02-08T19:31:35+00:00

A quick introduction.

Rail has joined Release Engineering, and will be based in Moscow.

Some of you may already know him from his automation work in the Turkish and Russian locales for various Mozilla projects including Firefox. Or maybe you know him from his work in openoffice.org, or debian, or pootle. Anyway, he’s been using his skills in automation to make each of those better, so we’re delighted to have another like-minded automation person joining RelEng.

On irc you’ll find him as “Rail”, which is pronounced “ray-eel”.

(Oh, for the curious - he’ll be based in Moscow, as Toronto is “not cold enough” for him right now!)

Laura Mesa: A/B Testing: First Run Page

Laura — 2010-02-08T19:18:43+00:00

One of my new responsibilities as I work with John Slater and the Creative Marketing team on Mozilla.com is to test, improve and optimize our web pages. This joint project with Blake Cutler and the Metrics team is one of many in the A/B testing pipeline.

One of the first pages we're working on is the First Run page.

The First Run page is a huge page for us for two reasons:

1) It's our first impression.
The First Run page is the first page that loads immediately after Firefox is launched for the first time. Everyone who downloads Firefox sees this page, and it's our first opportunity to visually (and verbally) introduce ourselves to a new user.

2) It's one of our only touch points.
We have very few ways to get in touch with our users. The First Run page is the first time we can make contact with a Firefox user to share information, answer questions and differentiate ourselves from other browsers outside from the normal product interactions.

We are currently testing three different designs inspired by some of the most popular sites on the Web:

Design A:

This is the "Task" oriented design, with expandable tabs that open to show more content. This page was inspired by Southwest Airlines.

Design B:

This is the "Tab" oriented design, allowing users to click on tabs to see relevant information. This page was inspired by Mint.com.

Design C:

This is the "Process" oriented page, where users can go through steps to "get started". This page was inspired by the Skype and Digg sign-up processes.

These are just three of the different rough layout concepts that The Royal Order came up with during the brainstorm process to try and improve engagement*. It will take another month or so to finish the initial testing, but there will still be plenty to do! The winning design will need to jump through many more hoops as we test variations of the design to find the best or most "optimized" page before it will be implemented on Mozilla.com.

Big Thanks Blake Cutler and the Metrics team, Steven Garrity, Stephen Donner and the WebQA team, The Royal Order for all their help on this project.

Thoughts? What do you think should go on the First Run page?

[*Improved engagement for this particular page means more clicks on our CTAs (Personas and Add-ons), longer times spent on the page, and lower bounce rates. ]

Mozilla Labs: Mozilla Jetpack Design Challenge invites 10 teams to Design Camp

2010-02-08T18:54:56+00:00

For the past two months participants in Mozilla’s Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge have worked on Jetpack prototypes to turn the open web into a rich social learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online. Today 10 teams were selected to participate in a hands-on Design Camp. The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge is sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The selected Jetpacks support a wide range of learning activities. They help users learn foreign languages, support the development of sophisticated web-skills or turn the web into a quiz engine. A list of finalists (and all Jetpack prototypes) can be found on the Mozilla Wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Design Camp in March will give the selected teams an opportunity to complete their prototypes with support from some of the world’s foremost Jetpack experts. The event is co-organized by Aspiration. An overall winner of the Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge will be selected during the camp and announced at the Mozilla SXSW event.(*)

The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge uses an innovative combination of competition, training, and workshop to build skills in web development and drive innovation for learning on the open web. Online seminars provided participants with the necessary background on extension development and Jetpack technology. An active mailing list was used by participants to discuss and solve challenge they faced. All seminars and discussion are openly available for anyone to review and help them build their own Jetpacks.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world. Through the Mozilla Education initiative we work with computer science, design and business schools around the world to create learning opportunities for a new generation of Mozilla community members and help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning. By doing this we hope to move closer to Mozilla’s broader goal of making openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. More information is available at education.mozilla.org.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

(*) The Design Challenge is not connected to or affiliated with SXSW in any way.

QMO: Results of the AMO Testday

ashughes — 2010-02-08T16:28:11+00:00

This past Friday, February 5th, WebDevQA held a testday for the new AMO. Overall, the test day was very successful. We had 27 people in the #testday channel at the testday's peak. Participants ranged from eager to learn first time community members to veteran community members. Everyones testing efforts resulted in 7 bugs and enhancement suggestions being filed against AMO. I'd like to thank everyone who came out to the test day and stephend and krupa for helping guide testers and answering questions. If you want more details about the testday, see the folowing links:

Testday Details
Testday Detailed Results

Mozilla Web Development: GetFirebug.com redesign launched!

nlee — 2010-02-08T16:03:05+00:00

If you’ve happened across the GetFirebug.com web site recently, you’ll notice everything has a rather pleasant freshly painted smell. After a much-too-long delay, we’ve finally updated the design and layout for the official Firebug web site, and introduced a lovely new icon by our resident Iconmaster General Sean Martell.

Even with intense competition from tools integrated into other web browsers, Firebug is arguably still the leading web development tool in use, with nearly two million active daily users. Its web site needed to reflect Firebug’s capabilities more clearly. With that in mind, the primary goals with this redesign were to make the official Firebug web site easier to use, more pleasant to look at, and give Firebug more of a traditional software-style layout to highlight its many positive qualities.

GetFirebug.com: Before

GetFirebug.com: After

It’s a fairly straightforward design, so there’s not a lot of interesting production notes to highlight, but here’s some specifics on what went into this redesign:

The layout is roughly based on the 960 grid system. The original hope was to do the site in a fully fluid layout, but time constrains intervened.
Headers and pull text are in the gorgeous (and open source!) Tittillium, thanks to @font-face. The body text was originally set in Droid, but due to a legibility issue on Windows machines with text-smoothing disabled, it was switched to the more common Trebuchet MS.
The pages are build using the HTML5 doctype, with JQuery and the Fancybox plugin powering the modal pop-ups.
The screencast on the homepage uses the Video for Everybody system to embed the OGG video, with MP4 and Flash fallback for other user agents.
The homepage blog feed pulls in from the Firebug weblog RSS feed using SimplePie.
For this iteration, we wanted to switch the site over to a simple content management system, and ended up settling on Perch. It has its shortcomings, but it was straightforward enough and easy enough for me (mostly a designer/UX guy) to implement.
Sean passed along a few images that inspired the sparkly new icon. Originally, we tossed around the idea of doing something cartoony and heroic, like this lil’ dude, but ultimately decided to go with a more, well, buggier bug.
Photographic inspiration: Bug 1 • Bug 2 • Bug 3 • Bugs!

It’s been a long time coming, and we hope you like GetFirebug.com’s new set of clothes. The content is currently being updated and will roll out as it is completed, but in the meantime, please kick the tires and let us know what you think.

Thunderbird Localization: The death of opt-in threads is imminent

Simon — 2010-02-08T13:32:07+00:00

Good news, for localizers. With the new release of the l10n dashboard, co-developed by Pike (Axel Hecht) and Gandalf (Zbigniew Braniecki) we're killing off the opt-in threads for localizers.

Every localizer should take a close look at all the functionality that the new dashboard exposes. There is also a 5-minute screencast, that hopefully guides you through some of the new features.

We'll start to use this new functionality once Thunderbird 3.0.2 is out of the door. So Thunderbird 3.0.3 and onwards as well as Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 will be our starting points.

Calendar: [February 08, 2010] Lightning Status Update

2010-02-08T10:14:12+00:00

Now that we're moving full-steam towards the Lightning 1.0 beta2 release, it's also time to make clean slate and show you in terms of fixed bugs, what has happened since the last status update back in late November 2009.

Overall we have fixed an impressive 55 bugs since then, keeping in mind the whole release process hassle, the holidays and Philipp's exam schedule. Here's the complete list of fixed bugs:

Bug 313822: Make Lightning work on SeaMonkey
Bug 357332: Holidays in Chile for 2010
Bug 364487: Argentina Holidays 2008-2009
Bug 376139: Sri Lanka Holiday 2010
Bug 397180: South African Holidays 2010
Bug 432440: Israel Holidays 2010
Bug 472466: No small icons in edit event/task dialog available
Bug 489882: Building with "NECKO_DISK_CACHE=" fails with unresolved external symbol
Bug 500399: Event Dialog: Help Menu is uselesss and could be removed
Bug 509100: Holiday file for Namibia
Bug 511193: [Mozmill] Recursion tests
Bug 518610: Tasks no longer work in TB3/Lightning with Kerio Mailserver
Bug 524574: Polish holiday 2009-2020
Bug 528676: e-mail list not updated when using next/prev button in New Calendar wizard
Bug 529810: Views borked using wcap: dayHeaderBox.mItemBoxes is null
Bug 529853: Creation of local calendar fails (DB Error no such column: recurrence_id_tz)
Bug 530096: Tracking bug for Sunbird/Lightning 1.0b1 release
Bug 530097: Create release notes for Lightning/Sunbird 1.0b1
Bug 530100: Bump version numbers for 1.0b1 release
Bug 530165: [Mozmill] Timezone test
Bug 530842: Upgrade Sunbird/Lightning 0.9 to 1.0pre fails
Bug 531028: Linux: Delete Task button in Task view is missing its icon
Bug 531418: Allow building lightning with all locales at once
Bug 531685: Build problems on linux and win32 due to insufficient disk space
Bug 531699: Spanish Holidays 2007-2010
Bug 532656: Fix Sunbird official branding on Mac.
Bug 533070: Sunbird nightly builds fail with |No rule to make target
Bug 533089: Malta Calendar 2010
Bug 533259: Sunbird website does not validate to its doctype
Bug 533324: Finnish Holidays 2010
Bug 533329: [Mozmill] Verify that Calendar is working properly with UTF-8 characters
Bug 533458: Fix mac and windows trunk builds
Bug 533466: calendar-multiget REPORT should not specify the calendar collection URL
Bug 533498: Build config changes for Cocoa Printing
Bug 533713: gdata-provider.xpi should support SeaMonkey 2
Bug 533747: Mention required version of Thunderbird in system requirements of Lightning
Bug 533943: CalDav access to my calendar doesn't work on RC2, lightning 1.0, using CGP
Bug 534969: Add sq to calendar/locales/all-locales
Bug 535379: Create more l10n.ini files to builds against 1.9.1 and central
Bug 535574: [Mozmill] Writing to a local ICS calendar
Bug 535812: [Mozmill] Event with no changes shouldn't prompt to save
Bug 536185: Update calendar/ copyright dates to 2010
Bug 536189: Wrong Lightning version in install.rdf
Bug 536354: getItem doesn't set calendar for items
Bug 536525: Turkey holidays for 2010
Bug 537066: Scrape dead bits out of credits.xhtml
Bug 537470: Russian Holidays 2010 and onward
Bug 537628: Building localized Sunbird l10n nightly builds fail since 02-Dec-2009
Bug 537885: Add Arabic (ar) to Calendar builds
Bug 538170: Mac trunk builds failing running merge-installrdf.py
Bug 538439: static Sunbird builds from comm-central/mozilla-central fail
Bug 538576: Singapore Public Holiday 2010
Bug 539681: Puerto Rico Holidays
Bug 539943: Set up builders for Lightning 1.0b2pre for Thunderbird 3.1
Bug 543359: Adjust Lightning version and required Thunderbird version

As always, our thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that have made this possible.

Smokey Ardisson: Standing on the shoulders of Kiwis

Smokey — 2010-02-08T06:57:57+00:00

It has been some time since the last regular Camino development status update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work—it just means that I’ve been pretty busy with all sorts of things, and the status updates have been fairly low on my to-do list.

As I said, though, we’ve been working on all sorts of things so far this year. Dan Weber has been hard at work on patches for some of the most visible issues with the new autocomplete experience, and I landed the fix for the magically-reappearing autocomplete window tonight. Dan is also still working on improving the speed of autocomplete for large histories, though that patch is not yet ready. Chris Lawson has also been working on various and sundry other bugs, including changes to the Flashblock exceptions list so that pasting URLs into the field will work as users expect. Philippe Wittenbergh is hard at work polishing some of our toolbar icons.

Christopher Henderson has been working on a patch that moves our history off of Mork, which is both the sane thing to do and critical for moving forward to the new Mork-less world. As usual, I have been chasing down bugs here and there and wrangling patches to get ready for the upcoming 2.0.2 and 1.6.11 releases. We’ve also seen Alex Jones, who has been working off-and-on on supporting Mobile Me sync, again recently, though it sounds like Sync Services wants to do things in a manner that is not easily compatible with Camino’s bookmarks implementation. All in all, we’ve been fairly productive since the new year began.

Which brings us back to the title of this post and to this weekend’s developments. Late Saturday afternoon, I got a debug version of Camino to build, launch, and run using Gecko 1.9.1, and early Sunday evening I was able to make a static (i.e., distributable) build do the same thing. (Even better, Christopher Henderson was able to replicate my success.) This feat would not have been possible without all the hard work that Christopher put in for the aforementioned history migration, as well as a good bit of debugging and patching he did this weekend as we hit some unexpected code-change-related build failures. After applying those patches, I mostly deleted and added things to the project and waited for the next build failure. At the end of the day, though, Camino launches and runs, plays <audio> and <video> (with Ogg), and displays pages with @font-face (with raw TrueType fonts).

This doesn’t mean that we can turn around and release a version of Camino based on Gecko 1.9.1 (and there’s a very strong possibility we may not); for starters, there are a number of known regressions (including the loss of Find-As-You-Type), as well as possibly hundreds of other serious problems we haven’t discovered in our limited test browsing. Beyond that, the “build system” is not yet a system at all; it involves pulling mozilla-1.9.1 from hg, checking out Camino from cvs into mozilla/camino, and applying a large patch. But if you’re brave or crazy, you can try this at home now (and for those less brave or more sane, there’s an Intel-only build here that you can use to help us find other broken things. N.B. You should treat this build as highly experimental. It might eat all of the cheese in your house. It will eat your profile, so make a backup copy first).

We also know (thanks to earlier attempts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build mozilla-central) that there are more serious code breakages in newer versions of Gecko, so this is only the beginning. In between other things the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a new repository and fleshing out issues and solutions for the build system. There’s a long road ahead, and Camino 2.1 might be ready before we’ve gotten to the end of the road; we’ll have to see. However, as Christoper said on Saturday night, “it’s been a great day in Camino Land.”

Smokey Ardisson: And the winner is…

Smokey — 2010-02-08T06:32:11+00:00

FCKEditor!

This news is a bit old now (since it appeared briefly on Planet Mozilla the other day half-buried in a PR round-up, and since reader James reported it in a comment on January 21), but FCKEditor is the winner of the 2010 edition of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest.

If you use FCKEditor on a site and it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.6 or nightly builds of any Gecko browser built since January 1, you’re probably seeing the bug that won FCKEditor this year’s prize with a stunning upset of two-time defending champion Yahoo!

My gut feeling is that this new type of contest winner is much worse than the old “major site is broken” type, since there is no single point of contact for the fix (everyone who uses the affected versions of FCKEditor will have to patch or upgrade their install), since unpatched instances of FCKEditor could break functionality on websites far and wide for years to come, and since in some ways the distributed nature of the problem means there is less visibility than when a major website suddenly ceases to work correctly.

I think this also highlights the importance of web “library” or “component” authors doing things correctly from the beginning—not browser sniffing at all, but instead testing for features—because their code will be used widely and, as I understand it, they have little control over getting consumers to update when there are fixes for broken things like this.

If you’re going to write something for wider consumption, or that you think may one day be useful to large audiences, please take the time to get things right from the beginning, especially if your code doesn’t have a dead-simple upgrade experience. Your users, and their users, and even other unrelated software vendors, will thank you for it later.

(And remember: only you can prevent broken browser sniffing! )

Stephen Horlander: Theme Bugs Filed, Wiki Updated

Stephen — 2010-02-08T05:59:10+00:00

Theme Bugs Filed This Week

Note: I haven’t filed any Linux bugs yet and the Wiki page is out-of-date. Still working out some details there and should have that resolved this week.

This week I filed the first round of Bugs for implementing the new theme:

#544815 – Allow for placing Tabs over the Navigation Bar with option for Tabs under the Navigation Bar
#544816 – Attach combined Stop/Go/Refresh button to the Location Bar
#544817 – Create Bookmarks Widget with placement dependent on Bookmarks Bar status
#544818 – Progress “Line” indicator for background loading tabs
#544819 – Create a basic Home Tab linking to the current Home Page
#544823 – [Meta] Theme Visual Refresh

#544820 – [Windows] Theme Visual Refresh
#544821 – [OS X] Theme Visual Refresh

This is a pretty exciting step for me after having worked on the design for so many months.

Wiki Updates

I also spent some time getting all the mockups and thought processes on the Wiki current:

Robert Kaiser: Who Dat Sey Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints!

KaiRo — 2010-02-08T04:05:41+00:00

I almost can't believe it - even though I really do believe in the New Orleans Saints.

When they Saints go marching in.... Too bad I can' beam over and be on Bourbon Street this night. It surely is being flooded - by cheers this time, by partying, by celebration. The "fleur de lis" made it to Football heaven!

This is a victory not only for an astonishing team, it is a victory for the whole city and people people who cherish it, restore it and rebuild it by investing their hearts in it. I've been there, and I felt what a great city it is. And I'll come back, that's a promise.

In the end, Peyton - that son of New Orleans area who has grown to be one of the greatest quarterbacks up there in Indy - could not outcoach and outcall Mr. Payton. The coach on the field needed to give in to the team he usually cheers for, a team with many great people - Payton, Bush, Porter, Vilma, and of course their own quarterback - they call him the Brees...

I'm not sure I really have fully realized that "my" Saints have actually done it and WON the Super Bowl in their first attempt ever to do so.

Who Dat!

Alex Vincent: Asynchronous events and Mochitesting

WeirdAl — 2010-02-07T23:34:50+00:00

Recently, I found that I needed my chrome Mochitest to wait for a XBL binding to apply, before continuing the test. For the end-user, waiting is hardly an issue - by the time they see the new user interface, all the bindings have applied. Mochitest (and most other automated test harnesses) runs straight through, and brakes for nobody. In some cases you can pull some trickery with nsIThreadManager, convincing Firefox to wait... but that's hardly reliable.

So I came up with a three-part solution.

Force my XBL bindings to fire DOM events when the constructor executes.
Break up my test functions into (slightly) smaller functions, each of which handles a part of the overall test. Two parts cover the main functional testing, while a third part is specific to the XBL binding.
Implement a generic testing harness for Mochitest which can manage the flow from one function to another.

This new test harness, which I call PendingEventsTest, adds a layer of complexity on top of SimpleTest. Each test function is added via PendingEventsTest.addTest(), and you can pause for a DOM event with PendingEventsTest.addEventLock(). The whole test sequence can abort with an error by calling PendingEventsTest.abortFail(). You can advance to the next test function in the sequence with PendingEventsTest.asyncRun() or PendingEventsTest.run().

There's more complexity to it than that, of course. To move data from one test function to another, I also added "payload" support, for storing a generic object. Also, this is written for chrome Mochitests - it will likely fail in content Mochitests. Still, this new test harness helped me finish support in Verbosio for my equivalent of the <xbl:children/> element in markup templates.

Lastly, it (and the logging service I wrote a few weeks ago) is licensed under MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1, so anyone who wants to borrow this for Mozilla code is welcome to. Cheers!

John O'Duinn: Clifford Stoll: TEDtalk and The Cuckoo’s Egg

John — 2010-02-07T23:11:26+00:00

I recently found this clip of Clifford Stoll at TEDTalk.

I’d never seen him live, so had no idea what it would be like. His continuously exploring curious mind was refreshing to me, and served as a wake up call to me to not get stuck in my ways. Further, the way he brought practical everyday logic to early education was something I found personally moving. His approach of explaining complicated things to kids when they’re curious and eager to learn, and before they start to believe “its supposed to be hard”, really resonated with me. The experiment he put together for his 8th grade class to calculate the speed of sound was straightfoward, understandable and quick. His attitude reminded me of the people, both in and out of school, who had the most influence during my education, and I found myself thanking them yet again for their inspiration. His closing quote from the bell inscription really resonated with me (no pun intended).

Watching this inspired me to dust off my old 2nd edition copy of his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, and reread that.

Its now of course an old story from the late ’80s about Clifford, when he was a university undergrad student in Berkeley tracking down a bug in some auditing software. He eventually discovers that the auditing errors are because of unauthorized breaches in the university computers - being used as a conduit to attack classified military research computers. As he untangles the giant ball of interwoven strands of the problem, he just wrote everything down like it was a personal journal, interweaving details of home cooked meals with his new girlfriend, emails and hone calls with sysadmins at the targetted systems, invented hacks to detect when intruders returned to their computer systems, even his own self-questioning of his hippie anti-establishment roots as he cycled across campus to meet with the NSA suits who took interest once evidence of KGB involvement started to emerge.

I found it a fascinating readable story, just like as if a close friend was telling me about some strange thing that happened that day at work… made only slightly more surreal when you keep in mind that its all true.

Blair McBride: Status update

Blair McBride — 2010-02-07T22:27:09+00:00

Extension Manager UI Redesign

Status

Planned for eventual mozilla-central landing – want to get initial parts landed before betas
Major AMO integration will probably be done as followups
Have been bringing UI up to speed with changes in mockups
Started looking at install/updates before realizing it’s not in the API yet

Loose ends

Boriss was away for the latest meeting, need to catch up
Waiting on project branch to be setup (bug 542910)

Next steps

UX discussions! UX discussions! UX discussions!
Implement helper widgets
Install/uninstall/update/enable/disable
Search
Help with API development

Target for next week

Catch up with Boriss
Implement various widgets – download progress, ratings, etc
Start implementing search (only local, until the API supports AMO searching)

Tab matches in Awesomebar

Status

Refactored UI for better toolkit/browser separation
Renamed “open tab” concept to the more generic “open page”
Must remember that adding a constant doesn’t mean the interface needs a change of UUID
Waiting on next review, then SR

Loose ends

None

Next steps

Land
Tackle followup bugs

Target for next week

Landed on mozilla-central

Reflections

I need to get better at estimating time required for larger projects
I’m having far too much fun for this to be considered “work”

Planet Mozilla Interns: Brian Krausz: Building a C++ XPCOM Component in Windows

Brian — 2010-02-07T20:47:58+00:00

I’ve been teaching myself to write Firefox extensions for the last few weeks, and became interested in XPCOM components. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good (and recent) summary of them, and had to spend 3 or 4 days cobbling together various tutorials, so I figured it’s time to write one.

What is XPCOM?

XPCOM is a language-agnostic communication platform used in Mozilla products (and some other random pieces of software) to allow code (specifically extensions) to be written in a wide variety of languages.

Why would I want to use XPCOM?

There are two ways to “use” XPCOM. First, you can call functions through XPCOM. For example, the Firefox bookmarks service uses an XPCOM interface. So in order to interact with this service from Javascript you would do something like:

var bmarks = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/bookmarks-service;1"].getService();
bmarks.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIBookmarksService);
bmarks.addBookmarkImmediately("http://www.mozilla.org","Mozilla",0,null);

There are plenty of tutorials on doing this as it is the more common use for XPCOM, so I won’t go into any detail on it here.

The second way is to write an XPCOM service. That is what this tutorial covers. Sometimes you need extra functionality, speed, or just want to tie into some library that requires a different language. Most commonly this is C++, but there is also JavaXPCOM and PyXPCOM (and probably a few others). I’ll be talking about C++, since it’s what I needed for my project.

Warnings

Before you trudge through this: you most likely are in the wrong place. Firefox extensions are usually all Javascript. If you can use JS to do what you want, stop now. There is no need to go through the complexity of an XPCOM component when you can just use JS. Go read a tutorial about writing extensions and get to work.
There is something called ctypes coming to FF 3.7 that may make doing this a lot easier. I haven’t touched this at all, but it may be worth considering if you can wait for the functionality and only need to tie into a particular DLL for some functionality. Long story short, XPCOM may become the more difficult way to call C++ functions from FF extensions.

My Setup

Windows 7
Visual C++ Express 2008 (free from Microsoft’s website)
Firefox 3.6 (Gecko 1.9.2)
A UUID or GUID generator. This is a unique (read: random) ID that identifies your app to the world. Windows and Linux have tools to generate this (guidgen & uuidgen, respectively), or you can find various online generators (Mozilla links to several). I recommend this one since it gives you the C++ encoded form too, which you will need. You need two different UUIDs: one for your interface and one for your component.
Ability to read and understand C++

Sample Code

If you don’t want to go through the tutorial and just want everything to work, then download this sample code. Just follow step #1 of the tutorial, then make sure your Gecko SDK directory is set right in the build step, and you can breeze on by most of this article.

The Tutorial

This is mostly paraphrased from Alex Sirota’s great tutorial, but it hasn’t been updated since 2005 and is a bit outdated. This new one should work out of the box for FF 3.6.

This tutorial will create a component called MyComponent with one function: Add, which will take 2 numbers and, surprisingly, return the sum.

Download the Gecko SDK for your version of Firefox. I used 1.9.2 for FF 3.6.
Create an idl file - IMyComponent.idl, with the following (replacing ***IUID*** with your interface UUID):
```
#include "nsISupports.idl"

[scriptable, uuid(***IUID***)]
interface IMyComponent : nsISupports
{
  long Add(in long a, in long b);
};
```
This file is a language-agnostic interface definition which you can read more about here.
Generate the interface header and typelib files out of the interface definition file. Assuming you extracted the Gecko SDK to C:\xulrunner-sdk\, run the following commands (from the directory you saved IMyComponent.idl to):
```
C:\xulrunner-sdk\sdk\bin\xpidl.exe -m header -I C:\xulrunner-sdk\idl .\IMyComponent.idl
C:\xulrunner-sdk\sdk\bin\xpidl.exe -m typelib -I C:\xulrunner-sdk\idl .\IMyComponent.idl
```
These will create IMyComponent.h and IMyComponent.xpt, respectively.
IMyComponent.h has two snippits of code that you can use for the next two files. Everything between /* Header file */ and /* Implementation file */ can be used for MyComponent.h:
1. Start by inserting double inclusion protection code and the right include:
```
#ifndef _MY_COMPONENT_H_
#define _MY_COMPONENT_H_

#include "IMyComponent.h"
```
2. Add the following lines, which define your component name, contract ID, and CUID (where ***CUID*** is the C++-style component UUID, of the form { 0×12345678, 0×9abc, 0xdef0, { 0×12, 0×34, 0×56, 0×78, 0×9a, 0xbc, 0xde, 0xf0 } }):
```
#define MY_COMPONENT_CONTRACTID "@example.com/XPCOMSample/MyComponent;1"
#define MY_COMPONENT_CLASSNAME "A Simple XPCOM Sample"
#define MY_COMPONENT_CID ***CUID***
```
3. Copy in the snippet from IMyComponent.h, replacing all the instances of _MYCLASS_ with the name of your component (MyComponent).
4. Finish off the double inclusion protection code with #endif //_MY_COMPONENT_H_
Everything between /* Implementation file */ and /* End of implementation class template. */ can be used for MyComponent.cpp:
1. Start by inserting the right include:
```
#include "MyComponent.h"
```
2. Copy in the snippet from IMyComponent.h, replacing all the instances of _MYCLASS_ with the name of your component (MyComponent).
3. Add some implementation to the Add method. I replaced return NS_ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED; with
```
	*_retval = a + b;
return NS_OK;
```

Create your module definitions files:

#include "nsIGenericFactory.h"
#include "MyComponent.h"

NS_GENERIC_FACTORY_CONSTRUCTOR(MyComponent)

static nsModuleComponentInfo components[] =
{
    {
       MY_COMPONENT_CLASSNAME,
       MY_COMPONENT_CID,
       MY_COMPONENT_CONTRACTID,
       MyComponentConstructor,
    }
};

NS_IMPL_NSGETMODULE("MyComponentsModule", components)

You now have all of the files needed to build an XPCOM component:

IMyComponent.h
IMyComponent.idl
IMyComponent.xpt
MyComponent.cpp
MyComponent.h
MyComponentModule.cpp

Now comes the hard part: getting the damn thing to build.

Building the code

Ok, it’s actually not hard since I’ve done most of the legwork for you. Assuming you’re using Visual C++ 2008 here are the settings you need (again assuming C:\xulrunner-sdk is where your Gecko SDK is). In Project->Properties:

Configuration Properties
  General
    Configuration Type: .dll
  C/C++
    General
      Additional Include Directories: C:\xulrunner-sdk\include
    Preprocessor
      Preprocessor Definitions: XP_WIN;XP_WIN32;XPCOM_GLUE_USE_NSPR
  Linker
    General
      Additional Library Directories: C:\xulrunner-sdk\lib
    Input
      Additional Dependencies: nspr4.lib xpcom.lib xpcomglue_s.lib

If you put the idl file into your project, be sure to mark it “Excluded from Build” in its properties…we don’t want VS touching it.

Cross your fingers, pray to whatever deity you believe in, and hit the build button. If it didn’t work let me know why in the comments and I’ll try to build a troubleshooting section.

Installing/Testing the Code

Copy two files to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components:
- The DLL the build generated
- IMyComponent.xpt
Normally, if this was installed as part of an extension, it would automatically search this directory and find these files. But now we have to force a refresh. Delete xpti.dat. and compreg.dat from your profile directory (FF will regenerate them on next restart)

Close Firefox and open it with this test file (MyComponentTest.html in the sample code):

<html>
<script type="text/javascript">
function MyComponentTestGo() {
	try {
		// normally Firefox extensions implicitly have XPCOM privileges, but since this is a file we have to request it.
		netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalXPConnect");
		const cid = "@example.com/XPCOMSample/MyComponent;1";
		obj = Components.classes[cid].createInstance();
		// bind the instance we just created to our interface
		obj = obj.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.IMyComponent);
	} catch (err) {
		alert(err);
		return;
	}
	var res = obj.Add(3, 4);
	alert('Performing 3+4. Returned ' + res + '.');
}
</script>
<body>
<button onclick="MyComponentTestGo();">Go</button>
</body>
</html>

One last time: cross your fingers, pray to whatever deity you believe in, and hit the Go button. If it didn’t work let me know why in the comments and I’ll try to build a troubleshooting section.

Hopefully this clears up what looked like a lot of confusion to me. I will keep this updated to the best of my abilities and hopefully it will continue to be useful for a long time.

Calendar: Lightning builds move towards supporting Thunderbird 3.1

2010-02-07T17:24:38+00:00

Some people have already noticed that we no longer release nightly builds that support Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0. As of January 31st, our nightly builds will no longer live in the latest-comm-1.9.1 folder, but in the latest-comm-1.9.2 directory.

The main difference between the 1.9.1 builds and the 1.9.2 builds is, that the latter will only support nightly builds of the Thunderbird 3.1 and the SeaMonkey 2.1 development branch. This also means that our next Lightning release (1.0 beta2) will not support Thunderbird 3.0.x and SeaMonkey 2.0.x and users of those releases will have to update to be able to get the latest Lightning release then. For now, users that want to test the latest Lightning fixes should either download Lanikai 3.1 alpha1 or a recent nightly build of Thunderbird (also called Shredder) or SeaMonkey.

The reason for this decision is (again) one of (developer) resources. Currently the following development areas/branches are available to us:

The comm-1.9.1 branch, where development for Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0 took place.
The Gecko 1.9.2 branch (home of Firefox 3.6) that in combination with the (soon to be created comm-1.9.2 branch) will be the basis for Thunderbird 3.1, which is currently scheduled for a release in April 2010.
The so called trunk, on which the release after Thunderbird 3.1 will be developed. The SeaMonkey folks are targeting the trunk for their 2.1 release.

With our current resource situation we are not able to fully support all three areas/branches. We have therefore decided to only fully support the Gecko 1.9.2 branch and give a somewhat limited support to the trunk. Those of you who want to follow our work are encouraged to download the Lightning Nightly Updater add-on, which should make updating Lightning much easier for you.

Thanks for staying with us.

Calendar: On the state of Sunbird 1.0 beta1

2010-02-07T17:04:40+00:00

Four weeks ago we released Lightning 1.0 beta1. At the time we also said, that we would make a 1.0 beta1 release available for Sunbird as well, the last Sunbird release from us as previously announced.

Now what's holding it up? The answers are: technical stuff and real life. To elaborate more, we're still having problems to produce the Sunbird 1.0 beta1 release builds in all our supported locales. The only two people who could fix that (Philipp and Gozer) are either too busy because they have to learn for their university exams (Philipp) or too busy, because they have to work on getting other (higher priority) releases out of the door (Lanika 3.1 alpha1 and Thunderbird 3.0.2).

The good news is that Philipp's exams will be done in the coming week and Gozer's main time consumer is either already done (Lanikai 3.1 alpha1) or will be done from his side in the coming week (Thunderbird 3.0.2). So expect a Sunbird release shortly thereafter.

Henrik Skupin: Mozmill talk of FOSDEM 2010

Henrik Skupin — 2010-02-07T09:50:09+00:00

Everyone who was not able to make it to my presentation during the FOSDEM 2010 you can dig into my slides on Slideshare. Live demonstrations are not contained. Mozilla: Automated Mozmill Tests View more presentations from Henrik Skupin.

John O'Duinn: Powering off xulrunner 1.9.0 machines

John — 2010-02-07T03:48:28+00:00

If you use our xulrunner builds, you know we provide builds for xulrunner on the 1.9.0, 1.9.1, 1.9.2, mozilla-central and lorentz branches. Almost all of these xulrunner builds are produced through the same pool-of-slaves that are used for Firefox - except for the oldest xulrunner1.9.0 which are still being produced the old way - on dedicated unique machines.

This blog post, as well as mfinkle’s blog post here, the dev.platform newsgroup posting here and the discussion in the Platform meeting on 27jan2010, are to let people know we’re planning to stop xulrunner builds and releases on the 1.9.0.x branch. This would only affect Mozilla building and releasing xulrunner 1.9.0.x. Mozilla will continue to build and release xulrunner from the 1.9.1, 1.9.2, mozilla-central and lorentz branches. Obviously, the source code to xulrunner 1.9.0.x would remain available and developers could always build and release their own xulrunner 1.9.0 packages from the source code if they wish.

While considering this, we realized that we don’t know how many people are using which branch of xulrunner; further, we have no idea if people are using pre-built xulrunner or building their own. If you are using xulrunner1.9.0, please let us know in the newsgroups if this will impact you either way. Meanwhile, unless there are objections, we’ll continue preparations to stop xulrunner 1.9.0 builds in bug#544678.

Planet Mozilla Blog: Planet Additions: Class of 2/6/2010

raccettura — 2010-02-07T00:56:03+00:00

Alina Mierlus (feed) – long time (Romanian and Catalan) Mozilla Project Contributor, focused mostly on advocacy and community marketing.

Dave Herman (feed) – Dave Herman generally writes about all things related to programming languages, ranging from the bit-twiddlingiest details to the ultra-theoretical. He has spent the last few years as a member of the ECMAScript standards committee and works on designing, specifying, and prototyping features for future versions of JavaScript.

Raindrop (feed) – Raindrop is an exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences.

Deb Richardson: Non-fiction: Drive

dria — 2010-02-06T18:52:11+00:00

Drive, by Dan Pink, is a book about what really motivates us and why, and I believe that anyone who leads a team, community, or open source project would benefit from reading it.

It turns out that extrinsic incentives — the old “carrots and sticks” system of punishments and rewards — really don’t motivate us very much at all. This isn’t to say that things like money, benefits, promotions, and bonuses aren’t important, but science tells us that after a certain level (i.e. when pay is already fair and equitable), extrinsic motivators aren’t really all that effective.

True motivation is something at once more simple and more complex. Intrinsic incentives — those motivations that come from within and are part of our fundamental character and make up — are the real reason we strive to excel, why we take such satisfaction in producing exceptional work, and are what lie behind our real passions and drives.

Pink postulates that there are three elements to intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The first element, Autonomy, is based on the observation that people are more likely to be engaged in and passionate about something if they are free to be self-directed — allowed not only to choose what they work on, but to find their own solutions, strategies, and approaches to the work involved. Pink puts forth “four Ts” where autonomy and self-direction matter: task, time, technique, and team.

Compare these two situations: In the first, you are asked to work on a project you select, on your own schedule, using methods you choose, and with a team that you recruit. In the second, you are asked to work on something you’re not interested in, on a schedule someone else sets, using methods you have no influence over, and with people you can’t trust, don’t like, and find difficult to work with. Which would you find more motivating? Where would you do your best work? Autonomy is an absolutely fundamental part of motivation.

Mastery, Pink’s second element, is based on his belief that we each have an innate “desire to get better and better at something that matters”. This drive is what lies behind that seemingly magical state known as “flow” — where time falls away when you’re working on a clear task that is just challenging enough without being frustratingly difficult. When our tasks are just slightly beyond our current level of mastery we are inspired to push ourselves to get better and accomplish ever greater things.

The third element, Purpose, provides a grounding context for the other two. “Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do it in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.” If you believe that what you’re doing has a purpose larger than yourself — say, as an example, ensuring there is choice and innovation on the internet and safeguarding the future of the open web — you’re going to be even more motivated to accomplish amazing things.

The book mentions both Wikipedia and Firefox as examples of what people can accomplish when driven solely by intrinsic motivation. All three elements are present: contributors are autonomous (entirely self-selecting and able to scratch whatever itches they like), highly skilled and driven to continually get better at what they do, and they usually have a pretty fundamental belief in the purpose and importance of the larger project. Working together over several years, the people involved with these projects have accomplished what most sane people would have believed was impossible only a few years ago. Intrinsic motivation is powerful, powerful thing.

If you’re interested in understanding the power of intrinsic incentives (and, to some extent, the dangers of extrinsic incentives) and harnessing those to motivate your team or open source community to even greater feats of awesome, I think Drive is definitely worth reading.

Eric Shepherd: MDC upgrade status report

sheppy — 2010-02-06T17:29:49+00:00

We’re working toward upgrading the Mozilla Developer Center from MindTouch 9.08.3 to MindTouch 9.12. We’re going through some testing and tweaking on our staging server at the moment, and hope to deploy very soon. At the moment we’re sorting out a glitch with the RSS feeds on the staging server not loading properly.

The 9.12 release of MindTouch offers a few key improvements we’ll be hoping serve us very well.

Performance

MindTouch has done some significant work on performance. They’ve added a caching module that reduces database hits substantially, which in their tests increases performance by an average of 400%. Hopefully this will be noticeable for our users, since obviously performance has been one of the largest complaints we’ve had.

Scaling

A number of bugs that made our multiple-host configuration unstable have been fixed. Most of these were backported to the 9.08.3 release we’re running currently, but there should be a slight increase in reliability with the impending upgrade.

Editor

MindTouch 9.12 supports CKEditor 3.0, the newest generation of the editor currently in use on MDC. This will not be activated at the outset, while we do further testing on the staging server, but this editor upgrade should offer us improved performance, accessibility, and reliability. In addition, it has a new JavaScript API that should let us extend it in new ways to even better suit our needs.

The Mozilla Blog: Weave Sync: New APIs and Resources for Developers

Erica Jostedt — 2010-02-06T02:05:36+00:00

Editor’s note: On Feb 5, Mozilla Labs released new Weave Sync APIs and resources for developers. For more details, check out Ragavan Srinivasan’s blog announcement, reposted below.

Last week we announced that the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox is now generally available to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences.

Using this free browser add-on from Mozilla Labs, you can use secure mechanisms to access all of your personal data (including your bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and open browser tabs) across all of your supported devices, making your Web experience instantly more personal and useful. And all of your data is encrypted end-to-end to help ensure your privacy.

This week we’re launching the first set of developer resources including Weave Sync & User APIs, documentation, and Python & Javascript client libraries — to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments.

Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.

We’re also releasing a number of early prototypes and sample code that have been developed alongside the Weave APIs, including:

Web-based Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer implemented in Javascript.
iPhone Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer on the iPhone, including support for a Firefox-like URL bar as a standalone application.

commandline Weave client: Command-line application and library written in Python.
WebOS Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer for Palm’s WebOS.

How to Get Involved

Dive into the Weave Services Developer Resource site
Post your design and early prototypes to Weave developers discussion group
Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

We’ve also tried to anticipate your questions, and have posted an FAQ .

– Ragavan Srinivasan and Mike Hanson, on behalf of the Weave team

Mozilla Labs: Weave Sync: New APIs and Resources for Developers

2010-02-06T01:39:57+00:00

Last week we announced that the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox is now generally available to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments.

We’re also releasing a number of early prototypes and sample code that have been developed alongside the Weave APIs, including:

Web-based Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer implemented in Javascript.
iPhone Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer on the iPhone, including support for a Firefox-like URL bar as a standalone application.

commandline Weave client: Command-line application and library written in Python.
WebOS Weave client: A complete Weave data viewer for Palm’s WebOS.

How to Get Involved

Dive into the Weave Services Developer Resource site
Post your design and early prototypes to Weave developers discussion group
Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org

We’ve also tried to anticipate your questions, and have posted an FAQ .

– Ragavan Srinivasan and Mike Hanson, on behalf of the Weave team

Jono S. Xia: Is it possible to opt out of social networking?

jonoscript — 2010-02-06T00:51:45+00:00

So I hear there’s this website called “The Facebook” that is really popular with the kids these days, and I decided to check it out…

Kidding, kidding. Of course I know what Facebook is. I’ve just been choosing not to participate. The whole “social networking” thing doesn’t offer me anything I want that I can’t already do through e-mail or by building websites. (I recognize that I am atypical in this regard).

I actually tried out Facebook back when it was university-students-only. I built a profile, linked it to my friends, and then said “Well, now what? I guess I’m done.” And I never went back. Eventually I deleted my profile, just to avoid spreading outdated information about myself.

Of course, Facebook now is not really the same application as Facebook in 2004. With over 350 million users (as many as Firefox), it forms a significant part of how many people experience the Internet, and as such it shapes their expectations for how web interfaces should look and feel, as well as how their real-life relationships should be represented in software.

This was the argument given by many of my coworkers, who told me that I ought to at least try out the modern Facebook, so that I could better understand where many of our users are coming from.

So I went to Facebook and started creating an account. I entered my first and last name and email address, and Facebook showed me a page saying “We think these people might be your friends”. There were several dozen people there who I actually know, mixed in with several dozen who I don’t.

Wait a minute, How does Facebook know who my friends are?? Remember, I hadn’t told them anything except an email address at this point. I was disturbed by how much they knew about me. More than disturbed. I was freaked out.

Where did this information come from? From the old account that I deleted? Unlikely. I believe it came from my friends importing their email contacts into Facebook. My email address was in their contact lists, so Facebook looked it up in their database and, not finding me, stored a sort of “dangling pointer”. This pointer laid dormant until I entered a matching email address, at which point it sprang into action.

The part that disturbs me about all this is that Facebook had my email address in their database, without my knowledge or consent, despite my decision not to use their service.

And they had a lot more than my email address. They had pictures of me, uploaded by my friends and tagged with my name. They knew who my friends were. They knew what my friends liked. They knew more or less how I would fit into their social network. If they wanted to, they could deduce a lot of information about the person behind the email address. It would have been fairly trivial for them to figure out what school I went to, about how old I am, what political activities I have been involved in, and what advertisers would be most interested in reaching my demographic.

My friends did not ask my permission before giving Facebook all this information about me. Why would they? There is no UI warning, no legal terms, no moral or cultural expectation that they should do so. They just typed in their own email password and clicked “Find Friends”.

Facebook makes money through targeted advertising. They profit from the detailed information that they extract from their extensive social network database. I was part of that database despite my choice not to participate. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that they have been profiting off of me, without my knowledge or consent, using information about me that was given away by my friends, again without my knowledge or consent.

I don’t think that Facebook as a company is doing anything unusual or exceptionally bad. This is pretty much standard practice in the industry. Facebook is in this position simply because they’re the social network with the biggest reach. I’d have the same concerns about any one company, no matter how seemingly benevolent, having this much information about people who chose not to participate (or rather, who thought they were choosing not to participate).

I want to be able to choose what information about myself I make available on the Internet. I want to be able to control how that information is used. And if I make a choice not to participate in an organization or do business with a company, then I don’t want that organization or company storing information about me.

Where do we draw the line between my right to control my data, and the right of other people to exchange information about me? The right of social network developers to innovate?

What do you think?

Dietrich Ayala: Firefox Startup Performance – Feb 5, 2010

Dietrich Ayala — 2010-02-06T00:21:28+00:00

Nothing major to report. Some of the big projects are in the final stretch, which is great to see.

Static build: Joel’s in cleanup phase, making sure the mobile tinderboxes build with the changes. Core patch is waiting on first review from Ted.
Ben’s fastload cache replacement is waiting on first-review from Ben Smedberg.
Zach has more data on the effect of the CSS parser optimizations he’s been working on.
Asaf put up an experimental patch for making the bookmarks toolbar all JS, no XBL.

Related work I did this week:

Started updating the Performance Snapshot. Fixing a couple of bugs and making the percentages relative to the 3.6 branch.
Spent some time poking at the graph server. It’s got serious performance problems, and is lacking a few features that’d make it immensely useful, instead of only somewhat useful. It just needs a little love, that’s all.
Landed bug 506471, moving FUEL out of the startup path.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Revamping the Statistics Dashboard

Justin Scott (fligtar) — 2010-02-06T00:18:53+00:00

Developers got their first glimpse at detailed statistics for their add-ons in early 2008 when we launched the Developer Statistics Dashboard for every add-on hosted on AMO. Since then, we’ve made incremental improvements to this tool, such as adding grouping and comparison options, data tables, locale usage stats, contributions, and most recently download sources.

In July, we asked developers to take a survey about how they use the Statistics Dashboard, and as part of our AMO rewrite currently underway, we’ll be revamping the dashboard.

Here’s a mockup from our designer, Chris Howse, of the overview page of the new dashboard:

A few comments on the new design:

Our main goal was to simplify the dashboard and present the most common things developers are looking for up front, answering questions like “which application versions is my add-on used with?” and “how many people use my add-on on Mac?”
Each of the breakdown pages will have its own URL and be linked to directly, eliminating the annoying dropdown menu currently used
We’ll be replacing the Timeplot graphs with nicer, less buggy graphs using Highcharts
Most of the features of the new dashboard exist in the current dashboard, but this will create a much better platform and layout for us to add additional features after the rewrite. We already have some great ideas to implement at that time.

You can see the rest of the mockups and design discussion in bug 540885 and implementation in bug 543548.

ShareThis

Gavin Sharp: reviews, crashing plugins, and tab matches

gavin — 2010-02-06T00:15:31+00:00

I’m going to give weekly blog status updates a shot. I suspect planet already gets inundated with them near the end of the week, so maybe I’ll try adjusting my schedule by a few days. Or maybe I’ll end up just posting them on wikimo instead. Either way I’ll try to keep them interesting!

I didn’t think I was going to end up doing this, so I didn’t take detailed notes of everything I’ve done this week. I’m going to try to get better at that.

Accomplished this week:

tried to keep the review queue cleanup rolling from last week, but I think I netted out even (or slightly negative). Current state: 33 pending requests.
reviewed dolske’s plugin crashing UI patches (bug 539848, bug 538910)
helped test the 1.9.3 alpha 1 branding changes (bug 543564)
wrote some additional tests for bug 512784 (consolidated smart getters for common services). ready to land once it gets rs=Mossop
spent some time reviewing patch for bug 480350 (tab matches in awesomebar)
wasted a bit of time arguing with RSnake on his blog

Up next (roughly in priority order):

shorlander’s going to be filing bugs for proposed theme/UX changes, will need to triage/prioritize those with dao
need to make progress on browser.js cleanup/simplification – I want to get a list of actionable items by mid-next-week and get patching
I have some mobile blog post ideas and notes that I really need to turn into posts
try not to give up too much ground on review queue clearing
want speak to Ryan about some changes required for bug 511017 (allow default search plugins to be updated, allowing them to get locale-specific search URLs to avoid redirects through google.com)
would like to resolve bug 479334 (improved en-US spellcheck dictionary, including better merge scripts to ease taking changes from upstream hunspell and chromium). just needs a final test run and a couple of tweaks before landing, I think.

Ideally I think my “upcoming” tasks would be as granular and clearly defined as my “completed” tasks, I guess, but they’ll probably be easier to split out into specific tasks once some of the planning/exploratory work is done.

Joshua Cranmer: Developing new account types, part 1: The folder pane

Joshua Cranmer — 2010-02-05T23:25:18+00:00

This series of blog posts discusses the creation of a new account type implemented in JavaScript. Over the course of these blogs, I use the development of my Web Forums extension to explain the necessary actions in creating new account types. I hope to add a new post once every two weeks (I cannot guarantee it, though).

In the previous blog post, I gave a broad overview on the overall structure of the backend interfaces and the components of account implementation. Now, we will prepare the necessary components of getting your extension's folder displayed in the folder pane.

Account implementation decisions

Before you start implementing, you have to decide how to structure the account. The first decision is what the internal account type will be. This will be the value of nsIMsgAccount::type and will dictate the contract IDs for several interfaces. The next decision is what the account URI scheme is. This will be the scheme for the URI and dictates the contract IDs for a few more interfaces; for mailbox accounts, this scheme will be mailbox. For my extension, I have decided to choose webforum for both of these.

Another important decision to make will be the server for which you will be doing most of your initial tests. It should be something that is manageable for debugging purposes. In my case, I've decided to bestow this honor on the Kompozer web forum, because it seems lower traffic than any other forum I'm reasonably interested in. As you may notice, I am starting my extension with the intention of focusing on phpBB access—it's sufficiently widely used that I expect that only supporting phpBB at first would still make a worthwhile extension.

Once you have decided that, you should take the time to study how things will be structured: what determines a folder? What determines a message? A thread? Replies? How are you going to be carrying out new actions, such as checking for new messages? What internal information are you going to need to save for accessing? Heck, what determines the "server" to begin with? In my case, the DOM inspector is an invaluable tool for answering this questions. Don't worry about how to figure out the list of possible subscribable folders yet. Subscription will come into play much later; we are going to start by just hardcoding this list somewhere.

In my case, I am choosing to structure the folders as a Category → Forum hierarchy. I'll pick a few of the smaller forums to use so I don't overwhelm debug logs.

Implementing protocol information

Since nsIMsgProtocolInfo is the shortest and simplest of the interfaces, let me start by implementing this one. There are a total of 12 attributes and 1 function on this interface, so the code will not be hard to write. Following is an implementation of the code [1]:

wfService.prototype = {
  contractID: ["@mozilla.org/messenger/protocol/info;1?type=webforum"],
  QueryInterface: XPCOMUtils.generateQI([Ci.nsIMsgProtocolInfo]),

  // Used by the account wizard and account manager
  get defaultLocalPath() {
    let dirSvc = Cc["@mozilla.org/file/directory_service;1"]
                   .getService(Ci.nsIProperties);
    let file = dirSvc.get("ProfD", Ci.nsIFile);
  file.append("WebForums");
    if (!file.exists())
      file.create(Ci.nsIFile.DIRECTORY_TYPE, 0775);
    return file;
  },
  get serverIID() { return Ci.nsIMsgIncomingServer; },
  get defaultDoBiff() { return true; },
  get requiresUsername() { return false; },
  getDefaultServerPort: function (secure) { return -1; },
  get canDelete() { return true; },

  // Used by UI code
  get canLoginAtStartup() { return true; },
  get canGetMessages() { return true; },
  get canGetIncomingMessages() { return false; },
  get showComposeMsgLink() { return false; },
  get specialFoldersDeletionAllowed() { return false; }
};

The meaning of each of the attributes can be found in more detail on the MDC page. The properties used by the account wizard mostly control initial preference values; those used by the UI code mostly control which UI elements are enabled. I have excluded from the implementation also those attributes which are unused.

Perhaps the most leeway you have is in implementing defaultLocalPath. In this case, I have adapted the RSS implementation, which does not allow users to change this location. The other implementation (used by IMAP, POP, NNTP, Movemail, and Local Folders) uses a preference to return the default path. An example implementation of this method is like thus:

get defaultLocalPath() {
  // This will probably be found in the constructor
  this._prefs = Cc["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"]
                  .getService(Ci.nsIPrefService)
                  .getBranch("extensions.webfora.");
  // Preference looks like [ProfD]WebForums
  let pref = this._prefs.getComplexValue("rootDir", Ci.nsIRelativeFilePref);
  return pref.file;
},

Once you have completed that, you should test that the service implementations work as expected via test snippets in the Error Console. The account manager can be mean when it comes to unusable account types [2], so this will help fix the most obvious bugs before the account manager attempts to do it for you.

Server and root folder discovery

Before I start going any further with code, let me take a minute to explain how servers and folders interact. The server objects themselves do surprisingly little in the UI; the most common property calls are probably rootFolder and type. This even includes what you might think of as server attributes: the bold display name, has new messages treeview properties, etc. Instead, those features can be found on the root folder, which is a "fake" folder object. Most of what we care about in this part happens on the root folder instead of the server; however, if you browse the implementation in nsMsgDBFolder, you can see that some of the property calls get forwarded back to the server for root folders.

The backend code will create server objects early on and hold onto them for the duration of the program (or until they are deleted). The server objects then create the root folders which then create subfolders as necessary. Links that go backwards (parent links and server links) are weak references to avoid refcount cycles. Most of this work is hidden in nsMsgDBFolder for you. After creation, various properties are accessed at will; some properties will be loaded in from the database info (a topic for later).

In more concrete code terms, the following is the steps in loading the folder pane:

The account manager loads the mail.accountmanager.accounts preference; the values here are a comma-separated list of account keys.
For each account key, an account is instantiated. Per-account data is read off of the mail.account.<key> preference branch; in specific, the server preference contains the server key to load and the identities preference is a comma-separated list of identity keys.
The identities and servers are then bootstrapped. In the case of servers, the server is created as an object with the @mozilla.org/messenger/server;1?type=<type> contract ID. The server pref branch is mail.server.<key>; key preferences here are type, the type for the contract ID; userName, the (optional) username of the server; and hostname, the (required) host of the server.
The account manager sets the key, type, username, and hostName properties, in that order on the server object instance and then retrieves the port property. The (type, username, hostName, port) tuple is the unique identifier for a server: no two servers can have the same combination of these values. Now your server is constructed and returned to the folder pane.
The folder pane retrieves the rootFolder of your server. If you happened to be saved in the expanded state, subFolders is recursively retrieved from folders as corresponding to the saved open state. The folder pane also calls performExpand() on the server if the root folder is expanded.

So that explains how your server gets created; how do your folders get created? nsMsgIncomingServer::GetRootFolder [3] calls nsMsgIncomingServer::CreateRootFolder, which calls serverURI and uses it to construct an RDF resource. serverURI creates a URI of the form localstoretype://[<username>@]<hostname> by default. This URI is actually the URI of your root folder; other code will assume that this invariant holds true (especially subscribe!). Other folders are created when you get the subFolders property. When the folder URI is parsed (which is pretty much the first time a useful property is called), getIncomingServerType is called to get the type of the server.

In summary, you may need to implement localStoreType and possible serverURI on your server, and subFolders, and getIncomingServerType, and CreateBaseMessageURI on your folder [4]. First we'll start by getting the root folder display working:

function wfServer() {
  JSExtendedUtils.makeCPPInherits(this,
    "@mozilla.org/messenger/jsincomingserver;1");
}
wfServer.prototype = {
  contractID: ["@mozilla.org/messenger/server;1?type=webforum"],
  QueryInterface: JSExtendedUtils.generateQI([]),
  get localStoreType() { return "webforum"; }
};


function wfFolder() {
  JSExtendedUtils.makeCPPInherits(this,
    "@mozilla.org/messenger/jsmsgfolder;1");
}
wfFolder.prototype = {
  contractID: "@mozilla.org/rdf/resource-factory;1?name=webforum",
  QueryInterface: JSExtendedUtils.generateQI([]),
  getIncomingServerType: function () { return "webforum"; }
};

At this point, I recommend you again check to make sure resources are properly registering via the Error Console. With that in hand, it's time to modify your preferences manually. I personally recommend changing settings via editing prefs.js while Thunderbird is off so you don't accidentally confuse the account manager. I'm using the keys account99 and server99 to make it plain which account is being edited. First, I copy the mail.identity.id3 pref branch (any identity would do) and change the id3 to id99. Then I copy the mail.account.account3 pref branch and change the 3's to 99's.

The next changes are the server preferences, which are going to be the most unique. directorydirectory-rel are set to a folder where I want to store stuff ([ProfD]WebForums/kompozer, in my case). download_on_biff and login_at_startup are set to false (to avoid dealing with biff for a bit longer). name is set to be the display name of the server. hostname and userName were set to the appropriate values for this account [5]. To the preference mail.accountmanager.accounts, I appended account99. With those changes done, I then start up Thunderbird to see the outcome:

Perhaps I should have chosen a shorter name for display.

Folder discovery

Now that the root folder is displayed, we need to get the folders added to the display pane. Somehow, we need to figure out what the folder hierarchy looks like—it has to be stored in some file, in other words. The NNTP code uses the newsrc file to store its folder tree, and local folders looks at the directory hierarchy for its map, to name two examples.

In my code, I'm going to choose the use of a JSON file to store this data. I've considered SQLite, but I don't really need synchronization (per-server files work nicely here), and I'm mostly doing simple lookups. Plus, I can probably handle automatic schema migration more easily in SQLite.

For this next part, we concentrate on a single property: subFolders. This function typically has two parts: it first checks for initialization (if so, it returns the enumerator to the stored values); if it's not initialized, the rest of the function, or perhaps a second function altogether, is used to create the subfolders.

Some code to initialize these subfolders is as follows (the logic to retrieve the database is not included and can instead be found in the source code for my extension):

 get subFolders() {
    if (this._folders)
      return array2enum(this._folders);// If we're here, we need to initialize.
    this._inner.QueryInterface(Ci.nsIMsgFolder);
    let serverDB = this._inner.server.wrappedJSObject._db;
    // Uninitialized -> no subfolders
    if (!serverDB.categories)
      return array2enum(this._folders = []);

    // First find our level
    let level = /* some logic */;

    let URI = this._inner.URI + '/';let folders = [];
    // Yes, we still use RDF
    let RDF = Cc["@mozilla.org/rdf/rdf-service;1"].getService(Ci.nsIRDFService);
    let netUtils = Cc["@mozilla.org/network/io-service;1"]
                     .getService(Ci.nsINetUtil);
    for each (let sub in level) {
      // Some URIs may contain spaces, etc. -> escape
      let folder = RDF.GetResource(URI + netUtils.escapeString(sub.name,
        Ci.nsINetUtil.ESCAPE_URL_PATH));
      folder.QueryInterface(Ci.nsIMsgFolder);.parent = this;
      folders.push(folder);
    }
    this._folders = folders;
    return array2enum(this._folders);}

There are a few major things to note. First, the new folders are created via the RDF resource. Both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey use RDF for folder access, so it is still a good idea to create via the RDF service so you don't confuse the caller code. Also, with that in mind, the subfolder name still needs to be escaped as well in the URI, hence the calls to nsINetUtil. The auxiliary function array2enum takes in a JS array and returns a proper nsISimpleEnumerator for the array. I've excluded it's definition here do to its simplicity and the length of this document; if you want to see it, you can view it from the extension source code. The last thing to note is that this code is using this._inner: this variable is a link to the nsMsgDBFolder implementation which was created for us by the JSExtendedUtils inheritance call. I will defer a more thorough treatment of this C++-JS glue until later.

Folder pane extras

At this point, you should have a simple, plain folder hierarchy, which is navigable if not fully usable. In terms of UI, though, it's not quite fully perfect: if you have an inbox, it will be rather indistinguishable from other folders; similarly, "fake" folders (think the [Gmail] folder if you have Gmail IMAP) show up as regular folders. These things are handled to a large degree by CSS.

A full list of the available of the styling points for the Thunderbird folder pane can be found on MDC. Extensions can also modify the folder pane views or add other, non-folder items. More information can be found at MDC's folder pane information page.

I would provide some example styling code here, but when I was doing testing, I discovered some related assertion failures that I have not yet had time to grok. In the interest of keeping to a posting every two weeks, I am going to defer this until either a mini "part 1.5" or the beginning of part 2, depending on how much time I will have available next week.

Notes

I will not, in general, post the full code for any of the classes, only enough to demonstrate what needs to be done. For example, the classID property is omitted in this example. Something to note is that I have a modification to XPCOMUtils locally that will accept arrays of contract IDs as opposed to a single one (wfService will be implementing more than one contract ID).
What it specifically does is attempt to get the server; if it fails, then it removes the account from the accounts pref. If you are compiling your own builds for your extension development profile, I recommend you remove the lines in nsMsgAccountManager::LoadAccount that remove the account on failure.
In general, I will mix the IDL and C++ names for methods and properties in the course of the guide. As a basic rule of thumb, if you see a :: in the name, it's a C++ name; otherwise, it's the IDL name.
getBaseMessageURI is a local function called by nsMsgDBFolder during initialization that is used to set up the URIs for getting individual messages. This function will be covered in more depth as we get messages working, but it is technically necessary for startup (a stub that does nothing is provided).
A strong temptation for accounts whose sources are some web address (for example, RSS or my web forums account) is to put the base address as the hostname property. However, as you would quickly realize, that plays havoc on URI parsing, and nsMsgDBFolder::parseURI is not virtual. A better option would probably be to leave the hostname as some identifier that you use only for guaranteeing uniqueness and to store the base URI somewhere else. Since all of my folders have independent URIs associated with them, I can safely ignore the issue until account creation and subscription are covered.

Mozilla Security: Security Issues With Two Experimental Add-Ons

Lucas Adamski — 2010-02-05T19:18:03+00:00

Two add-ons in the experimental section of addons.mozilla.org were found to be containing malware. These were not originally detected with the anti-malware scanning tools that we have been using. We have since increased the number of scanning tools, and will be taking additional steps to minimize the risk of further incidents. Full details of the issue and recommended mitigation steps are here on the AMO blog:

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/02/04/please-read-security-issue-on-amo/

Aakash Desai: How to Enable Plugins on Mobile Firefox 1.0 Maemo

ahdesai — 2010-02-05T17:40:46+00:00

As most of you n900 users know now, plugins have been disabled by default due to quality issues on Mobile Firefox 1.0. The mobile team tried **really** hard to get it fixed in time for 1.0, but it just wasn’t possible. Instead, we’re treating it as an experimental feature that can be enabled for those very adventurous web browser-ers (and hopefully, bug filers *wink* ) out there. The following instructions are for those who think of themselves as such ( and, again, are those who like to file bugs on Bugzilla under Core:Plugins for Flash-related issues on Fennec *double-wink* ).

Here’s how to enable plugins on your profile for Mobile Firefox:

1. Type in “about:config” in the url bar and press enter. ( Screenshot )
2. Click on the button with the following text, “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
3. In the input field next to “Filter”, type in “plugin.disable” (without the quotation marks). ( Screenshot )
4. Tap on the row entry for “plugin.disable”
5. Press the Enter/Return key. ( Screenshot )
6. Close the browser and re-open it.

To disable, simply repeat the steps above.

One thing to note is the n900 is optimized for the h.263 codec standard. So, websites like Youtube, who use it, will play well on the device, but sites like Dailymotion and Vimeo, who don’t use it, will have a terrible time with video and/or audio playback. For those that want to watch videos on Youtube without tripping over any flash-related issues found on other sites, you can download the Youtube Enabler add-on for your video-on-mobile-device needs.

Axel Hecht: L20n presentation at FOSDEM 2010

Axel Hecht — 2010-02-05T11:26:28+00:00

I’ll be presenting at FOSDEM on l20n, the infrastructure that we’re hoping to move our localization efforts to. The talk will be in the Mozilla Developers room on Sunday, 13:15. The FOSDEM program might still give a Sunday morning time, that changed.

I’ll focus on what tools can do to help localizers to use the power that l20n brings, without making things totally obscure. I’ll start with a quick recap for those that are new to it, and then discuss the challenges that l20n brings, and how tools can help. I’ll also present first thoughts on how to communicate data describing languages between tools, using html5 and microdata.

See you in Brussels, not just for that talk, of course.

PS: I’ll be giving a lightning talk on the new l10n site, too.

Bugzilla Tips: Client-Side Bugmail Filtering

gervmarkham — 2010-02-05T10:25:16+00:00

Everyone who uses Bugzilla seriously gets a lot of bugmail. Bugzilla provides controls so you can restrict the amount of it you get. But did you know it also adds headers to each email so you can do further filtering on the client side?

Here are a sample set of headers, with explanations:

X-Bugzilla-Reason:	CC	(the role you have on the bug which led to you getting the mail; other values are AssignedTo, QAcontact)
X-Bugzilla-Type:	changed	(other value is ‘new’)
X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason:	QAcontact places@firefox.bugs	(the role of the person you are watching, and who it is, if you are getting bugmail for that reason)
X-Bugzilla-Who:	gerv@mozilla.org	(the person who made the change)
X-Bugzilla-Changed-Fields:	AssignedTo Status	(the names of the fields changed by the update)
X-Bugzilla-URL:	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

The following headers give the values of particular bug fields after the change in question has been made.

X-Bugzilla-Classification:	Client Software
X-Bugzilla-Product:	Firefox
X-Bugzilla-Component:	Places
X-Bugzilla-Keywords:	crash, regression
X-Bugzilla-Severity:	major
X-Bugzilla-Status:	NEW
X-Bugzilla-Priority:	P2
X-Bugzilla-Assigned-To:	mconnor@mozilla.com
X-Bugzilla-Target-Milestone:	Firefox 3.6

You can use any of these, or a combination, as a trigger to do something different with a bugmail – file it somewhere, tag it, mark it as read or delete it.

To set up filters in Thunderbird 3, go to Tools | Message Filters… . If you click “New” to add a new filter, and then scroll down to the bottom of the list of headers and other values you can filter on, you will find “Customize…” This allows you to enter custom header values, such as the X-Bugzilla headers above.

Dave Townsend: Mossop Status Update: 2010-02-05

Mossop — 2010-02-05T10:12:07+00:00

Done:

Lost most of the week to sickness but trawled through some reviews that were blocking people's work.

Downloads and updates in the add-ons API

Vladimir Vukićević: mjs: Simple Vector and Matrix Math for JS

vladimir — 2010-02-05T09:04:19+00:00

One common thread running through the many different and interesting WebGL projects out there is that they all need to do vector and matrix math, do it quickly, and do it in JavaScript. To date, developers have either rolled their own, or they've used Sylvester, a fairly featureful vector and matrix JavaScript library.

One of the problems with Sylvester is that while it's fully featured (arbitrary NxN matrices and vectors can be created and manipulated), it suffers in performance because of it. Since this is such a crucial part of a successful WebGL program, I've put together a small package that I'm calling mjs.

mjs is designed around speed and simplicity. For example, it doesn't attempt to stuff vectors and matrices into JavaScript objects. Because the language offers no operator overloading, there's very little benefit in treating these types as discrete objects, and lots of performance and memory usage downsides. Instead, it provides a set of functions for performing operations on vectors and matrices, which can be any array-like object. For any function that returns a vector or matrix, an existing array can be passed in to take the result, or the function can create a new one. Array reuse ends up being important because of the potential for expensive garbage collection churn eating away at performance.

Here's a sample of the API:

var r = M4x4.rotate(Math.PI/2, V3.$(0, 1, 0),  M4x4.I);

Note that V3.$ and M4x4.$ are shorthand for creating a new V3 or M4x4 (I wanted to use V3() and M4x4(), but that didn't work out too well since functions have a length property). However, because all they return are just new array-like objects, you could also write:

var r = M4x4.rotate(Math.PI/2, [0, 1, 0], M4x4.I);

If the WebGL types are available, those will be used for newly created vectors/matrices. They are a significant performance boost especially for repeated operations; but for specifying one-off vectors such as the above, literal array syntax is fine.

The rotate function internally makes a rotation matrix, and then multiplies it by the given matrix. So the above could also be written as:

var rotation = M4x4.makeRotate(Math.PI/2, [0, 1, 0]);
var r = M4x4.mul(M4x4.I, rotation);

(The last line being redundant given that we're multiplying by the identity matrix.)

All methods that return a vector or matrix take an optional final argument, that of an existing object to reuse. For example:

var m0 = M4x4.$();
r = M4x4.mul(someMatrixA, someMatrixB, m0);
// r == m0, so the assignment isn't necessary, but it's handy for chaining
// .... do something with r ...
r = M4x4.mul(someMatrixB, someMatrixC, m0);
// r == m0 still
// ... do something else with new results ...

Without allocating any additional temporary objects.

As mentioned before, one of the goals of mjs is performance. Matrix multiplication is one of the most common tasks, so here are some numbers comparing mjs, Sylvester, and native C code. This was run on a Core i7 desktop using a local build of Spidermonkey, which included one patch that's about to go into the tree that fixes the no-reuse tracing case. (Without it, the no-reuse tracing case is much larger because it's never actually jitted.) The test is simple: it multiplies two matrices together in a loop 1,000,000 times.

Test	Time
mjs, JIT, matrix reuse	140ms
mjs, JIT, no reuse	533ms
Sylvester, JIT, no reuse	5,280ms
mjs, no JIT, matrix reuse	25,833ms
mjs, no JIT, no reuse	26,681ms
Sylvester, no JIT, no reuse	41,996ms
Native C++, SSE2, matrix reuse	71ms
Native C++, SSE2, no reuse	142ms

(I also have numbers for MSVC without the SSE2 compile flag, but the numbers vary greatly depending on whether the values eventually go to infinity or not; if the values end up trending towards 0, the non-SSE2 code tends to win at around 52ms vs. 71ms; if the values trend to infinity, the non-SSE2 code takes around 11,000ms!)

Those numbers are pretty encouraging -- having native code be only 2x as slow for something like this is pretty nice to see. Granted, this is only a very isolated test, and I'm sure there are some tricks to optimizing the native code case (it's currently just a fully unrolled set of multiplies and adds). The "no JIT" case is less nice, but I'm sure that our Jaegermonkey folks will be all over this testcase (right, guys?). In any case, ideally most WebGL rendering loops will be fully traced in Firefox, so it would be less of an issue.

mjs is still very much a work in progress; it's missing a test suite and a whole bunch of features. You can find it hosted at Google Code, at webgl-mjs. (Side note: I couldn't just call the project mjs because a project called mjs was abandoned on Sourceforget 5 years ago, and Google Code complained.) There's also some documentation, viewable online here.

Bugs and contributions welcome!

Shawn Wilsher: sdwilsh Status Update: 2010-02-05

Shawn Wilsher — 2010-02-05T06:18:24+00:00

Done:

Work on bug 461199
Work on bug 542592 (learning oh so much about content/)
CMU career fair

Finish (no, really!) bug 461199and bug 542592

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Please read: Security Issue on AMO

Nick Nguyen (osunick) — 2010-02-05T03:49:26+00:00

Issue

Two experimental add-ons, Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan code aimed at Windows users. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose Trojan. Both add-ons have been disabled on AMO.

Impact to users

If a user installs one of these infected add-ons, the trojan would be executed when Firefox starts and the host computer would be infected by the trojan. Uninstalling these add-ons does not remove the trojan from a user’s system. Users with either of these add-ons should uninstall them immediately. Since uninstalling these extensions does not remove the trojan from a user’s system, an antivirus program should be used to scan and remove any infections.

Status

This vulnerability is known to affect Firefox on Windows only, if either Master Filer or Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader are installed. Versions of Sothink Web Video Downloader greater than 4.0 are not infected. Master Filer was downloaded approximately 600 times between September 2009 and January 2010. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader was downloaded approximately 4,000 times between February 2008 and May 2008. Master Filer was removed from AMO on January 25, 2010 and Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader was removed from AMO on February 2, 2010. AMO performs a malware check on all add-ons uploaded to the site, and blocks add-ons that are detected as such. This scanning tool failed to detect the Trojan in Master Filer. Two additional malware detection tools have been added to the validation chain and all add-ons were rescanned, which revealed the additional Trojan in Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader. No other instances of malware have been discovered.

Credit

This issue was originally reported by CatThief.

Antivirus Software

Here is a list of antivirus programs known to detect the trojans found in the affected add-ons.

Antiy-AVL
Avast
AVG
GData
Ikarus
K7AntiVirus
McAfee
Norman
VBA32

ShareThis

hacks.mozilla.org: Firefox 3.6 feedback

Alix Franquet — 2010-02-05T02:27:42+00:00

Firefox 3.6 was released on Jan 21st and has already been downloaded more than 35 million times! It features a faster JavaScript engine, faster DOM performance and a bunch of new HTML5 features. Highlights for web developers include support for the WOFF font format, new CSS features like gradients and multiple backgrounds, drag and drop, File API, device orientation, and more. Want to see the full list? Look at our Firefox 3.6 for Developers page on developer.mozilla.org.

We hope that you took the time to test Firefox 3.6 on your web sites before the release. If you didn’t, it’s not too late to let us know about issues. Here are a few problems that we’ve seen in the wild so far:

We’ve seen a couple of issues with the FCKEditor component, used widely on the web. It apparently doesn’t handle dates after 2009 properly (this is the first major browser release in 2010, a new decade!) and it also has some problems with document.readyState.
People who had the YSlow extension installed saw crashes with Firefox 3.6. YSlow has been updated to version 2.0.6 to fix the issue
Some Facebook apps were broken by a change we made to comply with the upcoming HTML5 standard. We updated element.getElementsByTagNameNS and document.getElementsByTagNameNS to no longer case-fold when doing tag name lookups. (We strongly suggest that you only use lower-case for tag names for many reasons, including this.) For more information, please see this note from Henri Sivonen about what’s changed. Facebook has since fixed the issue in their code, but other sites may also be tripping over this.

We’re looking for feedback on any developer-facing regressions you’ve seen in 3.6 from 3.5. Please comment on this post if you have feedback.

Luis Villa: Telling numbers

Luis Villa — 2010-02-05T02:11:49+00:00

I’m currently reading a book on modern legal drafting (read: ‘plain english for dummies, I mean, lawyers’). It is very good so far, but I think this is a telling stat about lawyers: 127 pages are devoted to why clear, modern english is a good idea. That is 22 pages more than are devoted to how to write clear, modern english.

Modern Legal Drafting, by Peter Butt and Richard Castle

This imbalance isn’t as insane as it sounds at first; there are some not-crazy reasons to re-use old language in legal documents, and explaining why they aren’t actually correct is a useful service. Still… given that some of the complaints about legalese cited by the book are over 200 years old, you would think the profession might at least by now realize that much legalese is a bad idea, even if we haven’t yet learned how to get rid of it…

(Favorite sentence from the book: “My client has discussed your proposal to fill the ditch with his partners.“)

Mary Colvig: 2 weeks, 37 million downloads

Mary Colvig — 2010-02-05T00:20:56+00:00

Wow! Once again launch was a blast and a little surreal — keep in mind I’m the sentimental type. It was my first launch away with me working in the Paris office. I had to pause for a sec and take it in: I’m watching the launch on Air Mozilla, sitting next to the greatest colleagues in Paris, and chatting/collaborating with folks in Bosnia, Chile, Macedonia, the U.K., Italy, Germany, and countless other places. Not too long ago I remember hearing about this whippersnapper of a browser (Firefox 1.0) and never dreamed I’d be contributing with such a great, passionate group of people.

As we’re wrapping up the 3.6 launch it would be helpful to see any great blog posts, reviews or stories on Firefox 3.6. Take a second to fill out our launch tracker with any good stuff you’ve found on Firefox 3.6 or you’ve done yourself. Thanks!

Mike Morgan: Rally Fighter visits Mozilla

morgamic — 2010-02-04T23:56:57+00:00

The Rally Fighter is an open source car with a huge community behind it. Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, took time out of his busy schedule to come talk about his experience with the Rally Fighter during lunchtime today.

He gave Mozilla a shout out and said we’re an inspiration for other companies trying to do things the right way and focus heavily on what people want and need. He also mentioned he’s an avid Firefox user and tries to install it on every machine he can get his hands on!

Another thing worth noting was his comments on crowdsourcing — that’s it’s not at all about getting a group to do a bunch of work for you. In many ways the textbook definition of crowdsourcing betrays the real value in it.

He said it should really be called co-creation because their community as well as potential customers for this car are a huge part of what the car will actually be and how it will evolve over time. It is a good way to look at things, and not very different from what Mozilla strives to do from day to day.

Overall, it was a great experience and the car is damn cool. Thanks to Jay and his team for visiting us. See more pictures here.

Caitlin Looney: Take a tour of the first version of Firefox on the Nokia N900

Caitlin Looney — 2010-02-04T23:02:29+00:00

Take a quick tour of the first version of Firefox on the Nokia N900. Fore more info, visit Firefox.com/mobile. To download Firefox directly to your Nokia N900, visit Firefox.com/m

Dan Mosedale: Lanikai Alpha 1

dmose — 2010-02-04T21:59:31+00:00

Thanks to hard work by a whole bunch of folks, we shipped Lanikai Alpha 1 (the first development release of Thunderbird after 3.0) yesterday. More details about Lanikai can be found on the project page.

This release is a first in several notable ways:

* we're now requiring automated tests to land with most code changes
* the release cycle was much shorter than any development release in recent memory
* we're now having to do development and releases across both a development and a stability branch.

We've already learned a bunch of stuff from all the changes, and I expect that learning to continue for a little while before we're fully in a groove.

Thanks to everyone who has been part of making the release happen!

Camino Blog: Camino is an About.com Best Independent Browser Finalist!

Smokey Ardisson — 2010-02-04T21:00:00+00:00

About.com has just released the list of finalists in the 2010 About.com Reader’s Choice Awards, and Camino is one of the five finalists in the “Best Independent Browser” category. We’re excited to be recognized, especially as the sole Mac-only browser in the category.

Voting runs through February 24, so if you’re a Camino fan, you can vote on this page. (You can access all the About.com Reader’s Choice Awards categories here and vote for your favorite sites and programs in other categories.)

Mozilla IT: Mozilla Scheduled Downtime – 02/04/2010, 7pm – 11pm PST (0300 – 0700 02/05/2010 UTC)

justdave — 2010-02-04T20:35:56+00:00

We will have a scheduled maintenance window tonight from 7:00pm to 11:00pm PST. The following changes will take place:

7:00pm – Upgrade the server ‘mradm01′ from RHEL4 to RHEL5 (bug 542454). Actual downtime is expected to be 30 minutes or less, but it may take through the end of the window to get all services completely functional again afterwards. This server hosts ns1.mozilla.org (DNS server) and the nagios slave (facility-wide system monitoring) for the MPT colo facility. DNS services are redundant (ns2 and ns3 will pick up the slack). We will be without monitoring in the MPT colo facility while the server is being upgraded, however. This means any problems that are normally automatically detected and cause the oncall sysadmin to get paged will not be detected or paged about during the outage. We ask that if anyone observes any such problems during the window that you report them in the #bmo channel on irc.mozilla.org (click the link to go there via your browser).

Please let me know if you have any reason why we should not proceed with this planned maintenance. As always, we aim to keep downtime to as little as possible, but unexpected complications can arise causing longer downtime periods than expected. All systems should be operational by the end of the maintenance window.

Feel free to comment directly if you see issues past the planned downtime.

Boris Zbarsky: Understanding the numbers your profiler gives you

bzbarsky — 2010-02-04T20:21:35+00:00

A common situation I run into is that I have some testcase, I profile it, then I optimize one of the things that looks slow a bit and reprofile. If I'm lucky, then the fraction of time it takes drops from B to A (A < B of course, with B standing for "before" and A for "after"). What does that mean for the overall time of the testcase?

Obviously, what it means depends on both A and B. If we assume that the time taken for the part that wasn't optimized hasn't changed, then the overall speedup is (1-A)/(1-B).

So B - A = 5% would mean a 2x speedup if B is 95% and A is 90%, and only a 1.05x speedup or so if B is 5% and A is 0%. If B is something like 53% and A something like 48%, then you get a 1.11x speedup.

All of which is to say that focusing on the hotspots is _really_ the way to go, if at all possible.

Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: WinCE builds disabled on release engineering

Armen Zambrano — 2010-02-04T20:16:33+00:00

We have turned off the WinCE builds in our release automation. This will give us back some of our CPU time for others builds.
Disabling these jobs is just as switching off the lights of a room, and therefore, it can be easily reversed.

I announce this on dev.planning and here is the link to the bug.

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Chris Cooper: All about the RelEng sheriff, revisited

Coop — 2010-02-04T19:37:46+00:00

This is a follow-up to Ben’s blog post about the RelEng Sheriff back in October. His post described clearly what the RelEng Sheriff (and more generally, the RelEng team) can do to help developers.

Since we implemented the RelEng sheriff (or “buildduty” as it is more informally called) last spring, developers have been getting better about using the buildduty person as the first point of contact for RelEng issues. I’d like to implore people to continue doing so. There are a few exceptions, of course:

It is outside of regular work hours and/or the designated buildduty person is not available; or,
you are already working on a bug with a specific release engineer.

We recognize that different release engineers have different core competencies, and it may be tempting to go “straight to the source,” but please respect our process. The process is in place to limit (as much as possible) the interrupt-driven nature of release engineering work and to minimize the impact of those interrupts on ongoing projects. In many cases, the person with the expertise you need will still end up helping you (we’re all in the same IRC channels, after all), but the buildduty person is specifically committed to helping you, even if only as a thin scheduling proxy for another release engineer.

Ben’s post had a good list things that RelEng can help developers with. Based on actual requests over the past few months, here are a few other services we can offer:

clone a virtual machine for one-off debugging/testing: Sometimes patches work on the try server but (for whatever reason) don’t once checked in. Sometimes tests fail or are intermittently orange. If you’re seeing issues like these after landing a patch, or need access to a specific platform for short-term work, the RelEng team can clone one of our reference machines and give you access (under certain circumstances).
grab build/extra logs from a build machine (provided they exist). This is often useful if a try server build generates extra, non-standard output

In both the above cases, the best thing to do is talk to the person on buildduty and then file a bug.

Conspicuously missing from Ben’s post was a list of what RelEng can’t do for you. While we can usually point you in the right direction, there are some things that we explicitly cannot do:

help you debug issues with your own local builds. We’re not (necessarily) build config experts, so unless you’re running with exactly the same configuration as our build machines and don’t have any code patches applied, you’d be better served asking the talented folk in #developers or posting to the newsgroups (m.d.builds or m.d.a.firefox)
shepherd your patch through the landing process. Standard patch landing rules apply: *you* are expected to be around when you land patches. If builds/tests fail and you’re not around, your patch will likely be backed out.

Need help finding the RelEng sheriff? Here’s the RelEng sheriff schedule.

Jono S. Xia: Test Pilot is going to CHI 2010

jonoscript — 2010-02-04T19:35:30+00:00

Good news, everyone: The paper that Jinghua and I submitted to the 2010 CHI (Computer Human Interaction) conference has been accepted. The conference is in Atlanta, Georgia, April 10-15.

In particular, we’ll be presenting as part of a workshop called “The Future of FLOSS in CHI Research and Practice” on April 11. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together the open-source community with the usability research community, which is exactly what we’re hoping to do with Test Pilot.

If you’re attending the conference and you’re interested in meeting up with us while we’re there, let me know! I would love to meet more people in the usability research community and get their ideas on how to improve the quality of our research.

The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Sponsors GNOME Accessibility Efforts

Melissa Shapiro — 2010-02-04T19:31:09+00:00

Editor’s note: Today, the GNOME Foundation announced a $10,000 grant from Mozilla to advance accessibility. See the full press release for full details. Included below is an excerpt from the release:

The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.

“The GNOME Foundation’s commitment to accessibility improves the desktop and Internet experience for millions of people, and Mozilla is proud to support this work,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.