Planet Mozilla

Bonjour Mozilla: Mime Cuvalo

clarista — 2012-02-09T09:00:00+00:00

Le bureau Mozilla de Paris a bien de la chance ! Depuis un mois est arrivé en son sein le formidable Mime Cuvalo, pour le plus grand bonheur des employés parisiens qui étaient déjà fans de son travail. Mime n’est pas un petit nouveau au sein de la communauté, loin de là ! On lui doit en effet l’indispensable FireFTP (client FTP basé sur les technologies Mozilla), ainsi que l’impressionnant FireSSH (qui permet de se connecter en SSH dans le navigateur). Aujourd’hui, Mime a quitté sa Croatie, et intégré l’équipe Services de Mozilla où il travaille notamment sur Firefox Sinc. Et vous savez quoi ? En prévision de son arrivée en France, Mime a appris le français ! Et il se débrouille très bien ! Bonjour Mozilla pense que Mime était fait pour ce pays, au regard de son look très classe de “Titi Parisien”. Mais ne vous fiez pas aux apparences : Mime n’est pas qu’un mannequin (;-)), c’est avant tout un homme de cœur qui pendant 7 ans a versé 50% des dons à FireFTP à des orphelinats de Sarajevo et en Croatie. Et depuis qu’il travaille chez Mozilla, 100% de ces dons sont utilisés pour soutenir la communauté LGBT à travers le monde. Alors… comment vous dire ? On ADORE Mime !

Bonjour Mime, et bienvenue en France !

How lucky is Paris Mozilla office! The great Mime Cuvalo has been there for a month already, to the delight of Parisian employees who were already fans of his work. Mime is not a newcomer in the community, far from it! He indeed created the indispensable FireFTP (FTP client based on Mozilla technology), and the impressive FireSSH (SSH login into the browser). Now, Mime has left his Croatia and integrated the Mozilla Service team where he works on Firefox Sinc. And you know what? In anticipation of his arrival in France, Mime learned French! And he is doing very well! Bonjour Mozilla think Mime was made for this country, considering his classy “Titi Parisien” look. Don’t be fooled though, Mime is not a model (;-)), he is above all a caring man who, for seven years, has given half of FireFTP donations to orphanages in Sarajevo and in Croatia. And since he works at Mozilla, it gives 100% of donations to the LGBT community worldwide. So… how to say it? We LOVE Mime!

Bonjour Mime, and welcome in France!

Daniel Glazman: CALL FOR ACTION: THE OPEN WEB NEEDS YOU NOW

glazou — 2012-02-09T08:39:00+00:00

The CSS Working Group, the W3C, the browser vendors and the Open Web need you, and I really mean you ALL. The following article is written by Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the CSS Working Group, but also represents an official discussion of the CSS Working Group and was decided by consensus in the Group. Members of the Group behind that decision include Adobe, Apple, Disruptive Innovations, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Not so long ago, IE6 was the over-dominant browser on the Web. Technically, the Web was full of works-only-in-IE6 web sites and the other browsers, the users were crying. IE6 is dead, this time is gone, and all browsers vendors including Microsoft itself rejoice. Gone? Not entirely... IE6 is gone, the problem is back.

WebKit, the rendering engine at the heart of Safari and Chrome, living in iPhones, iPads and Android devices, is now the over-dominant browser on the mobile Web and technically, the mobile Web is full of works-only-in-WebKit web sites while other browsers and their users are crying. Many sites are sniffing the browser's User-Agent string and filtering out non-WebKit browsers. As in the past with IE6, it's not a question of innovation but a question of hardware market dominance and software bundled with hardware. But there is an aspect of the problem we did not have during the IE6 era: these web sites are also WebKit-specific because they use only "experimental" CSS properties prefixed with -webkit-* and not their Mozilla, Microsoft or Opera counterparts. So even if the browser sniffing goes away, web sites will remain broken for non-WebKit browsers...

In many if not most cases, the -webkit-* properties WebKit-specific web sites are using do have -moz-*, -ms-*, -o-* equivalents. Gradients, Transforms, Transitions, Animations, border-radius, all interoperable enough to be browser-agnostic. Their web authors need only a few minutes to make the site compatible with Mozilla, Microsoft or Opera. But they never did it.

Without your help, without a strong reaction, this can lead to one thing only and we're dangerously not far from there: other browsers will start supporting/implementing themselves the -webkit-* prefix, turning one single implementation into a new world-wide standard. It will turn a market share into a de facto standard, a single implementation into a world-wide monopoly. Again. It will kill our standardization process. That's not a question of if, that's a question of when.

Let me be very clear: this is NOT hypothetical and I'm not discussing here something that could happen. All browser vendors let us officially know it WILL happen, and rather sooner than later because they have, I quote, "no other option". Let me also state very clearly that is NOT a lack of innovation on these browser vendors' side, in particular when they DO support a feature but with their own prefix, following here the Working Group's rules.

Vendor prefixes have not failed. They are a bit suboptimal but they also very clearly preserved Web Authors from chaos. We can certainly make vendor prefixes work better but we can only do that if vendor prefixes remain VENDOR prefixes.

This situation happened in the past with IE6, when browsers where desktop-only, and it took ten long years to recover. With billions of mobile browsers today, the Web may not recover at all.

THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN.

I am asking all the Web Authors community to stop designing web sites for WebKit only, in particular when adding support for other browsers is only a matter of adding a few extra prefixed CSS properties.

I am asking all the Web Authors community to remove immediately and stop implementing WebKit-based browser sniffing in web sites. You own such a web site? Show your support for the Open Web and remove that browser sniffing immediately after you finish reading this call for action.

I am asking the Web Design and Web Users community to stop recommending web sites that require one single browser while they could be open to multiple ones. Don't link them, mention them only to let the community know they fail serving the Open Web. Don't feed the trolls; blacklist them, whatever is the coolness of the service they provide.

I am asking the Web Authors community to update their online services to support the other browsers if these other browsers offer a level of CSS support they did not offer in the past. Do that NOW! Very little effort, big effect.

I am asking the whole Web community, all Users, to ping Web Authors and complain if their web sites work only for one rendering engine while it could work for many. Help us evangelize these Web sites to make sure the Architecture of the Web remains safe for all, remains based on consensual and open Web Standards, because browser vendors implementing the prefix(es) of other browser vendor(s) can only need to a chaos of the IE6 magnitude. We did it in the past for works-only-in-IE6 web sites and we did it well, now is the time to do it again for works-only-in-WebKit web sites.

I am also asking the browser vendors behind WebKit, namely Apple and Google, to submit as soon as possible to the CSS Working Group complete technical proposals for the proprietary CSS-like properties they have let the whole world use in iOS and Android devices, harming the Open Web. An example of such a property is -webkit-text-size-adjust. Please note the Apple representative to the CSS WG said it will happen, and I do thank Apple for that. If these properties are so well implemented and so useful to the mobile Web, they became de facto standards ; let's turn them as soon as possible into de jure standards through W3C standardization. I am also calling Apple and Google to remove support for the "experimental" versions of a property when the final one is implemented and shipped. We, and that we represents the whole Web Industry, cannot let the architecture of the Web become unsafe and unreliable keeping forever vendor prefixes that should be gone. That is harmful and this is your responsibility, because you could provide mandatory software updates to your users. The Open Web does not have to suffer of such a decision.

So please all express your opinion, help the Open Web and tweet or blog that you don't want to see this happen. Some of you already started, after reading the minutes of the CSS Working Group face-to-face meeting in Paris. Let Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera know this is the wrong way to go even if we understand perfectly both the diagnosis and their proposed solution. If browser vendors standardize the Web, it's really owned by Users and Authors and now is the time to let browser vendors remember it better. YOUR VOICE DOES MATTER.

I am finally asking you to relay that call for help. For that reason, comments are closed on this article. Use your blog, your twitter account, Facebook, Google+, whatever. But do it.

Jeffrey, Eric, Molly, Lea and all our friends of the Web Designers' community and/or Web Standards' community: please help us. Now.

If you're a journalist, I'm immediately open to interviews on this topic (please note I'm based in Europe).

Thank you.

Jess Klein: Open News Design Sprint Day 3: Meet the Journalists

Jess — 2012-02-09T04:04:53+00:00

After two days of doing a design sprint brainstorming about a tool that could help journalists learn webmaking, we decided to go right to the source for help. We invited about a dozen journalists to join us for a conversation today. We lucked out and got a fantastic group of professionals with a variety of different skill sets and backgrounds. Journalists showed up representing tons of different orgs, including: New York Times, Forbes, Gotham Schools, NYU Journalism Institute, Mashable, NYU ITP and the Huffington Post.

The main question that we asked this group was: "What do they you to make on the web?"We had a range of responses to this question. There we are a lot of answers in the categories of data manipulation, data visualization, interactives, and text based interactives.

"There are two categories: a special project that's a one-off that blows people away and wins awards. But the thing that's more interesting are the things that can sustain and help a community. A database of property transfers that is maintained and is there for someone to access when they want to find out about it. Something that continues, is sustained, and is part of the fabric of info flow in a community. Data that comes in and continues to live." (note that all quotes in this post are paraphrased from the session)

We delved into an interesting conversation about what journalists need to know in terms of learning about the underpinnings of webmaking. Many participants talked about wanting to learn skills that actually fall into the category of "design thinking."

"Journalists don't have the knowledge of when to use a map vs not use a map. Or from a story to getting more interactive. They need to understand that a story isn't just an article, that it can be a whole bunch of different things. design thinking methodology"

"When you get down to it, we have a history of jorunalists as writers. But the last thing you want is a situation when all the journalists become coders. The more powerful thing is to have more of that process--the methodology/training/etc. To run a group of coders, or talk to coders. To know enough about your topic to come up with ideas and know if something is feasable or not. Not to be condescending, but 'skills are for interns'<--- they are important to know to do, but nobody's going to make work-changing this just coding CSS. Skills are great and they're important, but it's about getting to understand the bigger picture. We spend a lot of time on, what do you call it, agile journalism."

I explained to the group that I personally have no interest in forcing anyone to learn how to code, but I was interested in learning about what would empower journalists to take an interest in webmaking.

"It's about showing them good work, and then showing them easy things--things that are very much within reach. It's about motivating them and liberating them."

"A big problem is internal. Which traffic cop gives the most tickets per parking meter: you dont' want to wait for six weeks for the data guys to come back to you with the answer. It's about being able to quickly test a hypothesis that could be interesting. There could be a story here--well, you want to know that quickly. Maybe the distribution of skills in the newsroom is 200 writers and 2 coders--it's going to be a long time before that. How much coding do you need to be able to play and test those hypothesis?"

"It's the bridge/demystification thing. There's a big wall--it feels like it. But then you go to hackjams and it feels attainable. It demystified it. When you realize those tools are attainable."

Mentorship and peer based learning was another topic that came up. One participant admitted to the group that he had signed up for CodeAcademy because of "social peer pressure" but then is now in the position where he has 6 untouched lessons in his inbox. This is because the great myth about something like CodeAcademy is that you are doing it with your friends. You signed up because your friends tweeted about it and you got all pumped up and signed up together- but then you are at home by yourself at the end of the day- not coding. Another participant talked about how she and a friend got a book and together followed all the steps to learn Python. After a month or so, they hired a "geek" to ask questions. We talked about how there are online communities for that like Stack Overflow or Quora- but these are often intimidating communities where a journalist would never think to go.

We asked for some initial feedback on the prototypes that we are working on. Here were some of their responses:

1) On the sequencing of learning content: Is the tag flashy enough to be the first thing that is taught in the instructional overlay?

some say yes, some say no. The yes came from a not super tech savy journalist "I don't want big blocks of text"

2) On the editing window: I see a lot of use of the immediacy of the left/right pane as tool

everyone agrees

"there is no internal demo tool other than building the page

3) On if this is useful: Yes: even myself, on my Tumblr, if I want to make a change, etc, I have to publish it, look at it, reload, etc, that's incredibly frustrating.

A bigger use-case for this is internal training, self training, etc. I'm throwing in on being the weekend home page editor.

4) On Badges: I can totally see only entertaining resumes from people with that badge. And if you don't have it, spend a weekend to earn it.

At the end of the session- Carl Lavin was generous enough to sit with me and tell me-- if we were going to do webmaking 201, 301 etc for journalists what topics would he want covered. He wrote out these cards for me:

I think these will be really useful when we start to build out learning pathways for our Mozilla learning offerings.

I spent a good deal of time picking the journalists brains as well about the topic that I have been struggling with this week- about framing this as a project about storytelling or something specifically for journalists- and many participants told me that they prefer the storytelling angle because it is something that can appeal to a larger audience. Some of the journalists told me that that "journalism" means different things to different people, but at the end of the day everyone has a story to tell. And that is something that I can bake into the prototype!

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mobile Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-08

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-02-09T04:00:09+00:00

Mobile/Notes/08-Feb-2012

< Mobile | Notes

Details

Wednesdays – 9:30am Pacific, 12:30pm Eastern, 16:30 UTC
Dial-in: conference# 95312
- US/International: +1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 95312
- US toll free: +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312
- Canada: +1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 95312
irc.mozilla.org #mobile for backchannel
Warp Core Vidyo Room

Schedule

TDB – See Major Topics

Major Topics for This Week

Beta Status: We are not releasing a beta this week. We made the decision that rendering performance (panning and checkerboarding) was not good enough for a beta release. Patrick and BenWa started work on using GL-layers in Gecko/Android to improve rendering performance. Work has also started on off-main thread compositing (OMTC) to make panning more responsive. Erin and Alex are working on schedule impact and planning.

We don’t know if this means Fx11 is not the release for Native. We are working to answer that today or tomorrow. <== we need the OMTC work to land in m-c before a new schedule can truly be set.
Work continues to drive down crashes, improve stability and improve UI responsiveness.

GL-Layers and OMTC: Work to convert mobile to use GL backed layers is happening at breakneck speed. We should have a demo of the GL-layers work at today’s Mobile Demo meeting.

We will use the Maple branch to continue the GL work
Builds are available and Fennec is demoable.
Working to get estimates on timelines and collateral breakage

ARMv6 Status: Ted and Mike have got armv6 starting up. See Ted’s tweet.

We need to stamp out any other ARMv6-related crashes
We need to look at performance characteristics

Chrome for Android: ICS-only and no Flash, but a pretty solid release otherwise. How do we match up?

Stand ups

Suggested format:

What did you do last week?
What are working on this week?
Anything blocking you?

Please keep your update to under 2 minutes!

James W. (snorp)

Kats

Last week
- fixed bug 718684 (positioning problems with form input inside iframes)
- investigated bug 719033, dupe of 717085
- fixed bug 723545 (futzing around with robocop makefile)
- fixed bug 723619 (allow grabbing painted surface afer animtions in robocop)
- fixed bug 720538 (double-tap could allow ending up with bad zoom/overflow + regression test)
- investigated bugs 720902 and 716096, dupes of 720538
- perused through unassigned bug list for some brain-dead things, duped/wfm’d some bugs
- fixed bug 724949 (add more regression tests)

Next week
- Do some perf measurements of cairo vs skia
- help as needed for the new GL layers code
- Land some gfx patches on beta that haven’t gotten there yet
- bug 723295 (startup crash on API >= 8 with no sdcard) – I had a fix but it was backed out; needs more code rewrite

Blockers
- Not get useful traces out of gdb (this used to work before on a linux build) which is making it slower to get gw280′s skia work up and running

GBrown

Last week:

Bug 720930 Robocop: testBookmark fails if there are no bookmarks
Bug 717023 convert robotium Log.* calls to dumpMessage calls
Bug 718827 Robocop: testBookmark uses key events
Bug 696095 Create Fennec startupCache at build time

Next week:

Finalize startup cache discussion?
More robocop and devicemanager work

AlexP

Last week

Worked on input issues in designMode document (Etherpad): bug 719121, bug 721393
- While investigating these found bug 723810, which affects the editing in designMode documents
- Discussed the issue with Masayuki, got some useful information
- Compared the implementation in XUL and Native
- Implemented a fix, which seems to work, but needs more testing

This week

Finish designMode document fixes
Work on the assigned bugs

Chris Lord (cwiiis)

- Last week
bug 720613 – java.lang.RuntimeException: Screen size of (480,800) larger than maximum texture size of 0
bug 722068 – Sub-tile invalidation isn’t working properly on pages with animations (fall out from bug 717283)
bug 722325 – Repeated areas of the page, or blank areas displayed momentarily after panning (layout regression from bug 720987)
bug 717349 – Telemetry to measure checkerboarding
bug 724230 – On-demand tile patches are risky and unnecessary without further patches/testing
Gave talk at FOSDEM about the state of Firefox Mobile with lucasr
Reviews

- This week
bug 725255 – Improve checkerboarding telemetry
bug 724928 – We could tell Gecko to draw less to improve checkerboarding
Help out with OMTC
Reviews

Chris Peterson

Last Week
- bug 715251 – Reduce overscroll distance and janky scrolling — IMPLEMENTING REVIEW FEEDBACK
- bug 708167 – Testing about:home without Placeholder initialization. — ON HOLD, WAITING FOR bug 723251

This Week
- bug 681192 – Investigating romaxa’s patches to avoid layer invalidation when scrolling — IN PROGRESS
- bug 706891 – Making axis scroll lock unbreakble (regression from XUL Fennec) — WAITING FOR REVIEW

Blockers
- Waiting for bug 723251 to fix placeholder screenshots before I can commit bug 708167 to sidestep displaying screenshot. :)

GCP

Last week
- Re-landed safebrowsing changes.
- Blogged about the safebrowsing changes.
- Added WIP patch to Sync preference migration (bug 715550)
This week
- Continue Sync preference migration.
- In process of moving the profile migration to use the ContentProvider instead of BrowserDB
Blockers
- Require working Password Manager (wesj? bug 704682 etc)

Brian N

Done
- bug 721776 – Bookmark is removed from bookmark list only after Fennec restart
- bug 722413 – Bookmark menu item not updated when deleting bookmark in AwesomeBar
- bug 724152 – Honor URL_SAFE flag for base64 encoding/decoding
- bug 722184 – Add keyword support to AwesomeBar searches
- bug 724194 – Allow editing bookmarks in AwesomeScreen
- bug 725213 – Add search engines from text input fields
Next
- Test cases
- More bugs

Sriram

Last week:
- Landed ICS specific landscape mode (bug 712687)
- Investigated Tabs-tray loaded and provided optimization options (bug 706819)
- Removed web apps shortcut in widgets
- Restricting the height of autocomplete popup (bug 711185)
This week:
- Newer replacements for default thumbnails (bug 721847)
- Fixing black portion shown on thumbnails (bug 721841) – backed out due to failures
- Avoiding tab indicator animations on rotation
- UI fix on URL bar to show default text
- Avoiding empty space on closing a tab (bug 722278)
- Avoiding jumping to top after tab close (bug 718268) – WIP
- Working on content branded about:home
  - Cleaning up about:home for faster startup is in progress
Blockers:
- None

WesJ

Last Week:

Bug 723200 – Enable multitouch by default on Android
Crash fixes

This Week:

Touch events cleanup
Password provider – got reviews yesterday. fixing today
Form history provider

Blockers

None

LucasR

Last week

Talk at FOSDEM
bug 723103 – Properly update about:home when history is cleared
bug 723841 – Bookmarks database consistency constraints
bug 719434 – ‘Tabs From Last Time’ not wiped on Clear History

Next week

More P1/P2 bug fixing (focused on DB and perf bits)

Blockers

None

MBrubeck

Forgot to do an update last week; this covers two weeks.

Done:

bug 723977 – Disabling Full Screen add-on does not disable full screen mode
bug 723917 – NullPointerException when removing a menu item
bug 720985 – Temporarily whitelist properties leaked by Fennec tests
bug 723480 – Mouse events in XUL Fennec broken by bug 721484
bug 723772 – Mousemove events broken in XUL fennec
bug 723746 – XUL Fennec uses non-tablet layout on ICS tablets
bug 720932 – Clean up default search engine code
bug 723084 – Remove observers when tabs are destroyed
bug 722808 – Back out c0ae127e29cd (bug 717522) because of nightly build failures
bug 719921 – Enable add-ons compatible by default for Fennec
bug 721459 – Enable WebSMS by default for B2G
bug 720400 – Crash in nsPluginInstanceOwner::RemovePluginView @ mozilla::AndroidBridge::EnsureJNIThread
bug 721301 – Disable font inflation by default in XUL fennec
bug 720614 – Disable WebSMS by default
bug 708774 – Always use fullscreen landscape keyboard in native fennec
bug 719557 – “Full Screen” add-on (window.fullScreen) has problems in native Fennec
bug 715275 – New default favicon images for different resolutions

Font inflation UI
Add-on preferences and other add-on manager bugs
Fixing some tests and other bugs

Margaret

Done:

Landed bug 719875 – Re-work tap-to-play plugins so that they work with back/forward navigation
Spent most of the week working with bookmarks
- Talked a lot with rnewman to figure out/file problems caused by sync
- Landed bug 724045 – createMobileBookmarksFolder doesn’t set title or parent
- Landed bug 716918 – Basic bookmarks UI to display mobile and desktop bookmarks separately
- Landed bug 725171 – Context menu is broken on bookmarks on the awesome screen
- Investigated (then passed off to lucasr) bug 723841 – Bookmarks database consistency constraints

bug 722020 – Fennec Native doesn’t show bookmarks in folders, or in desktop sequence
bug 724756 – removeBookmark can remove an arbitrary number of bookmarks
UC Berkeley Career Fair next Wednesday afternoon (Feb. 15)

Scott (jwir3)

Last Week:

Worked on Bug 713241: Font inflation on nightly.mozilla.org inflates the footer too much

This Week:

Working on a sg:crit bug in nsColumnSetFrame.
Continuing work on Bug 713241: Font inflation on nightly.mozilla.org inflates the footer too much
Taking some of the work on Bug 706193: footer text on nytimes.com inflated too much from dbaron as he’s as the CSS WG this week, although I’m not sure how much progress I’ll be able to make on this.

BLassey

Prepared for split release
Fixed Eclair builds (just in time for GFX to break them)

DougT

code reviews
meetings
crash kill stuff
- OMG:
- Wes just pushed a fix to the current top crash
- 3 more java crashes in the top 10.
- making good progress

MFinkle

Handed off Add-on Manager bugs to Matt
Focused on some planning and some MWC
Uplifting to Aurora
Picking up small bugs

Madhava

on behalf of mobile UX, who are all traveling or sick:

following and responding to ux issues in *existing* bugs as they’re resolved
otherwise, we’ve moved on to tablet and next version
- more on this soon and in bugs

Ian Barlow

Patryk Adamczyk

BenWa/AJuma

Work to convert mobile to use GL backed layers is happening at breakneck speed. We should have a demo of the GL-layers work at today’s Mobile Demo meeting.
Wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/OffMainThreadCompositing

We will use the Maple branch to continue the GL work, waiting for the repo to be cleared, currently still working off the kiwifox user repo.
Builds are available and Fennec is demoable.
Work towards: Displayport, Adreno crash fix, Layer positions, Buffer Rotation, Performance measurements & improvements, Artifact-free rendering after orientation change and keyboard appearance/disappearance
Working to get estimates on timelines and collateral breakage

Round Table

SUMO

Updating and creating new articles to support nativeUI; https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/Goals/NativeUIdocs
Question: Is there an opportunity to work on the menu? Having Settings & Add-ons under ‘More’ on gingerbread puts them further away than they were in XUL. Could they be moved back to the top?

QA

Filed all* the Java crashes that crash-stats knows about
waiting on the Beta plan will assist

Project Management

Just in case this wasn’t clear: We won’t have a schedule for beta and final until next week: we need to land the OMTC changes in m-c,before we widely circulate a new schedule. Landing is gated on the items being tracked in this bug and right now, we’re hoping to land to m-c in a week: bug 725095 OMTC: Land Android compositor
I will probably have a draft by the end of the week, but it will need to be approved and again, we need to see how the OMTC patch queue is looking before pick up where we left off; this will be testable on the Maple branch very soon.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Notes/08-Feb-2012“

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-08

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-02-09T04:00:05+00:00

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

< Firefox | Planning

« previous week | index | next week »

Planning Meeting Details

Wednesdays – 11:00am PDT, 18:00 UTC
Mountain View Offices: Warp Core Conference Room
Toronto Offices: Fin du Monde Conference Room
irc.mozilla.org #planning for backchannel
(the developer meeting takes place on Tuesdays)

Video/Teleconference Details – NEW

650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x92 Conf# 95312 (US/INTL)
1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 95312 (US)
Vidyo Room: Warp Core
Vidyo Guest URL

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren’t able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Actions from Last Week

Cheng to follow up with kev on AVG bustage in FF10

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

We plan to ship 10.0.1 (both mainline and ESR) with the following changeset this Friday (2/10): 18ce5e304e97

Beta (11)

Barring unexpected issues, Firefox 11 Beta 2 will ship this Friday (2/10)

Aurora (12)

Aurora 12 desktop was out to testers as of 2/3
Aurora 12 mobile was out to testers as of 2/7

Nightly (13)

Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)

Telemetry dashboard is now public! See Taras’ presentation for access details.

If you’re seeing long hangs on Aurora 12 or Nightly 13, please comment in bug 725110

Safe Mode: Auto detect previous start-up failure and offer to start in safe mode bug 294260
[New Tab Page] Set to enabled by default on Nightly bug 716538

Firefox Mobile

No mobile beta this week
- We are holding for performance issues
- Schedule is being reworked
Hi, Chrome on Android
- We will be adding Chrome to our competitive testing
- Solid beta, but not intimidating

Firefox Sync

Sync now has a Product Marketing Manager. Welcome to Greg Jost!
Native Sync
- did not go to Beta, along with native fennec
- Please file bugs. Not sure how to file a good android sync bug? http://160.twinql.com/how-to-file-a-good-android-sync-bug
- We have daily bug triage at 4pm
- You can find us on irc, #androidsync
- Old news that bears repeating
  - Data may be lost, reordered, or corrupted. Please do not use your good profiles
  - Migration from XUL to Native may cause your sync account to disappear
  - Please remember behavior is undefined if multiple instance of Native Fennec (nightly, aurora, etc) are on a single device
  - You still cannot create an account from a mobile device
Work has started on integrating BrowserID into Sync authentication
- The two sync systems will not be backwards compatible or interoperable
Coming to a release near you
- Firefox 10 has setup UI streamlining, mobile-to-mobile device pairing
- Addons being sync’ed in Firefox 11, XUL/tablet Fennec 11 (aka Beta): Addon Sync
- Native Sync has been enabled in Nightly & Aurora (but not Beta)

Add-on Builder

release today
shooting new tutorial today
all systems are still GO for launch next Wednesday February 15th

Add-on SDK

Release (1.4 -> Firefox 9, 10)

Found a nasty and released 1.4.3
- Important for developers using simple-prefs, simple-storage, or passwords APIs to take a look at:
- Blog post explaining issue and fix
- We wrote a module to help anyone affected “recover”

Stabilization (1.5 -> Firefox 10, 11)

Spun 1.5RC1 yesterday
Get started writing add-ons for Adnroid!
Still on track to release Feb 21, 2012

Development (1.6 -> Firefox 11, 12)

On track to merge to Stabilization on Feb 21, 2012

Add-on of the week!

Andrew Sutherland has written an SDK-based add-on called about:nosy to show “about:memory with charts, helps you lay blame more easily”

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 10:

AVG killing the enter button in the address bar. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
RealPlayer Video Downloader doesn’t work [12][13][14]
Norton isn’t compatible [15][16][17][18][19]
Can’t highlight/select text areas/missing cursor: [20][21][22][23][24][25]
Startup crashes [26][27]
General crashiness: [28][29][30]
We changed arrow keys to scroll 3 lines rather than 1: [31][32]
Extensions hidden/lost: [33]
Some HTTPs connections turning into connection reset: [34][35] — looks related to non-standard ports (used by internal services/routers)

Mobile

FF10 Android market feedback is consistent with previous XUL releases (performance and flash are top issues). NativeUI will fix both of these problems.

SUMO Days update:

We started SUMO Days on Nov 3rd and we answered 58% of the questions asked that first day.
We’ve been working to grow the contributors to our support forum and improve the SUMO web content every two weeks since.
Last week, we answered 81% of the questions asked and we’ve made a big improvement in the overall average of questions answered. So, huge congrats to the SUMO contributors for their hard work to optimize the site content and get us on a path to answering every user question every day.

UX & User Research

Research

The Mobile Diary project is now in the hands of our users. The project will help us learn more about user attitudes, behaviors, and use cases. If you want to get an in-depth look at user needs, consider attending a participant interview, scheduled in the SF Bay area on Feb 15-16, 18-19, and 21st. Get in touch with Mary Trombley if you’re interested.

Design

Australis project:
Translation designs in progress
Metro UI (Win design in progress
URL Autocomplete landed! Then disabled! Then hopefully enabled again! (might change to only complete for previously typed entries)
New download manager still awaiting landing
New tab refinements continuing, enabled by default, give us feedback!
Home tab in UX branch has launch targets for Bookmarks/History/Downloads, and Apps in the future

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

Google released a beta of Chrome for Android, based on a fork of the Chromium code (version 16.0.915.75). A major focus for the development team is to re-merge the trees; some of the work has been done. Because of the Java base of Android, a lot of work using Java Native Interfaces will have to be done, no doubt to improve device support.

Chrome for Android also has integrated support for a mobile remote debugger, allowing developers to debug or profile their mobile web pages and web apps using a desktop machine. Here’s a screencast demo. Developers are encouraged to ask questions on stackoverflow.com.

Google announced that Chrome would soon stop conducting SSL online revocation checks, using its existing software processes to distribute lists of revoked certificates.

The German government, in a general list of recommendations for computer security, recommended the Google Chrome browser, primarily because of its sandbox architecture.

Development versions of Chrome now feature a new Settings UI that is fluid and appears to make use of graphic acceleration; see the video at the link for a demo.

The Dev version also now has partial support for Web Intents — here’s a screenshot.

Microsoft

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be released on February 29 at Mobile World Congress.

The IE team’s blog posted a detailed summary of the upcoming support of CSS3 3D transforms, with some interesting demos.

In a related post, the team drew attention to the fact that IE10 embedded in Metro apps will have the same performance, unlike similar apps on iOS, which run more than three times as slow.

MSIE 10 will offer compressed proxy browsing.

Opera

The W3C blog posted an interview with two members of the Opera team. They said among other things that Opera Mini’s proxy browsing / compression features make it so popular with users in developing regions that carriers use it in their advertising. There’s also an interesting summary of their vision for HTML5 on television sets.

Other

RIM has announced that all the code in their SDK for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform will be open sourced. Code is available at http://blackberry.github.com and development of the HTML5 SDK is happening in the open there.

There’s a proposal at the W3C for the next version of HTML to support accessing image metadata in the DOM.

Strangeloop Networks released a “State of the Internet” report that indicates that while the average site is 10% faster than it was a year ago, top-ranked sites are getting bigger and slower, with the average home page containing 98 objects.

Mobile

This week we are talking about Chrome for Android beta. Summary below, detailed report in your inbox.

Yesterday Google launched Chrome for Android beta, as a first step towards making Chrome the standard browser for Android version 4 and above. The release supports Ice Cream Sandwich, ARMv7-based devices, which currently make 1% of the Android install base and account for a 3 million addressable base.

The browser is based on Chrome v16 and V8 v3.8 and has a multi-process architecture similar to the desktop version. It does not have plug-in support, and lack of Flash in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market. An Android Central poll asking “Is a lack of Flash support on the mobile browser a deal-breaker?” has 47% of Yes answers and 52% of No.

Its UA String is: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-US; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) CrMo/16.0.912.75 Mobile Safari/535.7)

Speed, simplicity and personal are its main user propositions, while tab management, user data sync, the Omnibox and its multi-process architecture are the main promoted features. For developers, Chrome comes with a remote debugging via USB feature and boasts Web standards compliance, extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration.

Its positioning speaks to speed, personalization and extension of the desktop. Branding is persistent in the product on the New Tab page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the desktop: friendly, light, easy-going, simple and straight to the point. Tagline is “Your Chrome, away from home.”

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

Finishing 3.6 Upgrade Display Ads this week.
Finalizing plans for next Firefox release.
Finishing Up devices page and reworking content silos on mozilla.org/firefox and mozilla properties.

Mobile

Re-visiting positioning and marketing plan for Firefox for Android
Preparing for MWC
Video for Firefox 11 launch

Press

Coming to Firefox: Flash Player in a sandbox

Questions, Comments, FYI

Do we have a plan for shipping Firefox 11 on patch Tuesday? If not, when/where will that be figured out? (bhearsum)
- We will go manual only until we are comfortable unthrottling (late in the week of 3/11, or early in the week of 3/18)
Update on feedback: HTTPs problem seems to be “connection reset” errors when connecting to servers on non-standard ports (may be self-signed cert specific)
When should Push/BiPostal/Notifications appear as a product here? [ally]

Actions this week

ally to coordinate with greg jost on sync uptake metrics, and measuring the impact of the FF10 usability changes
laura to report on the state of persona/personas discussion
cheng to report back on connection reset issues with SSL
johnath to wrangle representation in this meeting for identity

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08“

Ricky Rosario: SUMO Development: 2012.2 Update

2012-02-09T02:31:29+00:00

Yesterday we shipped the second half of the 2012.2 sprint. We ended up accomplishing most of our goals:

[Elastic Search] Perform full index in prod - DONE
[Elastic Search] Roll out to 15% of users - DONE
Add more metrics to KPI dashboard - INCOMPLETE (We landed 3 out of the 4 new graphs we wanted).

Not too bad. In addition to this, we made other nice improvements to the site:

New workflow for retrieving forgotten usernames.
Redirect mobile browsers to the mobile landing page.
Auto-subscribe people who reply to a question to that question's notifications.
Moved Army of Awesome reply text to Verbatim.
Some small UI and email wording improvements.
Fixed some regressions.

Great progress for two weeks of work! Some data from the sprint:

Closed Stories: 30
Closed Points: 38
Developer Days: 35
Velocity: 1.08 pts/day

Onward to 2012.3

We are now a little over halfway into the 2012.3 sprint. Our goals are to roll out Elastic Search to 50% of users, be ready to roll out to 100% (fix all blockers) and add 5 new KPI metrics to the KPI dashboard. So far so good, although we keep finding new issues as we continue to roll out Elastic Search to more users. That deserves it's own blog post though.

Robert Kaiser: Weekly Status Report, W05/2012

KaiRo — 2012-02-09T01:02:58+00:00

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2012 (January 30 - February 5, 2012):

Mozilla work / crash-stats:
Once we backed out the new plugin crash UI to get back missing plugin crash/hang reports in Firefox 10, we found a plugin hang regression in 11, which I filed.
I kept track of Socorro 2.4.1 landing on production and filed a bug on reprocessing Java crashes.
Did my first Socorro patch to force correlation reports for in-development versions! This also gave me a good chance to try how the GitHub process works.
Investigated adapter data on graphics crashes.
I stayed in contact with Laura on showing Java stack traces in crash reports.
Continued watching new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed.
FOSDEM:
I spent this weekend in Brussels for FOSDEM 2012, including a talk I held in the Mozilla Devroom on CSI:Mozilla - Crash Scene Investigations. It was a lot of fun, interesting conversations and presentations, about Mozilla and other FLOSS projects. Also, on Friday, I could sit with a few fellow Mozillians in a meeting area at the hotel, and I enjoyed every minute of that - it was great to for a change not sit alone when doing Mozilla stuff.
Various Discussions/Topics:
Settling the Fennec UA and changing the Gecko token of the Firefox UA, ESR, B2G/Gaia and L20n, etc.

As a long-time localizer, it did hurt me quite a lot that the plugin crash UI backout needed to be done on trees where it affected the string freezes. I wrote down the story of that in a comment on flod's blog. It's quite interesting how things look when you are standing on the other side of this. And we are only starting to get used to the finer details of rapid release, like for example those backouts of code that might cause string freeze breaches. We hope it's a rare thing that we need to do this, and I really hope we'll find stuff like this earlier in the future. Still, sometimes we probably need to do something like this, and we learned a few things from this experience. Let's hope we'll never get too used to this, though.

Pascal Finette: Coffee - The Rabbit Hole Edition

2012-02-08T22:58:45+00:00

As you might know I am pretty obsessed with good artisan coffee making (espresso to be precise). Recently I found myself in the middle of a long discussion about the “right” equipment.

Good coffee is pretty much a function of 1) the right beans, 2) the right grinder, 3) the right machine, 4) the right temper and 5) skill.

If you ever want to go down the espresso rabbit hole - here’s my current top 5 list.

I buy beans from tonx.org - these guys are positively obsessed about getting the right beans and roasting them to perfection. My second source is Verve in Santa Cruz, CA and if I get my hands on them, pretty much any beans from one of the many artisan roasters in Portland, OR and Seattle.
Baratza produces some of the finest burr grinders on the market. Their new Vario-W is phenomenal.
The espresso machine I now use is a Rocket Cellini Premium Plus, the tool of choice for a lot of coffee aficionados. A great alternative is the Izzo Alex Duetto.
Tempering is mostly about applying the right pressure. Getting the right temper tool helps a ton with this - the tool of choice for a lot of serious barristas is a Reg Barber. Personally I love their C-Ripple base - used by the World Barrista champion.
The videos produced by my favorite store Seattle Coffee Gear are an amazing starting point to learn how to pull the perfect shot.

Erin Knight: Open Badges Roadmap

2012-02-08T22:57:00+00:00

I posted last week on the Mozilla Learning Group roadmap. You might have noticed some aspects explicitly missing, namely all the awesome work around the Open Badge Infrastructure. That’s because its so awesome, it warrants its own roadmap!

2011 was a big exploratory year for Open Badges. We built initial pilots, had a ton of conversations with folks about badges and badge system design, planned/kicked off the DML Badge competition and launched the first version of the OBI.

2012 is a big implementation and roll out year - we will be releasing everything publicly in a way that makes it as easy for people to plug in as possible. We’ll put it out there and then get out of the way and let the ecosystem grow. Here are the things we know we need to do:

Release a new version of openbadges.org - including an overhaul of documentation and resources (end of Q1)
Build a demo to help people see the OBI. The OBI is built to be underlying plumbing and the Backpacks are private to each learner so there isn’t a lot to see by design. But we get that people need a little more to be able to grasp the concept, see what we’re building, etc. So we’re building a demo environment to help that happen. Will be available from the new openbadges.org by early March.
Release a public beta of the OBI. We released an initial private beta last September - it was more of a developer preview. Now we are working towards an open, public beta that includes:
- Fully developed issuer API
- First-party signing of badges (as an alternative to needed to host/maintain the badge assertion on your site)
- Fully developed displayer API
- Initial endorsement API - supporting third party signing of badges
- Legal considerations built in
Ramp up partners pushing badges in and pulling badges out over the course of the year. Get more badges in the ecosystem!
Release the 1.0 version by the end of 2012. There is a lot that goes into reaching ‘product’ level in Mozilla so this version will build on beta, add in additional features and meet product-ize requirements.

You can see the full current working version of the roadmap here.

We definitely are looking for suggestions/insights/etc. on this roadmap. Does this align with your plans for badges? Are there elements that are missing?

Definitely feel free to log thoughts/feedback through comments, but the best venue for discussion is our new Open Badges community call, each Wednesday at noon ET. Here are the details and notes from the kick off call - please join us next week!

Thanks,

Smokey Ardisson: Dear CCAS

Smokey — 2012-02-08T22:51:45+00:00

What follows is the text of my email reply to CCAS’s recent email announcing the availability of the latest newsletter.

At 4:17 PM -0500 on 2/8/12, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies wrote:

But I am delighted to present to you a new, redesigned newsletter using a cutting-edge technology, ISSUU. Rather than downloading a PDF from this e-mail, all you need to do is click on the link to ISSUU on our website and read the newsletter there! Note that ISSUU offers users some attractive features via the row of icons under the newsletter, such as searching the newsletter for key terms or names, leaving comments about the newsletter, posting the newsletter to social media, and downloading or printing the newsletter.

Seriously, Flash?! In this day and age? That’s not cutting-edge, that’s edge-of-extinction. Even a PDF is more accessible, and more widely supported, than Flash. (And, btw, PDF supports searching, too, since it’s *real text* and not an image. And those buttons that let you post to social media aren’t hard to implement; you could stick them next to a link to a PDF newsletter on the CCAS site. And if you really, really wanted comments, embedding something like Disqus on a page for each newsletter would still be easy, and far better than forcing everyone off to a third-party Flash content-locker.)

Plus, the Flash viewer is so buggy (it won’t zoom-on-click to a scale at which the text is readable, and using the zoom slider, the viewer gets stuck in pan-or-zoom mode, so any movement trying to read jars either the position or the zoom scale). It’s absolutely not a pleasant reading experience by any stretch of the imagination. Moreover, the content is stuck inside a Flash “window” specifically designed to show that it’s a container holding the content, inside a tab, inside my browser window with normal browser chrome; when I was viewing the old PDF Newsletters inside my PDF viewer, it’s just the Newsletter content inside that window (which has minimal chrome, allowing me to focus on the content and not the container). I gave up on trying to read the Newsletter in the Flash viewer very quickly. So I figured I’d just download a copy, hoping it’d let me read in my PDF viewer like I had been doing since you discontinued the print version (I loved being able to grab the printed newsletter and take it with me, reading it wherever I was), but, wait, now I have to sign up for some third-party service just to download a copy of the CCAS Newsletter that used to be freely available on the CCAS website?! Seriously?! And what happens when this third-party service shuts down or is bought out? There go all the CCAS Newsletters posted there.

I can understand if you wanted to move away from PDF to reduce download sizes, or improve accessibility, or improve the ability to “mash-up” and share the content, or to make the newsletter more widely available to multiple device types and to support reading habits/preferences, but to do that, you need to take a step forward, not backwards. Move to a nice HTML newsletter in that case. But not to Flash.

Please, can you make the newsletter available again as a simple PDF download from the CCAS site, instead of this Flash monstrosity and its “you must create an account with a third-party service and sign in in order to download a readable version” content wall?

Thanks,
Smokey Ardisson
MAAS ‘03

hacks.mozilla.org: Announcing the December Dev Derby Winners

John Karahalis — 2012-02-08T22:09:12+00:00

IndexedDB lets web applications store structured data for fast online and offline use. Data can be stored using key-value pairs, and values do not need to be serialized (as they do with document-oriented databases) or coerced into a relational structure (as with relational databases).

Recently, creative developers from around the world demonstrated just how powerful IndexedDB can be in the December Dev Derby. Please join us in congratulating the top three demos as chosen by our judges.

1st Place: eLibri by mar.castelluccio
2nd Place: FileSystemDB by mar.castelluccio
3rd Place: IndexedDB Editor by twolfson

Runners up:
Vurkout Buddy by wcheung
Locate It IndexedDB by nestoralvaro

Congratulations to our winners and to everyone who submitted to the December Dev Derby.

Do you want to see your name here next month? We are now accepting demos related to Touch Events (February), CSS 3D Transforms (March), and HTML5 audio (April). Get an early start by submitting today!

Chelsea Novak: More locales for Firefox Affiliates

Chelsea Novak — 2012-02-08T19:21:20+00:00

We just can’t stop addling locales to Firefox Affiliates! Everyone’s favourite site for sharing Firefox with the world is now available in Albanian, Croatian, Slovak, Serbian and Serbian Latin.

We’ve also added buttons for sharing Thunderbird in all locales and WebFWD, Mozilla’s open innovation program, which is available in EN-US only.

If you’d like to add a locale to affiliates (South Asia, I’m looking at you), please contact me or ping us in #affiliates on IRC.

hacks.mozilla.org: Wiki Wednesday: February 8, 2012

Eric Shepherd — 2012-02-08T19:08:48+00:00

Here are today’s Wiki Wednesday articles! If you know about these topics, please try to find a few minutes to look over these articles that are marked as needing technical intervention and see if you can fix them up. You can do so either by logging into the wiki and editing the articles directly, or by emailing your notes, sample code, or feedback to mdnwiki@mozilla.org.

Contributors to Wiki Wednesday will get recognition in the next Wiki Wednesday announcement. Thanks in advance for your help!

JavaScript

SpiderMonkey

Developing Mozilla

Extensions

XUL

XPCOM

Interfaces

Plugins

CSS

SVG

HTML

DOM

Eric Shepherd: Wiki Wednesday: February 8, 2012

sheppy — 2012-02-08T19:08:06+00:00

Contributors to Wiki Wednesday will get recognition in the next Wiki Wednesday announcement. Thanks in advance for your help!

JavaScript

SpiderMonkey

Developing Mozilla

Extensions

XUL

XPCOM

Interfaces

Plugins

CSS

SVG

HTML

DOM

&appId

about:mozilla: FOSDEM, Mozilla Antarctica, WebFWD and more…

leo — 2012-02-08T17:54:24+00:00

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

FOSDEM 2012
Last weekend many Mozillians attended FOSDEM in a freezing cold Brussels. A huge thank you to Benoit Leseul and team for organizing our efforts there. Rob Hawkes talked about open Web apps and open Web games, whilst Tristan Nitot announced six grants to international non-profits who will strengthen the Web, free and open source software and user sovereignty.

Mozilla Antarctica
The Mozilla Antarctica Community Site recently launched which will provide news, interviews and other stuff from the coolest Mozilla community. Not only do we love the penguins but Antarctica is the only continent to have a majority Firefox market share . Must be all the intelligent scientists using it!

Become a WebFWD Affiliate
Do you want to spread some open source love? You do? Great! Because you can now become a WebFWD affiliate and increase awareness of Mozilla’s open innovation program. Signing up is super simple and in a few clicks you can display your love of WebFWD.

Bedrock ready to go!
The Web Development team have finished the new Bedrock platform which will power the mozilla.org website. Bedrock is a complete rewrite of the site, clearing up years of cruft and implementing cool new features.

Interview with Nikhil Suresh
Havi Hoffman interviews Nikhil Suresh about Bouncy and the Apple, his non-violent 2-person shooter game which won him the November MDN Developer Derby. She learns a little bit more about Nikhil and what inspires him.

Meet Some Mozillians
Bonjour Mozilla says bonjour to Serge Gautherie, Melek Jebnoun, Tim Taubert and Felipe Gomes and Sean Martell. A special hello to (quite possibly) the youngest Mozillian on the planet: William Joseph Markham. Read more about how these people are contributing to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* February 10, Online – Firefox Beta for Android Test Day
* February 23, San Fransisco, USA – WebQA ‘Live’ Test Day
* See more on the Mozilla Community Calendar

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

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s contributor
engagement team and is published every Tuesday.

If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue,
please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla .

You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

Web FWD: Forming Your Company: Key Decision Points

2012-02-08T17:31:38+00:00

Congratulations! You’ve founded a cutting edge startup. You spend your energy creating your vision, collecting user feedback, charting milestones, recruiting awesome contributors, bringing on staff and branding your product or service.

Small wonder your first go at raising money throws you off guard. How’s a product visionary supposed to know about NQOs, dilution and Flexible Purpose Corporations, let alone how to make decisions around them? Arcane as these terms may seem, understanding them can have significant impact on your future success.

Help is here. Steven Levine, Partner at Fenwick & West LLP (whose clients include Dropbox, Square, Facebook, Twitter and some others you may have heard of) walked our teams through many questions that are best answered early in the incorporation process. Some of his guidance - including what state and even country to incorporate in - were surprising. For example, in making certain decisions, the location of your employees may be more important than the sources of your revenue.

As its blue-chip high tech client base would imply, Fenwick is in the thick of these kinds of deals and has lots of expertise to share. It conducts a quarterly survey of venture financings (available from their website). Even better, Fenwick has made itself available to answer any follow-on questions from our teams. The rest of us can check out Steven’s great presentation below.

Staś Małolepszy: An intro to L20n

2012-02-08T17:20:00+00:00

Last weekend I had a chance to quickly hop on the stage of the Mozilla devroom at FOSDEM and demo l20n to the audience.

It was a really cool moment for me. I’ve been involved to some extent in the project from its early stages, but only recently have I started contributing code to it.

My talk was a quick introduction to how l20n will look like from the developer’s and localizer’s point of view, with a couple of examples. With all the work on HTML bindings that Gandalf’s been recently doing, I was actually able to demo the examples running in the browser.

Check them out at http://informationisart.com/preso/fosdem2012/.

I’ve also created a short screencast that will walk you through the demo. It’s only 14 minutes long.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. You can download it and watch it with your favorite video player.

I hope you’ll enjoy l20n as much as I enjoy working on it!

Gervase Markham: Marketing

gerv — 2012-02-08T17:18:54+00:00

Although most open source developers would probably hate to admit it, marketing works. A good marketing campaign can create buzz around an open source product, even to the point where hardheaded coders find themselves having vaguely positive thoughts about the software for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. It is not my place here to dissect the arms-race dynamics of marketing in general. Any corporation involved in free software will eventually find itself considering how to market themselves, the software, or their relationship to the software.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Gervase Markham: Summer of Code 2012

gerv — 2012-02-08T17:16:15+00:00

Google has announced that they will be running the Summer of Code again this year, 2012. The Mozilla Project has had the honour of participating in every SoC so far, and intends to submit a request to take part again. This means we need to produce a list of suitable student projects in the next four weeks.

For those who are not familiar with it, Summer of Code is where Google pays students to work on free software projects – as long as those projects can provide support and a mentor for the particular task the student is undertaking. This is a great opportunity for us as a project to introduce new people to Mozilla, and for you as an individual to get new people involved in your team :-) In the past, it has been the source of major features of our flagship products. For example, the 3D web page debugging tool Tilt started life as a SoC project.

It doesn’t matter where in Mozilla you contribute. We are collecting project ideas for every part of the project – Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla, L10n, NSS, B2G, IT and many more. Can you think of an 8-week-sized task you might be able to guide a student through?

If you have a proposal, head over to the Brainstorming page, whcih is our idea development scratchpad. Please read the instructions at the top – following them vastly increases your chances of your idea getting added to the formal Ideas page.

Note that, in order to have much chance of going ahead, ideas need to have a suitable mentor. So if you submit an idea and you aren’t available to or suitable to mentor it, you may want to go about trying to find one by politely emailing experienced hackers in the appropriate areas of the code.

Rob Campbell: TextArea Fallback for SourceEditor going away

robcee — 2012-02-08T16:58:19+00:00

Some time ago, way back in the heady days of Firefox 7, Mihai Șucan began work to incorporate the Orion text editor into our codebase and landed it in Firefox 8. At the time, we had some concerns around accessibility and localization: would Orion be up to the task of being an in-browser editor for the Scratchpad?

We discussed some possible ways to mitigate this and settled on including a TextArea-based fallback. Mihai’s done a tremendous job of providing a SourceEditor API in the browser that abstracts a lot of Orion’s own interface into a more general-purpose editor widget. In Firefox 10, we’ve enabled Orion by default in the Scratchpad for the first time. Cedric Vivier used the SourceEditor API for the Style Editor and it’s worth noting that it does not support the TextArea fallback at all in Firefox 11.

Now we’re trying to add some important new features to the SourceEditor component. Things like “Find in File”, “Incremental Search”, “Context Menus”… Y’know, things you’d expect from any normal text editor. The TextArea fallback has made that increasingly difficult to do and in some cases, impossible. The cost of maintaining this API has become untenable for future work.

So we’ve removed the TextArea fallback for Firefox 13.

This may have some unforeseen implications for us. We discovered earlier this week that at least one popular addon was using the SourceEditor and I wanted to broadcast this here just in case there are other developers or users who rely on the TextArea fallback. If you are one of these people and this is going to cause pain, please post here, to dev.apps.firefox or file a bug.

Henrik Skupin: How I fixed a Mozmill freeze by bisecting Python

Henrik Skupin — 2012-02-08T16:33:50+00:00

Last week we had a very frustrating situation with Mozmill. It caused us some headaches because it came up at the time when we tried to trigger our new test-run for add-ons ‘Default to Compatible’ for the first time. While I was working on the necessary Python script and testing it excessively on OS X 10.7, I haven’t noticed any issue. Everything was working as expected. Then I asked William Lachance to assist me in testing the script on Windows and Linux. So as you may guess now, he came back to me with a strange issue which was constantly happening for him on both platforms. In detail the script was able to start the Mozmill tests but when Firefox had to be restarted the Mozmill process kept hanging and caused multiple instances of Firefox to be opened after a while. Because I have never seen a situation like that I asked him to file a bug. A bit later we got bug 722707 which we had to investigate and fix quickly now.

Because it was already too late for me to start working on the investigation, I asked Clint Talbert to have a look at it if possible. He did and came up with an instrumented patch including a lot of debug statements. Also his comment on the bug showed me that something should be really wrong in the network.py module of JSbridge:

So, this is the closest to one of those “how the hell did this ever work” moments I’ve ever seen.

While Clint delivered helpful information it was still hard for me to know where to begin with the investigation of this regression. So my first task was to setup the system as used for DTC testing for Windows and Linux. Running my tests under the same conditions should hopefully reveal the same issue for me. And voila, already the first test-run on Windows and Linux showed me the same results as William has seen. I was really surprised. So what has been changed? I would probably see when diving deeper into the issue.

Because the script for DTC testing is only a wrapper script which calls some of our existing Mozmill test-run scripts from the Mozmill Automation repository, I executed one of those to check if my above mentioned script has caused this regression. This was not the case because the Endurance test-run was also affected. What!? How can this be? Why don’t we see this issue on our own boxes which do the daily and release tests? It was getting more mystically. So as next step I did a test with the pure mozmill-restart command and executed the endurance tests from our Mozmill Tests repository:

$ mozmill-restart -b /home/builds/nightly/firefox -t tests/endurance/

As I have already expected this test also failed. I thought: ‘What a bummer!’ but was happy at the same time that it has not been caused by my code. So we clearly had a problem with Mozmill on those platforms. But why? Ok, lets figure that out now. The only variations I was able to think of were the following changes which happened in the last couple of days:

A possible system update for Ubuntu and Windows could have caused this in our VMs.
For the Mozmill Environment we moved to a newer version of virtualenv.
Platforms have different versions of Python installed. While OS X Lion is still using Python 2.6.7, Linux and Windows are with Python 2.7.2.

The first thing I tried was to rollback the Windows VM to a snapshot which was clearly working. After doing so and updating the Mozmill Environment to the latest version, I haven’t seen any difference. Mozmill still hangs when Firefox gets restarted. So what’s next? I replaced the Python 2.7.2 installation on the Windows VM with Python 2.6.7, because it hasn’t shown the problem on OS X. After the environment has been rebuilt, the next test-run was successful and the hang didn’t occur anymore. That means we have a regression based on a change in Python between 2.6.7 and 2.7.2. Yay, I’m getting closer! Next, figure out the exact Python version which caused Mozmill to fail. That was a quick task because only Python 2.7 and Python 2.7.1 had to be tested. As the results have been shown the regression has been caused by Python 2.7.2. That also makes it clear why the failure didn’t occur on OS X up to Lion.

So which changes have been made in Python 2.7.2? Checking the download page of Python revealed the necessary information in the change log. But those are way too many changes to get any idea of possible candidates. It looks like that I have to test nightly builds of Pythons. Asking in the Python channel on Freenode where those builds can be found, I got the answer that for Python no nightly builds are getting produced and I should use ‘hg bisect’ to get the wanted changeset. Hm, I clearly have not expected to build Python on my own. But well, it looks like that this is the only way to get closer to a possible fix.

Because I haven’t setup Windows as a build machine, I planned to do the regression test on OS X. But that also meant that I had to check if Python 2.7.2 on OS X is affected too. Thankfully the Python Developer’s Guide gave me all the information to get started with the build process. The first step is to clone the Mercurial repository of Python:

$ hg clone http://hg.python.org/cpython

Afterward you have to run the ./configure script in the newly created cpython subfolder to setup the build process for your platform:

$ ./configure --with-pydebug

With that done I have to find the correct tag of the Python 2.7.2 release:

$ hg tags
...
v2.7.2                         70777:8527427914a2
v2.7.2rc1                      70508:f48756685406
v3.1.4rc1                      70504:32fcb9e94985
...
v2.7.1                         66511:5395f96588d4
...

Now it’s easy to update the code and get the build process started:

$ hg up v2.7.2
3570 files updated, 0 files merged, 714 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ make -j8

The good thing on Python is that most code is located in Python modules and the interpreter itself can be build really quick. With my 8-core CPU the initial build took about 1 minute only. Wow!

To be able to run Mozmill tests the local site-packages folder of the custom Python build has to be prepared. I wanted to avoid that by creating a new virtual environment with the Python build as interpreter but that didn’t work:

$ virtualenv -p ./python.exe test
Running virtualenv with interpreter ./python.exe
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 2098, in <module>
    main()
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 928, in main
    never_download=options.never_download)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1029, in create_environment
    site_packages=site_packages, clear=clear))
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1166, in install_python
    copy_required_modules(home_dir)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1118, in copy_required_modules
    dst_filename = change_prefix(filename, dst_prefix)
  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1103, in change_prefix
    (filename, prefixes)
AssertionError: Filename /Volumes/data/code/cpython/Lib/os.py does not start with any of these prefixes: ['/usr/local', '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages', '/usr/local/Extras/lib/python', '/Volumes/data/code/cpython/~/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages']
[39360 refs]</module>

So I ended up with installing setuptools and Mozmill manually into ./Lib/site-packages:

$ export PYTHONPATH=./Lib/site-packages/
$ curl -O http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
$ python ez_setup.py --install-dir Lib/site-packages/ setuptools
$ Lib/site-packages/easy_install --install-dir Lib/site-packages/ mozmill==1.5.8

Because we want to start Mozmill via the mozmill-restart command, we have to change the interpreter of the Lib/site-packages/mozmill-restart script to point to our self-build Python interpreter. Simply replace the shebang with your local path, e.g. #!/data/code/cpython/python.exe.

Now the tests can be executed with:

$ Lib/site-packages/mozmill-restart -b /Applications/Firefox.app/ -t mozmill-tests/nightly/tests/endurance/

As I was hoping the issue is reproducible with Python 2.7.2 on OS X. That gives me the chance to start bisecting with hg to find the causing changeset. To initialize the bisect module of hg a good and bad build have to be specified. Because the bad revision is already set, it can directly marked as bad:

$ hg bisect --bad
$ hg up -r v2.7.1
1388 files updated, 0 files merged, 34 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg bisect --good
Testing changeset 68537:2baaabf6bb05 (580 changesets remaining, ~9 tests)
1302 files updated, 0 files merged, 2 files removed, 0 files unresolved

All in all that gives us 580 changesets to test. Mercurial is kinda good in estimating the amount of tests, so we can expect to build Python and to run the Mozmill test about 9 times. The next changeset to test ‘2baaabf6bb05‘ gets automatically selected by bisect. We only have to build and execute the test again. For me the above changeset also failed and has to be marked as bad:

$ hg bisect --bad
Testing changeset 67486:e4d07a6f7abf (290 changesets remaining, ~8 tests)
1248 files updated, 0 files merged, 2 files removed, 0 files unresolved

Repeat those steps by specifying –bad or –good until the first bad changeset has been found:

The first bad revision is:
changeset:   68064:965ab9911fcd
branch:      2.7
parent:      68057:1797300f87b9
user:        (removed due to privacy)
date:        Thu Mar 03 14:17:51 2011 +0000
summary:     Merged revisions 88722 via svnmerge from

So what has actually be changed? With the changeset ‘965ab9911fcd‘ in the hand we can check the remote repository for more information about this specific changeset. As you can see it’s a SVN merge changeset which itself contains changes for 7 issues. Given Clint’s former information about network.py and asyncore involved lets see if we can find something specific in that area. And yes, there is only revision 88722 which exactly has code changes in asyncore.py. Lets focus on it.

With this revision a new array named ‘_DISCONNECTED‘ has been introduced. It contains all those error codes the module has to take care of. Therefore some lines of code have been changed to use this new array. For us it means one of those lines should have caused the freeze in JSbridge. For me the easiest solution was to simply revert those lines step by step to the old code, and building and testing again. In the forth cycle with reverting line 1.47 the issue was fixed and no hang occurred:

-  if why.args[0] in [ECONNRESET, ENOTCONN, ESHUTDOWN, ECONNABORTED]:
+  if why.args[0] in _DISCONNECTED:

Because those two rows don’t give as much as information as I need to fix the bug in JSbridge, lets check the the current version of asyncore.py in which method the change has taken place. So it’s:

def recv(self, buffer_size):
        try:
            data = self.socket.recv(buffer_size)
            if not data:
                # a closed connection is indicated by signaling
                # a read condition, and having recv() return 0.
                self.handle_close()
                return ''
            else:
                return data
        except socket.error, why:
            # winsock sometimes throws ENOTCONN
            if why.args[0] in _DISCONNECTED:
                self.handle_close()
                return ''
            else:
                raise

So which entry in _DISCONNECTED is causing this problem? Comparing the change ‘EPIPE‘ and ‘EBADF‘ have both been added. Lets remove ‘EPIPE‘ and test again… That didn’t help, so what about ‘EBADF‘? Yeah, with it removed the hang is gone. So we have the cause of the problem. But what is that ‘EBADF’ code? Checking the Python documentation for error codes shows:

errno.EBADF
Bad file number

We do not have a file descriptor here, but it should also be thrown for a bad socket connection. And with the code changes from above the recv method now handles such an exception on its own. It’s not getting passed to the caller method anymore. Could this be related? Lets check the code of JSbridge and where the recv method gets called:

def read_all(self):
        import socket
        data = ''
        while 1:
            try:
                data += self.recv(4096)
            except socket.error:
                return data

There is only one instance in the network.py file and it’s part of the Telnet class. Here we are entering a while loop which will always run until a socket error happens. What? Really? This looks really suspicious. As I have mentioned above the code in asyncore.py takes care about socket errors itself and doesn’t pass it to the caller anymore. But here in JSbridge we rely on such an exception to break out from the infinite loop. So this is definitely the problem which needs to be fixed. We are only allowed to run the loop as long as a valid socket connection exists.

At the end the patch to fix this hang in JSbridge was kinda simple:

-        while 1:
+        while self.connected:
             try:
                 data += self.recv(4096)
             except socket.error:
-                return data
+                break
+        return data

Now the loop is getting aborted when the socket connection gets closed. And I kept the except clause to ensure the backward compatibility with Python <2.7.2.

This patch has been checked-in on all development branches for Mozmill and the fix will be available in the upcoming release of Mozmill 1.5.9.

For me it was a wonderful and exciting challenge to figure out the real cause and finally being able to fix the hang in Mozmill or better in JSbridge.

Laura Thomson: The Fifteen Minute Maker’s Schedule

laura — 2012-02-08T15:39:58+00:00

If you haven’t read Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Managers Schedule”, I recommend doing that before you read this or it won’t make any sense.

The Maker’s Schedule makes sense to me in a work setting, but how about for side projects, things you’re trying to do after hours?

I started fomenting this blog post a while ago. A very good engineer I know said something to me which I must admit rubbed me up the wrong way. He said something along the lines of, “See, you like to write for fun, and I like to code for fun.” Actually, I really like to code for fun too, but it’s much easier to write than code in fifteen minute increments, which is often all I have available to me on any given day.

Let’s be clear about one thing: I don’t think of myself as a consumer. I barely watch TV, only when my two year old insists. I can’t tell you the last time I had time to watch a movie, and I haven’t played a non-casual video game since college. I do read books, but books, too, lend themselves well to being read in fifteen minute increments.

I want to be a producer: someone who makes things. Unfortunately my life is not compatible with these long chunks of time that Paul Graham talks about. I think any parent of small children would say the same. When you’re not at work you are on an interrupt-driven schedule: not controlled by management, but controlled by the whims of the little people who are the center of your universe.

This is how I work:

When I’m doing one of the mindless things that consume some of my non-work time - showering, driving, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, laundry, barn chores - I’m planning. Whether it’s cranking away on a work problem, planning a blog post or a plot for a novel that I want to write, thinking of what projects to build for our next PHP book, mapping out a conference talk, planning code that I want to work on. This is brain priming time. When I get fifteen minutes to myself I can act on those things.

In other words, planning is parallelizable. Doing is not. Since I have so little uninterrupted time to *do*, I plan it carefully, and use it as much as I can.

When I get the occasional hour or two - nap time on a weekend (and to hell with the laundry), my husband taking our child out somewhere, or those blessed, perfect hours on a transcontinental flight - I can get so much done it makes my head hurt. But those are the exceptions, not the norm. I expect that to be the case until our child is a good deal older.

I had to train myself to do *anything* in fifteen minutes. It didn’t come naturally, but I heard the advice over and over again, particularly from women writers, some of them New York Times bestsellers. One has five children and wrote six books last year, so it can be done. The coding is coming. Training myself to code in fifteen minute increments has taken a lot longer than training myself to write in the same time.

The trick is to do that planning. Train your mind to immerse itself in the problem as soon as you get into the zone where your brain is being underutilized. This kind of immersion thinking has been useful to me for years for problem solving, and I just had to retrain myself to use it for planning.

In summary: don’t despair of Graham’s Maker’s Schedule if you just don’t have those big chunks of time outside of work. You can still be a maker. You can still be a creative person. You just have to practice. Remember: the things that count are the things we do every day, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes.

Ross Bruniges: Come work with me for the Mozilla Foundation

Ross Bruniges — 2012-02-08T14:30:45+00:00

At the moment I’m the only developer on my team at Mozilla, in fact I’m the only person in my team. I am “Team Ross”. Thankfully in March this will change, we’ve already hired a designer and we’re looking to add at least another developer to work on supporting the Mozilla Foundations work, events and communities.

If that’s already got you wanting to apply then please have a read of the job spec and get your application in – http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oIkXVfwE. If you’re looking for more information please read on…

What will I be working on?

Short answer – lots!

Detailed answer – just this week we’ve launched a the new Knight-Mozilla Open News partnership. The site right now is pretty basic and there are tons of improvements that need to be made. We want to do something around our events platform, including getting an events platform; you can read more about that through the thoughts of Ben Simon on the infrastructure of self-organising and Michelle Thorne on potential feature requests for web makers (trying to crowd source what things we might initially need). Mozilla are running a partnership with the National Science Foundation, Geni, Ignite and the White House called Mozilla Ignite so there is work to be done on that site as we build out the feature set there. Then there is the Mozilla Festival… So yeah, we’ll make sure you don’t get bored.

“Team Ross” as it currently stands (or sits) – come make it a proper team!

Of course all of your work will happen in the open – your code will be on github, our dev servers will have public access as will our bug tracking systems and wikis. I’ve found this a really exciting part of the job so far and it’s certainly not as scarey as you think it might be – people when commenting on your code are helping you make it better and there is a global knowledge base to tap into.

What technology will I be using?

Mozilla are a web company so everything will be based around HTML5. Server side we’ve got projects running on Django (using Mozilla Playdoh), nodejs and wordpress. We’re not tied to one technology and decide on a project by project basis what is the best fit in terms of what’s most useful for the client and can produce the best experience for our end users.

Where can I work from?

Mozilla have, or soon will have offices in 9 locations worldwide but also are very open to remote working. So where ever you are reading this from if you think you’re a good fit then please apply!. London will have it’s office opening in the next month or so, I’ve been in, it’s looking great and has a good location in Covent Garden; it will also come with it’s own bar!

So where do I apply?

As mentioned above you can apply (don’t forget to include a github/bitbucket/googlecode URL) at http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oIkXVfwE

Any further questions then please ask in the comments.

Bogomil Shopov: Troll as a marketing asset?

Bogo — 2012-02-08T11:39:36+00:00

/The Troll Dad/

I was inspired by Lydia‘s talk during FOSDEM to share some thoughts about using trolls as a marketing asset.

Define

I am sure you know what is a Troll, but anyhow there it is, directly from UD:

A dumbass who makes idiotic posts in message boards newsgroups for the sole purpose of pissing people off, often lacking in intelligence. Sometimes compared to people who pass you by on the sidewalk then grab you in inappropriate places.

More “official” definition, can be found here at Wikipedia.

Trolls in action

I know couple of companies that are feeding the trolls, yes they have special policy and people to do that.

The reason is quite simple:

More trolls
More “discussions”
More page views,
More banner views,
More money in company’s pocket.

Trolls & flame-wars

I know some companies that are publishing flame-war blog posts to attract more trolls why?

More trolls = more content
More content == more developers to fight for their positions
More developers == more leads
More leads == More sales
More sales == More money in company’s pocket.

That’s it.

Alexander Surkov: Firefox 11 for AT developers

Alex Surkov — 2012-02-08T09:38:36+00:00

Here's an update what's new in Firefox 11 (beta, release on March 13) for assistive technology developers.

HTML

CSS generated tables (CSS display:table style) are exposed as layout tables. Originally this piece of work was targeted to Firefox 10 but we weren't in time to make this happen.

HTML table cells (HTML th and td elements) gained new not standard axis and abbr object attributes.

The axis object attribute is direct mapping of HTML @axis attribute. This object attribute is supposed to help AT to extract semantic of rich HTML tables in the web. Granted, this HTML attribute is not wide used on the web but we wanted to break the chicken-egg problem: browsers/AT don't support it iff web authors don't use it.

The abbr object attribute is less academic than previous one and useful to pick up short accessible name for header cells, for example, it makes sense when the user traverses through table cells and screen reader announces related heading information for each cell. The user doesn't want to hear long header cell names on and on: that's what abbr object attribute is supposed to help to. This object attribute is exposed in two cases:

HTML abbr element is inside the table cell
@abbr attribute is used on table cell

Examples:

  <th id="th1"><abbr title="Social Security Number">SS#</abbr></th>
  <th id="th2" abbr="SS#">Social Security Number</th>

HTML acronym and abbr elements allow @title attribute for accessible name computation. This can be illustrated by following example:

  <input id="input">
  <label for="input"><acronym title="O A T F">OATF</acronym></label>

Accessible name of input accessible is "O A T F" now.

HMTL5

HTML5 figure and figcaption elements are now accessible. The figure element is exposed with generic MSAA ROLE_SYSTEM_GROUPING and ATK ATK_ROLE_PANEL roles because neither IAccessible2 nor ATK provide more suitable roles. AT can rely on xml-roles:figure object attribute to detect figure element. HTML figure element picks up accessible name from figcaption element which is exposed with IA2_ROLE_CAPTION / ATK_ROLE_CAPTION role. The figure and figcaption accessible objects are linked by LABELLED_BY / LABEL_FOR relations.

The content of HTML5 canvas element is not accessible still but Firefox 11 started to expose an accessible object having IA2_ROLE_CANVAS/ATK_ROLE_CANVAS role for canvas element itself. Not big deal but it's a good first step on canvas accessibility.

ARIA

ARIA attributes used on HTML file element (input@type="file") are propagated to underlying text field and "Browse" button, i.e. accessible states defined by these attributes are inherited.

ARIA combobox (@role="combobox") fires MSAA EVENT_OBJECT_VALUECHANGE event and ATK accessible-value signal when option is changed. Here's an example of ARIA combobox widget.

Correctness

IA2_STATE_ACTIVE/ATK_STATE_ACTIVE state is exposed on active item for standard composite widgets like HTML select elements. The state can be used for example to detect the current item of the widget when the widget isn't focused. We make our implementation closer to ARIA widgets where aria-activedescendant technique is used. Another side of this code unification is IAccessible::accSelect called with SELFLAG_TAKEFOCUS flag can be used on widget items now.

Small fix for IAccessible::get_accName that returns S_FALSE when the accessible object doesn't have accessible name. Not big deal. Done for consistence and meet MSAA spec.

Bonjour Mozilla: Nikola Matosovic

clarista — 2012-02-08T09:00:00+00:00

(Photo : Brian King)

Il est le visage emblématique de la communauté Mozilla en Croatie et vient de publier un billet sur son blog rédigé sur 3 mois dans lequel il raconte par le menu ses premiers pas aux côtés du Panda Roux en tant que Reps. Ambitieux, Nikola Matosovic est bien décidé à bâtir une communauté importante dans son pays… Et c’est bien parti ! Il a déjà réussi à convaincre quelque 30 personnes de contribuer à Mozilla ! Il faut dire que Nikola est un remarquable organisateur, ainsi qu’un garçon enthousiaste et très sociable. C’est donc logiquement qu’il est candidat pour accueillir le prochain MeetUp pour les Balkans.

Bonjour Nikola ! Et merci !

PS : Bonjour Mozilla serait motivé pour participer à ce meetup ;-)

He is the iconic face of Mozilla community in Croatia and has just published a post on his blog written during about three months in which he tell in detail his first steps with the Red Panda as a Reps. Ambitious, Nikola Matosovic is determined to build a large community in his country… And he started well with 30 people already convinced to contribute to Mozilla! I must say that Nikola is an outstanding event organizer and a very enthusiastic and sociable boy. He is therefore logically volunteering to host the next Balkan MeetUp.

Bonjour Nikola! and thank you!

PS : Bonjour Mozilla would be very happy to participate to this meetup ;-)

Brett Gaylor: Mozilla Popcorn aka The Meme Generating Machine

2012-02-08T05:28:00+00:00

meme ( /ˈmiːm/) “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”

“A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus—that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” - Malcolm Gladwell”

We need Mozilla Popcorn to become a virus.

Hear us out here.

In our early iterations of Popcorn Maker, we’ve been tackling the problem of how to make it easy for non-programmers to create Popcorn experiences. It remains the central focus of the project, and we’ve fleshed out our User Stories to imagine the full experience that a user might have. Ben has described these stories in a recent blog post.

During our Popcorn Maker sprint, we put a lot of thought into imagining how our users’ creations will get shared and disseminated on the web. Ben has blogged about how Popcorn.js is a gateway drug to learning JavaScript (Also of the good sort. Stay with us). Similarly, we want Popcorn Maker to be a tool for injecting the Maker meme onto the web.

Fork my meme

To do this, we’ll need to do a few things. First, we need to make it easy for Popcorn makers to embed their creations on their own blogs, Tumblrs and websites. This means offering embeds.

More interestingly, we want to give viewers the ability to fork others’ Popcorn productions. If you’ve watched Jonathan MacIntosh’s Buffy Vs Edward pop-up video remix, for example, wouldn’t you love the ability to easily clone his creation and add to it?

Each Popcorn creation needs a post-roll that offers viewers the ability to 1) Replay, 2) Share and embed, and 3) Fork this creation.

Popcorn Gallery

To build WordPress-like community scaffolding, we need the ability for every single creation to be made available in the Popcorn Gallery. When users choose to [Share] from Popcorn Maker they have an option to share to the Gallery that is checked by default. While the Gallery will favour our default templates, it will become a jumping off point for new creators to get started with Popcorn. It will solidify the notion that creating on the web is generative. The act of creation will start by building on someone else’s work.

We think Popcorn will be a good bug to catch. Like getting the chicken pox when you were a kid. Or maybe more like taking an interest in photography. We’re sure this is the right metaphor. Note: knock knock jokes, box stores and lolcats were all considered as alternatives while titling this post. Go meme or go home.

Web Made Movies: Roadmap Popcorn Maker 1.0

ben — 2012-02-08T05:23:23+00:00

We are hard at work on Popcorn Maker.

Currently at version 0.1, Popcorn Maker is a little crufty. But Popcorn Maker 1.0 will hit hard in November of this year.

Popcorn Maker 1.0 will empower you to make cool web-based media, whether you’re a beginner or pro. With over 20 plugins—ranging from Twitter to Google Maps to video processing—you’ll be able to stitch up a stylish video that’s “woven” into the web. And, of course, it’s 100% free and open source.

Users will be able to publish and share their creations on their blog, Twitter, or Tumblr (or just grab the code). And the app will reward them for learning more advanced HTML, CSS, and Javascript skills.

When it hits critical mass, Popcorn Maker will be an engine for community innovation in open video.

I blogged about the Popcorn Maker vision in July of last year. Since then, it’s moved to the center of the Foundation’s “Maker” strategy for 2012.

Roadmapping

Last week—thanks to four intense, caffeine-fueled days—the project team arrived at a pretty solid roadmap and vision for Popcorn Maker. Our issue tracker also includes several hundred new/reassigned bugs, mapped against cheeky code names for each release. (We’ve chosen a blockbuster movie motif, so look forward to 0.2 Ghostbusters, 0.3 Breakfast Club, 0.4 Top Gun, 0.5 Pulp Fiction, 0.6 Terminator, 0.7 Amelie, 0.8 Rushmore, 0.9 Wrath of Khan, and finally, 1.0—Matrix.)

What’s new? A heightened level of ambition, matched with increased rigor to get it done.

Starting in 0.7, you'll be able to embed a viral Popcorn player on third-party sites.

Importantly, we’ve developed a working theory of how Popcorn can become a webmaking virus, which Brett Gaylor has blogged about here.

All of this is reflected in a shiny vision document, which is a work in progress (we’ll share next week). We’ve hashed out some user stories, gotten granular on the technical challenges, and imagined how the UI/UX might work. We need to kick the tires a bit before we’re confident in both the user stories and the roadmap, but we’re close.

We’d love to have your feedback in our Lighthouse issue tracker. (And, as always, we’d love to hear your template ideas! Feel free to create a ticket and let us know what’s on your mind.)

Here’s a look at some of our thinking.

Editor UI

Most users will experience the app as a special editor tray that sits on top of the project you’re working on (Popcorn Maker is a WYSIWYG tool). We need to get the editor UI/UX right. It needs to be compact but not constraining.

We’re moving event editors to the tray (in lieu of floating windows) and making it more intuitive to add Popcorn events to a page (just drag and drop onto the page target).

To make the app more versatile, we’ll offer a simple CSS editor UI to change your styles, without isolating you too much from the actual CSS:

Popcorn Gallery

The life-force of Popcorn Maker will be the Popcorn Gallery, which will let contributors share templates that others can build on. Call it the “WordPress.org effect.”

Plugins

You can use any popcorn.js plugin in Popcorn Maker. Even write your own.

Last but not least—plugins. Popcorn.js plugins are what make Popcorn Maker magic. We’re currently planning on supporting the following plugins, each with a pleasing editor UI (these are subject to change): Image, Video, Webpage, Wikipedia, Attribution, Media control, Apply class, Google map, Open Street Map, Chroma, Video effects, 3D object, Processing, WordRiver, PDF, DocumentCloud, Twitter, Facebook graph, Flickr.

One of the coolest things about Popcorn Maker, though, is that it will support every Popcorn.js plugin through a default editor. And plugin authors can create editor UIs for their plugins. In other words, the project is intentionally modular, so the Popcorn.js community can help us build out the functionality of the app.

As the community grows, the app becomes more powerful.

Seriously. Check out Seriously.js, then read that again.

Roadmap—want to help?

It’s going to be a hard sprint. But it’s super plausible, especially with Bobby Richter, Dave Humphrey, and the brilliant students of Seneca’s CDOT at the wheel. Here’s our roadmap, which will likely change a bit before we freeze it this month. Want to help? Join #popcorn in irc.mozilla.org, or join our mailing list.

Web Made Movies: Mozilla Popcorn aka The Meme Generating Machine

brett — 2012-02-08T05:12:46+00:00

meme ( /ˈmiːm/)
“an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”

“A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus–that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” – Malcolm Gladwell”

We need Mozilla Popcorn to become a virus.

Hear us out here.

In our early iterations of Popcorn Maker, we’ve been tackling the problem of how to make it easy for non-programmers to create Popcorn experiences. It remains the central focus of the project, and we’ve fleshed out our User Stories to imagine the full experience that a user might have. Tthese stories have informed the foundational changes to Popcorn Maker that Ben outlined in a recent blog post.

Fork my meme

To do this, we’ll need to do a few things. First, we need to make it easy for Popcorn makers to embed their creations on their own blogs, Tumblrs and websites. This means offering <iframe>embeds.

Each Popcorn creation needs a post-roll that offers viewers the ability to 1) Replay, 2) Share and embed, and 3) Fork this creation.

Popcorn Gallery

While the Gallery will favour our default templates, it will become a jumping off point for new creators to get started with Popcorn. It will solidify the notion that creating on the web is generative. The act of creation will start by building on someone else’s work.

We think Popcorn will be a good bug to catch. Like getting the chicken pox when you were a kid. Or maybe more like taking an interest in photography. We’re sure this is the right metaphor.

Note: knock knock jokes, box stores and lolcats were all considered as alternatives while titling this post. Go meme or go home.

Ben Moskowitz: Roadmapping Popcorn Maker 1.0

Ben Moskowitz — 2012-02-08T04:51:31+00:00

Currently at version 0.1, Popcorn Maker is a little crufty. But Popcorn Maker 1.0 will hit hard in November of this year.

When it hits critical mass, Popcorn Maker will be an engine for community innovation in open video.

I blogged about the Popcorn Maker vision in July of last year. Since then, it’s moved to the center of the Foundation’s “Maker” strategy for 2012.

Roadmapping

What’s new? A heightened level of ambition, matched with increased rigor to get it done.

Starting in 0.7, you'll be able to embed a viral Popcorn player on third-party sites.

Importantly, we’ve developed a working theory of how Popcorn can become a webmaking virus, which Brett Gaylor has blogged about here.

We’d love to have your feedback in our Lighthouse issue tracker. (And, as always, we’d love to hear your template ideas! Feel free to create a ticket and let us know what’s on your mind.)

Here’s a look at some of our thinking.

Editor UI

We’re moving event editors to the tray (in lieu of floating windows) and making it more intuitive to add Popcorn events to a page (just drag and drop onto the page target).

To make the app more versatile, we’ll offer a simple CSS editor UI to change your styles, without isolating you too much from the actual CSS:

Popcorn Gallery

The life-force of Popcorn Maker will be the Popcorn Gallery, which will let contributors share templates that others can build on. Call it the “Wordpress.org effect.”

Plugins

You can use any popcorn.js plugin in Popcorn Maker. Even write your own.

As the community grows, the app becomes more powerful.

Seriously. Check out Seriously.js, then read that again.

Roadmap—want to help?

Jess Klein: Day 2 of Open News Sprint- Design for Empathy vs. Pure Utility

Jess — 2012-02-08T04:48:22+00:00

Day 2 of the Open News Webmaking Design Sprint kicked off with a storyboarding session- which of course meant a round of the color coding index card game! Basically what we did was come up with three categories of things that we were sketching out the flow for:

Main Screens and Modal Windows (pink cards)
Content in the Instructional Overlay (orange cards)
Badges (green cards)

*Note- I will post the full storyboards later this week

One thing that was an interesting change from yesterday's conversation was that we converted the "sharing" steps into information that can be revealed and explored when the user clicks on the "share" button, thus eliminating that extra step.

In terms of the badges, for simplicity we came up with one badge per each skill set. So, for example, in the image below- we sketched out 3 steps for learning about how to write the html for embedding an image into a webpage. Step 1- place an image that we give them, Step 2- hack that image with an unique image and Step 3- Remix that Image--- then the user will receive an Image Badge. Completion of all the Modules will give the user the "uber badge". (We need real names for these badges, but this is just a concept).

One thing that we talked about- which is out of scope for this pilot prototype- was having a user pledge for the badge by going through a series of interactive activities or games or questions... to prove their skill. It's a bigger idea that certainly relates back to integrating this badge into a larger spectrum of "Mozilla Badges," but I like this idea because on some level it proves competencies and could essentially allow users to skip other "intro" activities in courses or interactives.

Atul, Brian and I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how we were going to implement the designs into a working prototype, a small- yet crucial step. Good news, we think we can make something by the end of this week.

The group had a great conversation about metrics for the project that I think we will rehash again after we create the MVP (that's a minimum viable product not a most valuable player). This is what we came up with as a first stab:

Beyond-the-tool Metrics

How many people share their URL outside of the tool (twitter, blogs, etc.)
3-months-later survey of people who graduated

Tool usage measurement metrics

How frequently the user switches away from the page (to another tab, app, etc) while using the app
How many steps people go through
How many of those steps are repeated
Time taken per step
How many people are return users to the website; so they use the tool and stop at a certain step and then come back at a later date to continue
and what are those stop points?
Also, how many people graduate from the 'course' (tricycle) to the 'tool' (training wheels), ie. how many people turn off the overlay and keep coming back, how many times.
How many people do the bare minimum (just the tutorial)
What link text people use when writing links and how many links are they putting in
How many people come back to pledge for the full badge?
How many people go above and beyond with tinkering

i.e multiple images, all the "optional" styles, etc.

We spent the remainder of our jam packed day focusing on copywriting. We had a conceptual conversation about what direction the tool should take, which of course affected the way that we wrote the copy. Because we couldn't agree on whether this should be a generic webmaking 101 tool, a tool focused on helping people tell their story through the web or a tool geared towards journalists we decided to write as much of the technical bits and pieces as possible and to come back and add on the layer that included narrative, voice and character.

Today I am feeling a bit conflicted about the design direction. In my heart I believe that the project should be a self directed interest based learning tool- which means a tool that helps someone make something and then baking in the learning seamlessly. I am concerned that if we go too generic we will end up with a tool, that people can't relate to and thus won't feel compelled to deep dive into the learning content. So that said, I guess this just is about deciding between the "telling your story" vs. "webmaking for journalists 101". As I said before, I like the telling your story through the web angle for the product because it is something that is easy for many different kinds of users to relate to. This is about branding- and by branding I don't mean slapping a logo on the project and calling it a day- it is about creating a narrative for the project that is compelling enough to give users and potential users the opportunity to empathize and relate to the project on a deeper level.

For example- if the lovebomb.me experimental project was a tool it might be called something like e-card maker. I suspect that people would not have responded so strongly to that project. We built in a narrative and a real directive- make a love letter for a friend- and wrapped that into a light narrative heavily supported by cute lovey-dovey graphics. Well, this conversation is to be continued later.

Tomorrow we will be meeting real live journalists, so I am excited to ask them about what they really are interested in making with the web. Hopefully this will inform the direction of the project.

Nicholas Nethercote: MemShrink progress, week 34

Nicholas Nethercote — 2012-02-08T04:35:18+00:00

Add-ons

The AMO add-on review checklist was amended a couple of weeks ago to include checks for zombie compartments. This change is bearing fruit: Andreas Wagner and Kris Maglione have found more than 10 submitted add-ons that have leaks. See here, here, here, here, here. With the experience they are gaining, we should be able to greatly improve the documentation on common causes of leaks.

In less positive news, two leaks were found in the add-on SDK. Fortunately the SDK team has proven to be effective at fixing identified leaks quickly in the past, hopefully they’ll do so again!

Finally, Jason Tackaberry fixed a zombie compartment in NoSquint 2.1.2. The fix is in the latest version (2.1.5).

about:nosy

Andrew Sutherland wrote a extension called about:nosy which is like about:memory on steroids. It’s oriented around hiding many of the details and instead assigning blame for memory allocations to particular tabs (and similar things). It also features graphs showing how the memory consumption of each tracked entity changes over time; this latter feature is quite memory and CPU-intensive, however. If you are running a recent Nightly build of Firefox, download about:nosy here and you won’t even have to restart Firefox to see it, just type “about:nosy” into the address bar.

Forthcoming changes will make about:memory more like about:nosy, by measuring more things on a per-tab basis. And for a long time I have had a vague plan that one day someone who knows about UX will write a user-friendly alternative to about:memory that focuses just on per-tab memory consumption, and about:nosy is a good indicator of what that might look like.

Miscellaneous

Saptarshi Guha from the metrics team did an analysis of the physical memory consumption of Firefox 10, 11 and 12, based on telemetry data. The post is heavy going for those who aren’t experts at statistics and R, but the two main conclusions of interest are (a) that add-ons significantly increase resident memory consumption, and (b) Firefox 12 is consuming more resident memory than Firefox 11. This latter fact matches something we’d seen in today’s MemShrink meeting when looking at data from John Schoenick’s in-development version of areweslimyet.com — something in early January caused a significant memory consumption regression. John is working on narrowing down which change caused this.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto overhauled the safe browsing implementation. I don’t claim to understand this change at all, but I think it reduces memory consumption when the database is updated. Better explanations from those who understand this change are welcome!

I reduced the amount of memory allocated when generating about:memory by roughly 30%.

I wrote a detailed discussion of the benefits of reducing memory consumption.

Bug Counts

Here are this week’s bug counts.

P1: 22 (-0/+0)
P2: 134 (-4/+8)
P3: 75 (-3/+4)
Unprioritized: 2 (-2/+1)

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: SeaMonkey Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-07

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-02-08T04:00:11+00:00

SeaMonkey/StatusMeetings/2012-02-07

< SeaMonkey | StatusMeetings

« last meeting | index | next meeting »

SeaMonkey Meeting Details

Time: 7 February, 2012, 13:00 UTC
Location: #seamonkey IRC channel

Agenda

Who’s taking minutes? -> Ratty
Nominees for Friends of the Fish Tank:
- Please note A person or entity can’t be nominated twice in a row.

Action Items

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

NEW

OPEN

IanN to write the “Friends of the Fish Tank” F.A.Q.

Status of the SeaMonkey Buildbot Master and Tree

Current Issues with existing machines
- one linux VM — Hosted on parallels, kernel panicking, No bug yet, but will get it done ASAP.
- problems with creating a second linux VM — will either fix or reclone this week.
- one win VM, switched from FAT32 to NTFS for one of its drives, need to recreate folders appropriately.
“Where do we stand with the machine(s) right now?”
- bug 721516 migrate seamonkey systems out of sjc1/scl2 and into scl3/scl1.
  - (2012-02-02) The iX boxes are now located at SJC1 they have been put into production for Callek and team.

Release Train

2.7b4 was shipped on January 20
2.7b5 was shipped on January 26
2.7 was shipped on January 31.
2.8b1 was shipped on February 4.

Extensions Compatibility Tracking

We need some help with the add-ons listed under the “2.0x” heading. Anything above it will work out of the box with SM 2.7 and later (yay to compatible-by-default!). Perhaps Ratty can go through his xSidebar site and check which add-ons are not compatible with at least SM 2.1 – that would help, too.

Since xSidebar itself is not compatible with any recent SM version, it should not be listed as a featured add-on on AMO. Who can make that change?
- KaiRo can, InvisibleSmiley will check talk to KaiRo about that.
- If anyone wants to suggest add-ons to be featured, send them to InvisibleSmiley (in manageable doses that is).

Addon Compatibility Listings, mostly maintained by InvisibleSmiley
- Recent changes can be found here.
- Restructured for compatible-by-default.
ACR 1.0.3 has been released with a fix for broken AOM search.
Enigmail provides versions for release (AMO) and all branches (Enigmail nightly page). The current release is compatible with both 2.5 and 2.6.
Lightning provides versions for the current stable and beta releases (AMO) and nightlies for trunk and Aurora (Calendar Versions page). Lightning 1.3b1 which works with SM 2.8b1 is available from AMO (Development Channel).
Firebug is compatible but not flagged as such on AMO (depends on automatic tests being set up and run on the Firebug side: bug 680837, needs a Python coder). Stable Firebug version 1.9.x works with any recent SM version. FB 1.10a1 works with trunk, 1.10a2 is broken but 1.10a3 should be OK again (cf. FB issue 5188).
Besides the above, we should also take a look at other add-ons that are important for our users when they switch to 2.x.
- Useful query: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/extensions/?sort=popular
The SeaMonkey Features page links to sub-pages for all recent SM versions, including those in development. Please help InvisibleSmiley add major features to the respective pages, ideally as they land. These pages are used when creating release notes, so the more up-to-date the better.
bug 666303 (Seamonkey 2.1 is detected as Firefox 2.1 on the Add-on Site) and bug 671085 Confusing compatibility error when visiting Firefox listing page using SeaMonkey)
- We don’t have a dedicated person here who understands how AMO really works, who to contact in order to actually get things moving etc. Unfortunately. Someone needs to sit down and find the offending logic, wherever it may be (probably in the AMO source, wherever that is).

2.x (Last, Current, Next)

2.6 had ~67,000 and 2.7 had ~21,000 ADU by last Thursday and 2.6.1 has had ~105,000 and 2.7 has had ~20,000 downloads so far.
- Of the released versions, as of last Thursday, we have 17.7% on 2.0, 6.3% on 2.1-2.3, 5.3% on 2.4, 5.3% on 2.5, 49.3% on 2.6 and 16.1% on 2.7. So, in the last two weeks, ~3k (an additional 2.7% of ADU) have migrated to 2.5 or above.
Still a large chunk of users on 2.0.x.
Figure out what is preventing people from moving from 2.0.x to the latest versions.
- Some people cannot upgrade due to system requirements (OS version, processor capabilities etc.)
- Perhaps putting resources into getting certain extensions working with SM 2.4 and above (those that won’t work with SM 2.7 automatically due to compatible-by-default extensions).
- Still need volunteers to look at what is keeping people at below 2.4. IanN could try knocking something up and send it round members lists for polishing but he’s not on all the channels (mozillazine, etc) to post it to when finished.
- Are some Linux distributions are still stuck on 2.0? We have data on OSes and OS versions in the raw data in the Mozilla metrics, AFAIK, Callek now also has access to that.

Usual reminders:

Please make sure that anything that landed on comm-beta (for TB) or mozilla-beta (for FF) which affected non-shared code and which fixed regressions will be fixed on our side, too. Please mark bugs we feel *need* to land on a particular train tracking+ or tracking? so that when we to do a release we can be sure that we don’t miss anything.
- Priority should be given to fixing regressions ASAP. Also keep an eye on and prioritize bugs to be ported from FF/TB that land on branches (Aurora, Beta). We need to keep an eye especially on Session Restore, Sync, Tabbrowser and Address Book.
- Be careful not to break code shared with Thunderbird, otherwise patches might have to be backed out of string frozen repositories.

2.7

open tracking (0)
tracking requests (0)
targeted (0)
fixed (30)

One tracked 2.5 issue still open.
- 2.1 through 2.7 have NOT included the ka locale. The last release with ka locale shipped was 2.0.14 and the ka l10n maintainers have not yet updated for changes in later SeaMonkey versions.
- Callek now needs to morph bug 667147 into removing |ka| from our [current] automation entirely (all-locales). Callek will look at best locale to transition any ka users to.
- Callek isn’t here at the moment (timezones), so ewong will talk to Callek about the ka locale later.
The New 2.7 Features page has a comprehensive list of features.

2.Next

InvisibleSmiley created a restartless add-on (available on AMO) for SM 2.8 (now in Beta) which adds an “Add-ons” options to the list of engines on the Sync pref panel.
Remember to help update the New Features pages as we go along.

Feature List, Planning

Bug statistics for last two (full) weeks: 50 new, 28 fixed, 14 triaged.

Medium triaging effort.
Good further triage targets could come out of looking at the component bug counts, pick yours!

Open reviews/flags:
25 review
9 super-review
0 ui-review
8 feedback

Major wanted/needed features:

Active

bug 606683 Allow customization of toolbar in Composer and MailNews Composition [IanN].
- Progressing slowly, still waiting on reviews from TB side. Full customization has to go to 2.next (currently 2.6 but could be pushed back further) as it needs work on TB too which is taking a while to get reviews on, plus feedback from kaze.
- IanN is still wading through the unpicking of Composer/Mail Compose code in the dependent bugs. After that he will be reworking his customising patches.
bug 477845 Build a standalone (Comm-central) Composer. [kaze]
- kaze has done a bit of work in this bug recently. Building on Windows works. Now supports debug builds on Linux if tests are disabled (–disable-tests). Still a lot to do.
- The standalone Composer patch has to be rebased and fixed for MacOSX.
- Kaze is considering moving Kompozer to an addon so that we can reuse the dialog boxes but start fresh for the content part. Also we can then use the current devtools. KaiRo told kaze in Berlin it seemed a good idea, as it could allow to run a Composer *tab* instead of a Composer window.
- Kaze working on it on hi spare time, with an Indian contributor.
- IanN was supposed to help get builds working with --enable-tests.
  - Will look into this once he gets his customization patches reworked.
Real full-screen (bug 610509) and DOM full-screen (bug 701714)
- patches provided by Mnyromyr and InvisibleSmiley. Otherwise stalled. :-(

Needing help, Unowned, Stalled

Kill-RDF:
- bug 657607 Port jminta’s kill-rdf to SeaMonkey where applicable Part 2 [meta].
- bug 657604 Remove the RDF global object. [serge]
bug 436794 Enable Mac OS X system address book per default and add UI.
- SM UI needed, unowned, helpwanted.
bug 449728 Drag tabs between windows.
bug 477840 Backport KompoZer to Composer (Depends on bug 477845).
- kaze has done a ton of work there. We still need to work out some organizational issues. At the moment there is no active interest from MoMo for bringing standalone composer into comm-central. That’s something we (KaiRo and kaze) will have to negotiate with the Thunderbird team (Standard8).
bug 507841 Port Bug 422814 – Make account configuration quick, easy, and more secure (autoconfig, Quick Account Setup).
bug 533908 SeaMonkey Mail: tabs not restored [misak].
bug 523274 Complete new default theme icon set.
- A list of TODO icons is up in the bug.
bug 526210 Update the icon set for the SeaMonkey Modern Theme.
- bug 548778 New communicator icons (based on Strata theme) for SeaMonkey. Some proposed icons got posted, we should take a look how to get that contribution into the product.
- The rest is unowned so far.
bug 87098 [SeaMonkey] Delete key should delete location bar history list entry.
- Note: Our location bar history doesn’t and can’t use autocomplete at all.
bug 677484 Individual SeaMonkey components are not properly handled by the Windows 7 taskbar.
bug 654009 Reply to list: automatically determine From: address
- Note: The actual task here is to port bug 45715 “Reply to List” [button/(context) menu item]
bug 664309 Make the built-in ChatZilla display a cZ icon in SeaMonkey (now helpwanted)

Roundtable – Personal Status Updates

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

aceman has been doing some work that touches SM as well as TB especially around feeds, which is good stuff.

Aqualon

asrail

Callek

Completed Release Engineering tasks:

bug 673834 Obsolete ReleaseRepackFactory, fold logic into CCReleaseRepackFactory.
bug 720918 (SM2.7b5) Tracking bug for build and release of SeaMonkey 2.7b5.
bug 721584 (SM2.7) Tracking bug for build and release of SeaMonkey 2.7 Final.
bug 722065 Obsolete GenerateCCTestBuilder.
bug 722940 codesize upload broken for SeaMonkey [and Thunderbird] due to tools dir being incorrect.
bug 724480 Update function on nightly non-functional since version bump to 2.10a1.

Build Config fixes:
Other fixes:

bug 715802 Move quirks triggering into nsSuiteApp.cpp because bug 696376 caused our quirks to be triggered too late.
bug 724336 SeaMonkey News XML causes errors (website).

Working on:

No Bug — Bring up Win2k3 iX Machines, and install MSVC2010.
bug 560772 Make use of mozilla::services for comm-central.
bug 607392 split tagging into en-US and other (RelEng).
bug 722262 Port |bug 552864 Throw away wrapper shell script on unix and lazily load libxul| to SeaMonkey.
- bug 704835 Use a pre-generated nsXREAppData struct instead of application.ini. [SeaMonkey Part].
bug 724791 Bring GenerateCCBranchObjects up to date (RelEng).

ToDo:

bug 655399 Backout CSS change from bug 655395 once SeaMonkey can use it.
bug 722448 Close PasswordAuth ssh access on cn-sea-qm-centos5-01.nl.mozilla.org.
bug 591848 SeaMonkey linux and Windows machines need device support for sound enabled.

ewong

Fixed:
- bug 717493 – Port |Bug 717491 – “Warning: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/components/proxyObject.xpt (package-manifest, 151).”| to SeaMonkey

Needs Review:
- bug 707786 – Use Services.prefs instead of preferences-service / gPrefService, in SeaMonkey

Working On:
- bug 722767 – Change buildbot configs to upload symbols to symbols1.dmz.phx1.mozilla.com
- bug 723839 – Tracking bug for build and release of SeaMonkey 2.8 Beta 1

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

IanN

Usual testing, reviewing and commenting.
Fixed:
- bug 719080 [en-GB] Search Engine modification for SeaMonkey
- bug 705458 [en-GB] add Twitter Search Engine for Fx (en-GB)
- bug 722758 Print button is misaligned in the Mail & News toolbar with the Modern theme
Waiting for review on:
- bug 638643 Remove obsolete EditorToggleParagraphMarks from editor.js
Waiting for dependent bug to be checked in:
- bug 720661 Display account central when no default account / no accounts setup
Waiting for additional review on:
Reviewed and waiting for feedback from mobile peer:
- bug 689253 Update en-GB for Mobile 10.0 (comm-aurora)
Working on:
- Contacting people affected by proposed changes to Project Areas.
- bug 606683 Allow customization of toolbar in Composer and MailNews Composition
- bug 639690 [META] Re-arrange code between editor and editorOverlay
- bug 657234 Move pasteQuote and pasteNoFormatting into contentAreaContextOverlay
- File/Folder selection in windows.
To Do:
- bug 639395 Get cmd_fontSize to reflect current state of selected content / content at caret.
- Prefs-in-a-tab.
- Create FAQ for Friends of the Fish Tank.
- Knock something up finding out why users are not upgrading to 2.4+ and send it around members lists for polishing.
- Help get composer standalone builds working with –enable-tests.

InvisibleSmiley

Fixed:
- bug 724311 Start page JS (upgrade nagging) fails to identify 2.10a1 nightly correctly
- bug 724076 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.8 Beta 1
- bug 722405 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.7 Final release
- bug 721881 Port |bug 666306 – Video content should become large play button …| to Modern
- bug 721583 Make lightweight themes / Personas work in the Download Manager window
- bug 721286 Update SeaMonkey website for 2.7 Beta 5
- bug 721021 Port |bug 593321 – Opening saved .EML with empty subject has wrong window title|
- bug 712699 Create/Update 2.7 Release Notes
- bug 713087 Port |bug 534956 – Sync add-ons| (restartless add-on for SM 2.8)
- bug 718310 Port |bug 526998 – Implement F2 keyboard shortcut for renaming focused attachments when composing (on Windows and Unix)|

ToDo:
- bug 701714 Add support for DOM full-screen
- bug 640420 Add draggable splitter between urlbar and searchbar
- bug 711334 Be explicit that TLS version is 1.0
- look into
  - bug 698038 Update Preferences help for the new section to control crash report
  - bug 696757 Port “Time range to clear” from Firefox to SeaMonkey’s “Clear private data” dialog
- track
  - bug 687316 (Remaining) Sync changes to port to Suite

KaiRo

mcsmurf

Working on bug 721474 Port |bug 575830 Image zoom (Page zoom) is reset when I switch tabs| to SeaMonkey.

Misak

Mnyromyr

MReimer

Neil

Ratty

Page Info Fixes:

Fixed bug 168908 All columns in Page Info tabs can be hidden.
Fixed bug 723984 PageInfo->Permissions: Don’t assume that the whitelist pref is there. It defaults to true in the new add-ons manager code. Don’t assume all consumers use testPermission.
Fixed bug 724222 View page info -> Security: doesn’t show cookies were set for sites with ip:8080 address (see Firefox bug 409174).

Test Fixes:

bug 724331 TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | chrome://mochitests/content/browser/suite/browser/test/browser_bug427559.js | an unexpected uncaught JS exception reported through window.onerror – executeSoon is not defined at …./suite/browser/test/browser_bug427559.js:56.
bug 724499 TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | chrome://mochitests/content/browser/suite/browser/test/browser_pluginnotification.js | Test timed out.

Lightning/SeaMonkey Integration:

bug 719031 [Meta] SeaMonkey issues from Lightning bug 316916 landing (Task Quick Filter bar).
Fixed bug 721330 Make Customizing Lightning Toolbars work in SeaMonkey.
- Part 1: CalendarToolbar and TaskToolbar.
- Part 2: TaskActionsToolbar.
Waiting for review: bug 721327 Implement Tabs Toolbar for Thunderbird and Lightning Compatibility.

Backout Patches (waiting for comm-aurora approval):

bug 723970 Backout bug 698187 due to mozilla-central back out of parts of bug 698986 to resolve bug 716945.

Waiting for feedback:

bug 701432 Add support for fave icons on jump list uri entries.

ToDo:

Other:

Bug triage and Bug discussions.
End user support and PR in newsgroups and Mozillazine.

Ricardo

sgautherie

Fixed SeaMonkey (related) bugs:
- bug 707039 [SeaMonkey] mochitest-chrome: “TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL … textLTR.openPopup is not a function at … test_bug649840.xul:39″
- bug 714257 Package ‘necko_websocket.xpt’ in SeaMonkey after |Bug 640003 – WebSockets – upgrade to ietf-07|
- bug 716395 Port |Bug 716397 – [Linux] “Warning: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/libmozglue.so”| to SeaMonkey
- bug 718912 Port |Bug 717975 – only expose m-c implementation of navigator.mozApps on b2g| to SeaMonkey
- bug 719325 Package dom_network.xpt : Port Bug 677166 (Implement Network Status API) Part 2 Add .mozConnection to navigator
- bug 721357 Support ‘mailbloat’ test target in SeaMonkey
- bug 721533 [SeaMonkey] “Warning: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/components/chardet.xpt”
- bug 724448 tests cleanup for browser_367052.js and browser_bug431826.js, in SeaMonkey
Fixed Core bugs:
- bug 649840 RTL on forms inputs autocomplete
- bug 720095 SimpleTest/EventUtils.js: fix some strict warnings and nits
- bug 720952 [MacOSX] Some (or random?) builders report “Typelibs contain definitions of interface nsIDocCharset with different IIDs!” when “Linking .xpt files…”
- bug 720955 pyxpt: Report IIDs when they differ
- bug 722019 Investigate status of cbox-dis.gif (and related)
Fixed other projects bugs:
- [Firefox] bug 652297 Stop trying to package MSVC DLLs in debug Windows Firefox
- [Firefox] bug 721535 [Firefox] “Warning: package error or possible missing or unnecessary file: bin/components/chardet.xpt”

Stanimir

stefanh

Fixed:

bug 425916 Improve look of mac treerows when in editing mode.
bug 713445 [Mac Default] tabbrowser tab title text styling is wrong in Lion.
bug 713446 White text with text-shadow in selected bottom tabs.

Working on:

bug 721529 [Mac default] Reference to non-existing chrome://global/skin/tree/item.png in searchbar.css and directory.css.

tonymec

In progress: bug 716232 crash in JS GC at every cZ startup: working with dmandelin to find the culprit changeset
TODO: IRC meeting later today about giving up ownership of the Nightly Tester Tools extension to a fuller team from automation and/or QA

Any other business?

Need to review project areas
- IanN has put out a final draft of the project areas list, and will then confirm that anyone who is not in the loop already has been consulted.
- IanN is still waiting for the last few people to respond before creating the new version.
- We will also need to update the Mozilla-wide list of official reviewers
Extended Support Releases (ESR)
- At the moment looks like that will be based off Gecko 10 so that will be 2.7 for us. Assuming we have the machines, we will also have an ESR which might help move some of those still on 2.0 up to 2.7. We’re unlikely to move to ESR until Gecko 10.0.1 or 10.0.2.
- Our ESR should use the same branch as Firefox ESR so any Security and Stability “extended” fixes for Gecko will be picked up by the SeaMonkey ESR.
- An ESR (Extended Security Release) may not be a given for us out of the gate. Callek thinks we should revisit that, separately, once it is clearer what MoCo’s general plans for their marketing/target/support levels etc. are.
- mcsmurf is on the ESR mailing list is our ESR goto guy.
Geolocation
- Geolocation now works out of the box. MoCo turned it on by default for all applications that build off mozilla-central.
- For comm-beta all we need to do is (bug 494421) to add pref("geo.wifi.uri", "https://www.google.com/loc/json"); to browser-prefs.js. However we’re not even sure we are legally allowed to ship with the URL in, we might need to actually put in a pref to disable that in newer builds.

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/StatusMeetings/2012-02-07“

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mozilla Platform Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-07

Jesper Kristensen — 2012-02-08T04:00:05+00:00

Platform/2012-02-07

< Platform

« previous week | index | next week »

Platform Meeting Details

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

Notices / Schedule

Firefox Development

As mentioned last week, New Tab is now on by default. Tim Taubert is on a tear fixing followup issues, improving performance of the thumbnail service, and making styling tweaks.
Inline autocomplete has been disabled on trunk while we fix some additional issues that popped up (bug 720792). Marco is on the case, and we’ll get that re-enabled shortly.
Chemspill candidates for FF10 are being discussed at today’s channel meeting (2PM PT in Warp Core)

Firefox Developer Tools

Initial Debugger Has Landed
- Preffed off: to enable, set devtools.debugger.enable to true.

Performance

Telemetry dashboard is now public! See Taras’ presentation for access details.
Performance work week summary from Jared.
- Front-end activities and notes
Safebrowsing move from SQLite to flat file landed (bug 673470)
Various front-end telemetry probes landed, and a bunch more are in-progress.
- Notes from perf work-week
- page thumbnails for new-tab (bug 721019)
- site identity popup (bug 723090)
- Places idle frecency updates (bug 723124)
- Places idle maintenance tasks (bug 723126)
- Firefox menu opening time (bug 723515)

GFX

JS

Layout

Edwin Flores (intern) making good progress on “embedded SVG glyphs in OpenType fonts” (aka “SVG Fonts Done Right”) bug 719286. We should have something shippable-but-preffed-off-by-default soon.
Other notable patches:
- bug 721068 Graphite font shaping update from SIL
- bug 722322 Have the “1″ and “2″ keys switch between images in reftest-analyzer.xhtml
- bug 722071 Implement array style indexing for SVGStringList
- bug 714839 nsCSSFrameConstructor now inherits nsFrameManager

Video

libcubeb landed for Windows, but was disabled due to some random test failures
- Matthew working on reenabling that, plus tracking down failures in Mac and ALSA backends
WebRTC:
- alder repo now builds on Win32 (thanks Ted!).
- Win32, Linux and Mac can capture images from video with fabrice’s bug 629955 patches
- Chrome is now shipping Canary Chromium builds with a very early version of WebRTC enable-able. A number of 3rd-parties have built early demos based on it; several were shown at IETF Interim last week.
- Data channel API/protocols firming up; will evangelize at HTML5 Gaming work week in Toronto (great for games!) and look to implement ASAP

DOM

WebAPI

Started work on WebNFC
Mounir is editor for Network Information API and Screen Orientation APIs at W3C

Network

Identity

Plugins

Mobile

Accessibility

Tree Management

Security

No security reviews this week due to security work week in Santa Cruz.
Please work with Curtis to schedule reviews and
Update feature pages so we have accurate information

Stability Report

Socorro

Desktop

Firefox 10 Top Issues

Noticed increase in cycle collector crashes – GCGraphBuilder::NoteXPCOMChild(nsISupports*) – #2 crash
- bug 724129 – startup crash nsXBLDocumentInfo::cycleCollection::Traverse
- bug 724284 – Security bug we believe is causing the above regression.
- bug 718284 – Bug in FF11 that is also causing an increase of these crashes.
Startup crash @ PR_EnumerateAddrInfo | nsDNSRecord::GetNextAddr – #3 crash
- bug 718389 – Spike we saw in FF10b4
- No clear next steps for investigation. Correlation reports have been inconclusive.
bug 725009 – crash je_free | mozutils.dll. May be related to Flash.

Firefox 11 Top Issues

Increase in hangs – bug 722394
- bug 709209 – This is complicating our investigation.
- Marcia logging some plugin side reports that might help uncover the issue – bug 724617
- Top concern, not making much headway – need some developer help with the analysis.
bug 715401 – new on 11a2 but rising in b1 – trying to isolate the regression range.
bug 718284 – Separate issue causing increase in cycle collector issues.

Firefox 12 Top Issues

Nothing new and notable on Aurora yet.

Trunk Top Issues

Tracking a number of new crashes related to the landing of some plugin work bug 90268
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Bug-90268

Mobile

Socorro fixes to separate out Java signatures – fix went out last week.
- bug 719943- new field in json metadata needs exposure in the UI
Crash volume going down after a bunch of fixes landed last week.

Trunk Top Issues

Still lots of new stuff landing. Focus on logging all the new Java signatures…
top crash fixed – bug 723550 – Lots of base64 decode errors in logcat
bug 724215 – java.lang.NullPointerException: at org.mozilla.gecko.GeckoEvent.addMotionPoint(GeckoEvent.java)
bug 723495 – java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: View not attached to window manager at android.view.WindowManagerImpl.findViewLocked(WindowManagerImpl.java) – (affects 13, 12, 11)

Aurora Top Issues

bug 711852 – Crash in neon_composite_over_8888_8888 or neon_composite_over_n_8_0565 or fast_composite_over_8888_0565 or arm_neon_fill @ libxul.so@0xa – (affects 12, 11)

Beta

Not enough data yet – top issue is just 4 crashes
bug 719741 – Crash @ __libc_android_abort | dlfree | free | fclose

Roundtable

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2012-02-07“

Brian R. Bondy: Snappy optimizations for faster Firefox startup

2012-02-08T03:48:21+00:00

Snappy is a project that ~~aims to improve~~ is improving Firefox responsiveness. As part of this project I've been working on Firefox startup optimizations.

You can spend days, months, or even years trying to optimize code, but if you don't understand where to optimize, you won't be making a difference. Likewise, searching for an optimizations in a competitor's product is usually not the best way to get results.

It's nearly impossible to optimize code by guessing what is slow, you need to profile the code to understand the problems. Once you understand the problems you can then fix them, and then finally test to make sure they are fixed.

Here are some initial Firefox startup optimizations I've done with some lite profiling on Windows over the period of a few days:

bug 724177 - 30-50ms (5%) Firefox startup speed optimization on Windows in nsLocalFileWin
bug 724256 - Optimize move file calls on Windows, saving about 2ms per call (1 call on startup)
bug 722225 - Firefox startup speed by ~5% (-70ms) on Windows by optimizing D3D10CreateDevice1
bug 722315 - Firefox startup speed by by ~5% (-76ms) on Windows by lazy loading CLSID_DragDropHelper
bug 724203 - Optimize nsLocalFile::IsDirectory on Windows by 50% giving 5ms startup improvement
bug 724207 - Save 15-20ms on startup from unused file attributes fetch when opening files
bug 692255 - Find a way to get rid of prefetch files on Windows for faster startup
bug 725444 - 10-15ms main thread startup optimization in Windows AudioSession

I plan to keep doing more startup optimizations for a while in between silent update work.

So how are optimizations found? There are many ways, the first I will talk about is Xperf.

Xperf

One way to identify optimization bottlenecks on Windows is to use Xperf. Xperf is a great way to find both IO bottlenecks and CPU usage bottlenecks.

It can tell you which files use the most IO, what the IO patterns are, which functions take the most time, and allow you to group based on different criteria to view the data in different ways. It is the tool that made Windows 7 so much faster than Windows Vista. It actually does a ton more than that but I won't focus on it in the context of this blog post.

Built in Mozilla profiler

Another way to find optimizations is to use Benoit's profiler (SPS). Currently it works well on Mac, and Windows is nearly completed.

I'm very excited to start using it on Windows.
It far surpasses the tools I've been using to find the bugs and fixes above.

Custom profiler

I haven't seen how the Mozilla built-in profiler is implemented, but I suspect that this custom profiler is a simplified version of the Mozilla profiler's Pseudostack mode.

I was able to find all of the above optimizations (with the exception of the prefetch task) with a tiny class with a couple of wrapper macros.

Basically the class is an RAII class built around the Win32 API QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency. These functions allow you to get very detailed timing results.

For any function you want to profile you simply add the PROFILE_FUNCTION() macro to the start of the function. I usually start by adding this to each non-trivial function in a file.

Once you've found a function that takes a non trivial amount of time you can start to dig deeper into other functions inside of the function until you find the root cause.

But sometimes a function has a lot of code and you aren't sure what the slow part of the function is. For this I use a second macro PROFILE_STR("FunctionName:N") where N is a number I increment evenly spaced out. The string can be anything, I just use that normally.

These macros just create an object. The constructor of the object stores the start time, the destructor of the object gets the end time.

The destructor also uses the function name or string as a lookup in a global map that keeps track of the number of hits, the maximum length of time, the minimum length of time, and the average length of time for each function/string.

There is a third macro I was using to dump the results to a file at particular events I wanted to focus on, like first paint, or when the session is restored.

One thing you have to look out for with this method is if you happen to put the calls in a recursive function. In that case it will appear to be a bigger bottleneck because the first call will include the full length of time of all calls that contain it.
All of the inner calls will add onto that.

The output of this function is made when the third macro to dump the results is called. It dumps the results to a simple formatted .txt file:

Verifying startup results

If you're working on Firefox, a good way to verify that your speed optimization made a difference is to use the about:startup extension.

This extension times the startup of important events like firstPaint and sessionRestored and gives you the average up top.

To verify my results I just did 20 startups in sequence with a release build that contained my patches vs a release build that did not contain my patches.

Here is an example after one of the patches above:

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Jetpack Project: weekly update for February 7th, 2012

wbamberg — 2012-02-08T01:59:20+00:00

Project News

We released a hotfix release, 1.4.3. It fixes an important regression in 1.4, 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 and should be taken by anybody currently using one of those releases. More details here.
FOSDEM happened, there were Jetpack presentations and discussions. Henrik Skupin blogged about it, and contributed a patch.
Andrew Sutherland has written an add-on using the SDK to break down Firefox memory usage by tab: or, to “help you lay blame more easily”

Quick Stats

Total open bugs: 253
Bugs created last week: 20
Bugs fixed last week: 12
Total SDK-based Addons on AMO: 432
Open pull requests on Github: 25

Note: the stats above are based on the queries I linked to for each item. If you have suggestions on how these queries might be made more accurate,please comment below. Stats generated at 2012-02-07 17:43:52 PST

Meeting Brief

The Add-on Builder is preparing for its 1.0 release. We have one blocker, bug 724766, otherwise things are looking good.
We had a brief 1.4.3 postmortem: concluded that we need to improve test coverage for beta releases.
There’s a lot of demand to make the SDK support Thunderbird. The SDK team does not have the resources to support Thunderbird officially, but should not prevent Thunderbird from working by, for example, throwing an exception when Thunderbird is detected.
Here’s a blog post from Dietrich on using the SDK to deliver features into Firefox.

Full minutes are available here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack/Weekly_Meeting/2012-2-7#Minutes

Nicholas Nethercote: The benefits of reducing memory consumption

Nicholas Nethercote — 2012-02-08T01:22:40+00:00

TL;DR: Any single change that reduces Firefox’s memory consumption can affect Firefox’s speed, stability and reputation in a variety of ways, some of which are non-obvious. Some examples illustrate this.

The MemShrink wiki page starts with the following text.

MemShrink is a project that aims to reduce Firefox’s memory consumption. There are three potential benefits. Speed. [...] Stability. [...] Reputation.”

I want to dig more deeply into these benefits and the question of what it means to “reduce Firefox’s memory consumption”, because there are some subtleties involved. In what follows I will use the term “MemShrink optimization” to refer to any change that reduces Firefox’s memory consumption.

Speed

People tend to associate low memory consumption with speed. However, time/space trade-offs abound in programming, and an explicit goal of MemShrink is to not slow Firefox down — the wiki page says:

Changes that reduce memory consumption but make Firefox slower are not desirable.

There are several ways that MemShrink optimizations can improve performance.

Paging

The case that people probably think of first is paging. If physical memory fills up and the machine needs to start paging, i.e. evicting virtual memory pages to disk space, it can be catastrophic for performance. This is because disk accesses are many thousands of times slower than RAM accesses.

However, some MemShrink optimizations are far more likely to affect paging than others. The key idea here is that of the working set size — what’s important is not the total amount of physical or virtual memory being used, but the fraction of that memory that is touched frequently. For example, consider two programs that allocate and use a 1GB array. The first one touches pages within the array at random. The second one touches every page once and then touches the first page many times. The second program will obviously page much less than the first if the system’s physical memory fills up.

The consequence of this is that a change that reduces the size of data structures that are accessed frequently is much more likely to reduce paging than a change that reduces the size of data structures that are accessed rarely. Note that this is counter-intuitive! It’s natural to want to optimize data structures that are wasteful of space, but “wasteful of space” often means “hardly touched” and so such optimizations don’t have much effect on paging.

Measuring the working set size of a complex program like a web browser is actually rather difficult, which means that gauging the impact of a change on paging is also difficult. Julian Seward’s virtual memory profiler offers one possible way. Another complication is that results vary greatly between machines. If you are running Firefox on a machine with 16GB of RAM, it’s likely that no change will affect paging, because Firefox is probably never paging in the first place. If you are on a netbook with 1GB of RAM, the story is obviously different. Also, the effects can vary between different operating systems.

Cache pressure

Some MemShrink optimizations can also reduce cache pressure. For example, a change that makes a struct smaller would allow more of them to fit into a cache line. Like paging, these effects are very difficult to quantify, and changes that affect hot structures are more likely to reduce cache pressure significantly and improve performance.

Structure traversals

Sometimes large data structures must be traversed, and reducing the number of elements in the data structure can reduce that traversal time. The obvious case for Firefox is the JavaScript heap — the garbage collector and cycle collector frequently traverse it, and so any change that causes dead objects to accumulate more slowly will reduce their traversal times.

Only a small fraction of MemShrink optimizations will speed up structure traversals.

Stability

If Firefox (or any program) uses too much memory, it can lead to aborts and crashes. These are sometimes called “OOMs” (out of memory). There are two main kinds of OOM: those involving virtual memory, and those involving physical memory.

Virtual OOMs

A “virtual OOM” occurs when the virtual address space fills up and Firefox simply cannot refer to any more memory. This is mostly a problem on Windows, where Firefox is distributed as a 32-bit application, and so it can only address 2GB or 4GB of memory (the addressable amount depends on the OS configuration). This is true even if you have more than 4GB of RAM. In contrast, Mac OS X and Linux builds of Firefox are 64-bit and so virtual memory exhaustion is essentially impossible because the address space is massively larger.

(I don’t want to get distracted by the question of why Firefox is a 32-bit application on Windows. I’ll just mention that (a) many Windows users are still running 32-bit versions of Windows that cannot run 64-bit applications, and (b) Mozilla does 64-bit Windows builds for testing purposes. Detailed discussions of the pros and cons of 64-bit builds can be read here and here.)

The vast majority of MemShrink optimizations will reduce the amount of virtual memory consumed. (The only counter-examples I can think of involve deliberately evicting pages from physical memory. E.g. see the example of the GC decommitting change discussed below.) And any such change will obviously reduce the number of virtual OOMs. Furthermore, the effect of any reduction is obvious and straightforward — a change that reduces the virtual memory consumption by 100MB on a particular machine and workload is twice as good as one that reduces it by 50MB. Of course, any improvement will only be noticed by those who experience virtual OOMs, which typically is people who have 100s of tabs open at once. (It may come as a surprise, but some people have that many tabs open regularly.)

Physical OOMs

A “physical OOM” occurs when physical memory (and any additional backing storage such as swap space on disk) fills up. This is mostly a problem on low-end devices such as smartphones and netbooks, which typically have small amounts of RAM and may not have any swap space.

The situation for physical memory is similar to that for virtual memory: almost any MemShrink optimization will reduce Firefox’s physical memory consumption. (One exception is that it’s possible for a memory allocation to consume virtual memory but not physical memory if it’s never accessed; more about this in the examples section below.) And any reduction in physical memory consumption will in turn reduce the number of physical OOMs. Finally, the effects are again obvious and straightforward — a 100MB reduction is twice as good as a 50MB reduction.

Reputation

Finally, we have reputation. The obvious effect here is that if MemShrink optimizations cause Firefox to become faster and more stable over time, people’s opinion of Firefox will rise, either because their own experience improves, or they hear that other people’s experience improves.

But I want to highlight a less obvious aspect of reputation. People often gauge Firefox’s memory consumption by looking at a utility such as the Task Manager (on Windows) or ‘top’ (on Mac/Linux). Interpreting the numbers from these utilities is rather difficult — there are multiple metrics and all sorts of subtleties involved. (See this Stack Overflow post for evidence of the complexities and how easy it is to get things wrong.) In fact, in my opinion, the subtleties are so great that people should almost never look at these numbers and instead focus on metrics that are influenced by memory consumption but which they can observe directly as users, i.e. speed and crash rate… but that’s a discussion for another time.

Nonetheless, a non-trivial number of people judge Firefox on this metric. Imagine a change that caused Firefox’s numbers in these utilities to drop but had no other observable effect. (Such a change may be impossible in practice, but that doesn’t matter in this thought experiment.) One thing that has consistently surprised me is that some people view memory consumption as something approaching a moral issue: low memory consumption is virtuous and high memory consumption is sinful. As a result, this hypothetical change would improve Firefox’s reputation, rightly or wrongly, for the better.

Let’s call this aspect of Firefox’s reputation the “reputation-by-measurement”. I suspect the most important metric for reputation-by-measurement is the “private bytes” reported by the Windows Task Manager, because that’s what people seem to most often look at. Private bytes measures the virtual memory of a process that is not shared with any other process. It’s my educated guess that in Firefox’s case that the amount of shared memory isn’t that high, and so the situation is similar to virtual OOMs above — just about any change that reduces the amount of virtual memory will reduce the private bytes by the same amount, and in terms of reputation-by-measurement, a 100MB reduction is twice as good as a 50MB reduction.

Examples

Some examples help bring this discussion together. Consider bug 609905, which removed a 512KB block of memory that was found to be allocated but never accessed. (This occurred because some code that used that block was removed but the allocation wasn’t removed at the same time.) What were the benefits of this change?

The 512KB never would have been in the working set, so performance would not have been affected.
Virtual memory consumption would have dropped by 512KB, slightly reducing the likelihood of virtual OOMs.
Physical memory consumption probably didn’t change — because the block was never accessed, it probably never made it into physical memory.
Private bytes would have dropped by 512KB, slightly improving reputation-by-measurement.

Now consider bug 670596, which made the JavaScript garbage collector decommit (i.e. remove from physical memory and backing storage) 1MB heap chunks that are unused. What were the benefits of this change?

Performance may have improved slightly due to reduced paging, on machines where paging happens. Those chunks are clearly not in the working set when they are decommitted, but if paging occurs, the pre-emptive removal of some pages from physical memory may prevent the OS from having to evict some other pages, some of which might have been in the working set.
Virtual memory consumption would not have changed at all, because decommitted memory still takes up address space.
Physical memory consumption would have dropped by the full decommit amount — 10s or even 100s of MBs in many cases when decommitting is triggered — significantly reducing the likelihood of physical OOMs.
Private bytes would not have changed, leaving reputation-by-measurement unaffected. [Update: Justin Lebar queried this. This page indicates that decommitting memory does reduce private bytes, which means that this change would have improved reputation-by-measurement.]

Another interesting one is bug 676457. It fixed a problem where PLArenaPool was requesting lots of allocations of ~4,128 bytes. jemalloc rounded these requests up to 8,192 bytes, so almost 50% of each 8,192 byte block was wasted, and there could be many of these blocks. The patch fixed this by reducing the requests to 4,096 bytes which is a power-of-two and not rounded up (and also usually the size of an OS virtual memory page). What were the benefits of this change?

Performance may have improved due to less paging, because the working set size may have dropped. The size of the effect depends how often the final 32 used bytes of each chunk — those that spilled onto a second page — are accessed. For at least some of the blocks those 32 bytes would never be touched.
Virtual memory consumption dropped significantly, reducing the likelihood of virtual OOMs.
Physical memory consumption may have dropped, but it’s not clear by how much. In cases where the extra 32 bytes are never accessed, the second page might not have ever taken up physical memory.
Private bytes would have dropped by the same amount as virtual memory, improving reputation-by-measurement.

Finally, let’s think about a compacting, generational garbage collector, something that is being worked on by the JS team at the moment.

Performance improves for three reasons. First, paging is reduced because of the generational behaviour: much of the JS engine activity occurs in the nursery, which is small; in other words, the memory activity is concentrated within a smaller part of the working set. Second, paging is further reduced because of the compaction: this reduces fragmentation within pages in the tenured heap, reducing the total working set size. Third, the tenured heap grows more slowly because of the generational behaviour: many objects are collected earlier (in the nursery) than they would be with a non-generational collector, which means that structure traversals done by the garbage collector (during full-heap collections) and cycle collector are faster.
Virtual memory consumption drops in two ways. First, the compaction minimizes waste due to fragmentation. Second, the heap grows more slowly.
Physical memory consumption drops for the same two reasons.
Private bytes also drops for the same two reasons.

A virtuous change indeed.

Conclusion

Reducing Firefox’s memory consumption is a good thing, and it has the following benefits.

It can improve speed, due to less paging, fewer cache misses, and faster structure traversals. These changes are likely to be noticed more by users on lower-end machines.
It improves stability by reducing virtual OOM aborts, which mostly helps heavy tab users on Windows. It also improves stability by reducing physical OOM aborts, which mostly affects heavy-ish tab users on small devices like smartphones and netbooks.
It improves reputation among those whose browsing experience is improved by the above changes, and also among users who make judgments according to memory measurements with utilities like the Windows Task Manager.

Furthermore, when discussing MemShrink optimizations, it’s a good idea to describe improvements in these terms. For example, instead of saying “this change reduces memory consumption”, one could say “this change reduces physical and virtual memory consumption and may reduce paging”. I will endeavour to do this myself from now on.

Robert Accettura: Why Open Source Is Pretty Awesome

Robert — 2012-02-08T01:01:09+00:00

At some point I think it’s easy to take things for granted. Being able to alter software to meet your needs is an awesome power.

Today, a tweet rehashed an annoyance regarding a tactic on websites to alter copy/paste and put a link with tracking code in your clipboard. I could opt out, but that doesn’t fix when websites roll their own. It’s a fairly simple thing to implement. In my mind there’s little (read: no) legitimate justification for oncopy, oncut or onpaste events.

So I did an hg pull while working on some other stuff. I came back and wrote a quick patch, started compiling and went back to working on other stuff.

Then came back to a shiny new Firefox build with a shiny new preference that disabled the offending functionality. A quick test against a few websites shows it works as I intended by simply killing that event. You can’t do these things with closed source.

Of course I found the relevant bug and added a patch for anyone interested.

A 15 minute diversion and my web browsing experience got a little better. Sometimes I forget I’ve got experience on that side of the wire too .

Harvey Anderson: Comments supporting DMCA jailbreaking exemption

lockshot — 2012-02-08T00:55:57+00:00

Every three years the US Copyright office, examines whether it will renew certain exemptions to the DMCA. In 2009 we submitted arguments supporting the EFF’s petition for the exemption of jailbreaking from the DMCA. The Copyright office granted the exemption in 2010 which now expires at the end of 2012.

Although it seems a bit silly to have to do this every three years, we’re going to again file a brief supporting the exemption for jailbreaking, also known as “rooting.” EFF has more information here on the arguments and the process.

Based on feedback from developers around the Mozilla project, the brief will contend that rooting is important because it’s necessary to achieve competitive application performance on Android mobile platforms, to effectively debug applications, and for regression testing. In addition, it’s even more critical now as mobile devices surpass desktop, and Internet access increasingly comes from mobile platforms.

We plan to file our comments on Friday afternoon. If you have ideas or thoughts that could be incorporated in the brief, please let us know. Alternatively, you can file your own comments, or if your flavor is petitions go here.

Taras Glek: Snappy, Feb 2nd – FOSDEM, Help Wanted

tglek — 2012-02-08T00:52:06+00:00

We cancelled last week’s snappy meeting due to Perf/Snappy workweek + FOSDEM. See Jared’s post for a summary of the workweek, I’ll mention the rest below.

We figured out a strategy for avoiding blocking DOM Storage IO (use scriptblocker to async preload relevant dom storage. Do async writeback to commit). We have a plan for cancellable SQL queries, bug 722243.

SetTimeouts/30s telemetry landed in bug 715953, I attached result of that in bug 715376. Persistent telemetry was backed out while Nathan investigates problems, bug 707320.

Brian Bondy has been fixing our usage of Windows APIs:

bug 722225 - Firefox startup opt on Windows by optimizing D3D10CreateDevice1 (pending review)
bug 722315 - Firefox startup opt on Windows by lazy loading CLSID_DragDropHelper (landed)
bug 692255 - Find a way to get rid of prefetch files on Windows for faster startup (pending review)

We spent the weekend at FOSDEM. I re-presented my Plumbers talk on why Linux sucks for starting big apps. I also did a Telemetry talk. The audience was great.

Help Wanted

To my great regret, I forgot to mention that Mozilla is hiring in my talks. In particular, I’m looking for more performance hackers. If enjoy spending quality time with stack traces,writing profilers or analyzing performance logs leave a comment or send me an email. Compiler toolchain and/or kernel hacking experience would be a great bonus.

Blog of Metrics: Some Results for Memshrink

Saptarshi Guha — 2012-02-08T00:38:13+00:00

As the website ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink ) describes, MemShrink is a project to reduce Firefox memory consumption. Summary (taken from the webpage) is

Speed. Firefox will be faster due to less cache pressure, less paging, and fewer/smaller GC and CC pauses. Changes that reduce memory consumption but make Firefox slower are not desirable.
Stability. Firefox will suffer fewer aborts/crashes due to virtual or physical memory exhaustion. The former is mostly a problem on 32-bit Windows builds with a 2GB or 4GB virtual memory limit, the latter is mostly a problem on mobile devices that lack swap space.

The engineers working on MemShrink asked the Metrics team to help discover and quantify what variables affect variables that related to MemShrink. Key among these is RESIDENT_MEMORY which is the resident memory that Firefox occupies. For a given installation, multiple measurements are taken before the data is submitted. The data, for a given installation, is recorded as a histogram (so we dont have serial correlations between observations …), and the final value used in modeling is the weighted mean.

The Data Set

We already have some variables at our disposal, them being

version :: the version of Firefox (10,11 or 12)
number of addons
does the installation have Firebug? (Yes/No)
memory size
Number of CPUs
RESIDENT_MEMORY

The data set was a 70% sample taken from the Hbase Telemetry table from 2012-01-01 to 2012-01-31. With those variables, we first looked at QQ Plots ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Q_plot ) to see the distribution for variable transformations (e.g. truncation? log transformation?). After that, the sample was further randomly sampled 1000 12.5% samples of the 70% sample. ANOVA was run across each of these samples and the quantiles of the residuals, the parameters and adjusted R squareds were taken.

Results

The following diagrams are scatter plots of some of the covariates vs. RESIDENT_MEMORY. This is used to consider interactions or transformations.

In the following graphs, Y vs X implies Y on the vertical axis and X on the horizontal. ‘log(A,2)’ is the log of A with respect to base 2.

1a). log(RESIDENT_MEMORY in bytes,2) vs. Log(# of Addons,2) by Version

1b) log(RESIDENT_MEMORY in bytes ,2) vs. Log(Memsize in bytes,2) by Version

1c) log(RESIDENT_MEMORY bytes,2) vs. HasFireBug by Version

1d) Quantiles of log(Resident Memory bytes,2) by Version

Note, there doesn’t seem to be interaction with version except for a feeble one in (1c)
1d) is also called the Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function.. If the distribution were uniform, it would be a diagonal at 45 degrees. The panel for ’12′ indicates that 60% of the obs. are less than 2^18 bytes .
In summary, he data set is extremely noisy. Though the assumptions of modeling are met (independence etc)
the variables only explain 35% of the variation (not even 50) as seen from the ANOVA R^2.s
1a) definite increasing trend with log(addon+1) but there is so much variation! and no difference across versions.
1b) same as (2) except that in 12 the flattening happens earlier though flattens at a higher value than 10,11. I expect some flattening to happen, why would RESIDENT_MEMORY increase continuously just because memory size is bigger?
1c) – marginal difference, but again so much noise.
1d) the distribution of RESIDENT_MEMORY is almost same for 10,11,12 with a slight upward shift for 12.

We cannot expect a great fit with these variables. The next is a panel display of QQ plots of 100 random ANOVA residuals. Statistical inference in in this particular case study requires that the residuals be Gaussian distributed. Here ‘normal’ means the Normal distribution. They aren’t perfectly Normal, but the departure looks acceptable. Not included are the other displays such Scale-Location plots, though upon inspection they show no relation between scale and location (i.e. variances does not depend on mean).

QQ Plots for Residuals for a Random 25

Interpretation

Averaging the coefficients of 1000 regression produces the following parameter table. Though the estimates are precise the R squared itself is not the highest – a lot of explanation is required. Explanation of the table follows below it. The model is log(RESIDENT_MEMORY,2) ~ version + log(addon+1,2) + hasFirebug(fb) + log(memorysize,2) .

The first column of numbers is the left end of the 95% confidence interval of the coefficient, and the 3rd column is the upper end of the 95% CI.

                          2.5    mean coef     97.5
(Intercept)       13.85290273 13.89114640 13.92939007
version11         -0.02897665 -0.01986893 -0.01076121
version12          0.09062749  0.10488013  0.11913277
log(addon + 1, 2)  0.28370203  0.28668868  0.28967534
fbTRUE             0.08945122  0.11898676  0.14852230
log(cpu, 2)        0.06480277  0.06965200  0.07450124
memsize            0.23214017  0.23590406  0.23966795

What this means is that, (‘keeping everything else fixed’)

version 11 reduces memory consumption about 2% (on average, but keep in mind there is a lot of variation) over v.10
version 12 ups it by about 11% over v.10 (see the distribution at top of log of RESIDENT_MEMORY by version)
Presence of Firebug extension causes a slight increase (on average of 12%)
if one doubles the number of addons (and add 1 to this) the RESIDENT_MEMORY increases ~ by 33%

Future:

The thing with large data is that even the smallest difference can be called ‘significant’. What is true that 12 seems to use more memory. And that the difference between using Firebug or not decreases for 12. But equally importantly the collection of variables explains only 36% of the variance – so though the estimates are precise, there is a lot of variance around any estimate. Results should be taken with caution.

All the computation and analysis was done using RHIPE (see https://github.com/saptarshiguha/RHIPE ). We have only covered some variables we thought might affect RESIDENT_MEMORY. There are however 215 variables captured by the Telemetry project and we could well benefit doing some tree-based analysis (randomforests anyone?) to discover useful variables (that affect RESIDENT_MEMORY). More on this later.

Sample RHIPE Code

This is the code producing marginal plots.

yy <- function(location,var,N=3){
  m <- ewrap({
    Var <- unserialize(charToRaw(Sys.getenv("varname")))
    N <- unserialize(charToRaw(Sys.getenv("N")))
    r <- r[!is.na(r$memres) & !is.na(r$memsize) & r$memres>-Inf & r$memsize>-Inf,]
    Y <- r[,"memres"];X <- r[,Var]; V <- as.character(r[,"version"])
    for(i in 1:nrow(r)){
      rhcollect(list(version=V[i],var=X[i],value=round(Y[i],N)), 1)
    }})
  mapred <- list(varname=rawToChar(serialize(var,NULL,ascii=TRUE)),
                 N=rawToChar(serialize(N,NULL,ascii=TRUE)))
  reduce <- summer
  z <- rhmr2(m,reduce=reduce, combine=TRUE
           ,ifo="/user/sguha/telemetry/samples/1/p*",of=location
           ,mapred=mapred)
  rhstatus(rhex(z,async=TRUE),mon.sec=5)
  z <- rhread(sprintf("%s/p*",location))
  library(Hmisc)
  version <- unlist(lapply(z,function(r) r[[1]][[1]]))
  varble <- unlist(lapply(z,function(r) r[[1]][[2]]))
  value <- unlist(lapply(z,function(r) r[[1]][[3]]))
  count <- unlist(lapply(z,function(r) r[[2]][[1]]))
  z1 <- data.frame(version=version,var=varble,value=value, count=count,
                   stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
  colnames(z1) <- c("version",var,"value","count")
  z1 <- z1[order(z1$version,z1[,var],z1$value),]
  z2 <- do.call('rbind',lapply(split(z1,list(z1$version,z1[,var])),function(r){
    P <- 1:19/20
    data.frame(version=r[1,"version"],var=r[1,var], p=P, q= wtd.quantile(r$value,r$count, P),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
  }))
  colnames(z2) <- c("version",var,"p","q")
  z2
}

library(lattice)
library(latticeExtra)

###############################
## Plot of memres vs addons
###############################
addons <- yy("/user/sguha/telemetry/tmp/b","addon")
pdf("~/addons.pdf")
asTheEconomist(
              xyplot(q~log(addon,2)|version, type='p',
              main='Quantiles of Log(RESIDENT_MEMORY,2) vs. Log(addon,2)'
                     ,data=addons,pch=1, cex=0.3,col='#00000030'
                     ,layout=c(3,1),aspect=1,ylab='Log(RESIDENT_MEMORY,2)'
                     ,panel=function(x,y,subscripts,...){
                       panel.grid(h=-1,v=-1,lwd=0.5)
                       panel.xyplot(x,y,...)
                       panel.loess(x,y,col='red',lwd=0.7,type='l')
                     })
               ,type='p',pch=16, cex=0.7,col='#00000060')
dev.off() ##cut at 6
#############################

Sean McArthur: Chrome for Android

2012-02-07T23:28:35+00:00

Chrome for Android:

Exciting news for Android. It’s always been a wonder why the stock Browser wasn’t Chrome, and now it is. And it really rocks. The tab interface is fun to use.

However, since it uses an updated version of the webkit rendering engine, it should need to load that library upon initialization. The standard engine is always in memory, something that’s held back Firefox for Android. Yet, Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from this.

Perhaps the mobile Firefox engineers already know, but I can think of 3 possibilities:

There’s a way to keep the new libraries in memory.
There’s a way to replace the default engine
Or they just handle the loading in a better way.

Whichever it is, hopefully mobile Firefox can find a way to improve their loading to be close to equivalent to Chrome’s loading.

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: SF Meetup: Add-ons Made Easy with Builder and SDK

Amy Tsay — 2012-02-07T22:35:42+00:00

If you’re in the Bay Area, we invite you to join us at our San Francisco office on Tuesday, February 21, for an evening of food, drinks and good company!

Come and see how easy it is to create add-ons for Firefox with Add-on Builder and the Add-on SDK. If you’re a Web developer and know HTML, JavaScript and CSS, you already have what it takes to make great add-ons.

One lucky raffle winner will receive an Android tablet!

Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Time: 6:00 – 8:00pm
Location: Mozilla SF – 2 Harrison Street, 7th Floor

** Reserve your spot now! **

David Boswell: Now we can say Mozilla is a world-wide community

davidwboswell — 2012-02-07T21:10:17+00:00

With the launch of Mozilla Antarctica today, we can truly say that Mozilla is a world-wide community. Check out the maps of local Mozilla communities around the world to see all of the cool stuff going on.

Now that we have all of the ground covered, we’ll need to reach out to the residents of the International Space Station to see if they’re interested in forming a local Mozilla community…

Ben Hearsum: Release Automation – Part 1: Bootstrap

bhearsum — 2012-02-07T20:14:25+00:00

One of the first tasks I had as a full-time employee of Mozilla was getting the Bootstrap Release framework working with Firefox 3.0 Beta releases. Now, just over 4 years later, our Release Automation has changed dramatically in many ways: primary language, supported platforms, scope and extent, reliability, and versatility. I thought it made be interesting to trace the path from there to here, and talk about what’s in store for the future, too. Throughout all of this work there’s been two overarching goals: 1) Lower the time it takes to go from “go to build” to “updates available for testing” – which we call “end2end time”, and 2) Remove the number of machines we have to log into, commands we have to run, and active time we have to spend on a release – known as “manual touchpoints”. I’ll be referencing these a lot throughout this series.

This post will talk about what I know of Bootstrap and my work porting it to Firefox 3.0.

In its earliest form Bootstrap was a simple scripted version of much of the previously manual release process. The processes for tagging VCS repositories, creating deliverables (source packages, en-US and localized builds, updates), and some verifications were encapsulated into its scripts. This was a big improvement over the 100% manual, cut+paste-from-a-wiki, process. Instead of logging into many machines and running many commands, the release engineer had to log in to many machines and run a few, very simple commands. The very first release that was Bootstrap-aided was Firefox 1.5.0.9, built on December 6th, 2006. This was before my time, but a former release engineer, Rob Helmer, told me that the end2end time back then could be multiple days, and countless touchpoints.

Over time, more parts of the release process were automated with Bootstrap, further reducing the burden on the release engineer. Even with these big improvements some classes of things were still not codified: which machines to run which commands on, when and in what order to run things, who to notify about what. Enter: Buildbot. Integrating Bootstrap into Buildbot was the next logical step in the process. It would handle scheduling and status, while Bootstrap would remain responsible for all of implementation. With this, the release engineer only had to log in to a few machines and run a few, very simple commands. Another big improvement! The first release to benefit from this was Firefox 2.0.0.8, built on October 10th, 2007. This work was largely done by Rob Helmer.

Around this time we were gearing up to start shipping the first Firefox 3.0 Beta release and had never tested Bootstrap against that development branch. I was tasked with making whatever changes were necessary to Bootstrap and our Buildbot to make it work. The Buildbot side was largely simple, because of it being at such a high abstraction layer, but back in these days we still had single purpose Buildbot masters, so it involved adding several hundred lines of config code.

The Bootstrap side was far more interesting. Until this point, there was a lot of built-in assumptions based on what the 1.8 branch looked like, including:

Releases are done from CVS branches (explicitly _not_ trunk)
Windows build machines run Cygwin
Linux packages are in .gz format
The crash reporting system Talkback is always shipped

By themselves, none of these things are too challenging to deal with, but as a very new hire, the combination took me about a month to find solutions to and fully test, with many rounds of feedback and guidance along the way. With all of that done and landed, we managed to use the new automation to build Firefox 3.0b2 on December 10, 2007. At this point, the end2end time was around 24h and there were about 20 manual touchpoints.

Over the next 8 months or so there were a few major improvements of note. Firstly, Nick Thomas fixed bug 409394 (Support for long version names) allowed us to start shipping releases with nicer looking filenames like “Firefox Setup 3.0 Beta 4″. Not a crucial thing, but much nicer from the user perspective. bug 422235 (enable fast patcher for release automation) was a massive improvement in update generation, written by schrep. With this work, we went from taking 6-8 hours to generate updates, down to ~1h — an incredible savings in time. Finally, bug 428063 (Support major releases & quit using rc in overloaded ways) (also fixed by Nick) enabled us to build RCs with Bootstrap. While it may sound simple, there’s a lot of things in release automation that depend on filename, and catching them all can be difficult. As well as making it possible to build these, this bug also renamed the internal “rc” notion to “build”, to avoid situations where we’d have things like “3.0 RC1 rc1″, which was utterly confusing.

So, in the early days there were tons of improvement quickly: Bootstrap itself sped things up and lowered the possibility of error through reducing manual touchpoints. Buildbot + Bootstrap did so again, through the same methods. We also had pure speed-ups through things such as fast patcher. Having these things allowed us to maintain the 2.0.0.x and 3.0.x branches more more easily, and get chemspill releases out quickly and simultaneously. All of this work had to be done incrementally too, because we had to continue shipping releases while the work was happening. It’s hard to find good data for releases done with this version of the automation, but I guesstimate that the end2end time was around 12-14 hours and the number of manual touchpoints was still around 20 for a release without major issues.

Next up….Release Automation on Mercurial, v1.

Boris Zbarsky: Vendor interactions with the CSS working group and product secrecy

bzbarsky — 2012-02-07T18:50:18+00:00

The minutes from yesterday's CSSWG face-to-face meeting are a very interesting read in all sorts of ways. I was somewhat struck by this part:

  tantek: I think if you're working on open standards, you should propose
          your features before you implement them and discuss that here.
  smfr: We can't do that.
  sylvaing: We can't do that either.

Those are the Apple and Microsoft representatives replying to Tantek.

Now I won't claim that Mozilla always does this, or that it's even always desirable; it's often better to have a prototype and then discuss the standard than discuss standardization in a completely theoretical way. But this is not about prototypes; this is about not being able to talk about a feature until there's a more or less complete implementation, which is when Microsoft and Apple tend to announce new features. I knew that both Microsoft and Apple had longstanding policies of refusing to discuss future plans, but hadn't really thought about the negative effect this blanket policy has on standardization efforts...

Crystal Beasley: How People Think Facebook Connect Log‑in and Log‑out Work

Crystal Beasley — 2012-02-07T17:59:17+00:00

As part of my work on the Identity project at Mozilla, I’ve been taking a look into how the average person thinks about single sign-on. It’s a complex system, so not surprisingly, it’s most often misunderstood at a fundamental level.

I ran an unmoderated user test with usertesting.com with five users. Their task was to go to Buyosphere, a site that implements Facebook Connect, create an account, then log out. Then I asked them a series of questions. All five indicated they had used Facebook to log into sites before.

“When you log out of Buyosphere, do you think it logs you out of Facebook also? Why or why not and how would you tell for sure?” Incorrect answers are red and bold.

User 1) “i believe that once i log out of buyosphere, i am also logged out of facebook. once i am logged out i cannot see any more information regarding my account after logging out.”
User 2) “I think it does log me out because it gave me connect with Facebook, thus it mean it is not recognizing that I have a Facebook account. I’d tell if I am or not by opening up Facebook in a new tab and seeing if it is automatically logged in or not.”
User 3) “No, I told facebook to remember me. I would open my facebook page in a different browser window? I don’t normally tell it to log me out, so that is only a guess.”
User 4) “Yes. I do not see a separate window for my facebook site so I would assume that Buyosphere would have set it up to log me out when I’m done on their site. I think I can check to see if I’m logged out by opening facebook and seeing if the login boxes come up or if it takes me straight to my FB page. I will try it right now….I was wrong it didn’t log me out. I am surprised by that. That makes the process of logging off take longer if I have to log out of this site and then go to FB to log out of that site separately.”
User 5) “I don’t think it would log me out. I have used other sites through facebook and usually the log in and log outs are separate. I can tell for sure by checking my facebook page which I just did and I am logged in.”

The goal of this research was to determine if users had a mental model that would allow them to correctly log out of a single sign-on system in places where there are security concerns like a shared computer or public terminal. The answer is no. Disclaimer: Do not be tempted to extrapolate that this means 60% of people would get this question wrong. This is qualitative research, not quantitative and should not be regarded as having statistical significance.

The last little gut-wrenching nugget comes from the last 20 seconds of one test. Watch and weep.

You caught it, right? She believes she could use her Facebook user and password to log into this site. *sigh* It’s horrifying how easily a bad actor could build a honeypot to collect Facebook credentials.

In addition to confusion over when/where/how to log-in and log-out, we know that sites have big percentages of users with multiple accounts. This video clearly illustrates how that can happen.

What are sites to do? I don’t think there is a good answer. As much as your business case allows, use only one identity provider. If you’re using Facebook Connect, don’t have a standard log-in. Too often, two log-in systems are less than the sum of their parts. LukeW’s article details experiments to mitigate these problems. Some of them have security concerns that wouldn’t fly with many sites. I’m not confident any of them work massively better than only supporting one way of logging in. However, many site will feel it necessary to have a standard log-in plus Facebook Connect. Clearly more thinking and testing needs to be done in this direction.

Of course, my biased view is that we can build better solutions for single sign-on.

How People *Think* Facebook Connect Log‑in and Log‑out Work is a post from: Crystal Beasley, UX Designer at Mozilla

Mitchell Baker: Resurfacing

mitchell — 2012-02-07T16:41:17+00:00

I’ve been sort of invisible online for a few weeks. Sunday night we finally got moved out of our old, beat-up house. By “beat-up” I mean foundation damage, and water and silt flowing into the downstairs rooms, making them uninhabitable. It’s a wreck, but it’s big. So we had a decade of stuff crammed into a zillion storage spaces. I though getting ourselves moved into the temporary living spot during remodeling was the big job, but then my husband started pulling stuff out from the truly hidden storage spots, and that took another week of evenings and weekends to finish up.

Now we’re living in a space about 1/3 the size, with tons of stuff in storage (do we even want it back)? and am back to the normal focus on Mozilla, online life, etc. Funny have the luxury of a stable life well above subsistence level leads to the accumulation of so much stuff that seems meaningful at first but then becomes a burden.

More shortly.

Breaking the egg: About Toggling Tabs on Top...

2012-02-07T15:05:55+00:00

Tabs on top is scheduled to land in Thunderbird 11, and we’re pretty excited.

A few folks on Bugzilla have been wondering about how they can switch back to Tabs on Bottom, and have been shocked to find that such a toggle is missing. A bug was filed by a concerned user, asking us to put the toggle in. They were concerned that we were restricting customization and flexibility by not allowing them to change the tabs UI.

However, this lack of a toggle was a conscious decision, and was not made lightly.

I gave our reasoning in the bug, and I thought I’d include a copy here as well. Here goes:

Hey all,

So I’m going to talk a bit about the decision to move tabs in Thunderbird above the mail toolbar - and, more specifically, the decision to leave the UI toggle to move the tabs back to below the toolbar out.

When it comes to UI stuff, I can get pretty hand-wave-y and long-winded. In a departure from this, I’m going to try to be succinct here - please don’t interpret this as rudeness or brusqueness! :D

In Firefox, you have a back button, a forward button, and a URL bar to tell you where you are. With these rudimentary tools, the toolbar is easily generalizable to the act of navigation. This works for Firefox, because this is what Firefox *is* - a tool for navigating around the web. A high percentage of the things that you can do in Firefox involve navigation. Even in the Add-ons Manager, or Bookmarks Manager, the browser toolbar could make sense as a navigation interface (though we don’t seem to make those available - in fact, in the Add-ons Manager, we’ve created *new* back and forward buttons for navigation).

Where the browser toolbar *doesn’t* make sense, is in a place where navigation has less meaning. I’m going to pick on the Downloads Manager, for example. Firefox does not have the browser toolbar as part of the Downloads Manager, and outside of an add-on, such a customization is not really possible.

The reasoning behind this is obvious - having a back/forward/URL tools in the Downloads Manager makes very little sense.

So, the conclusion we can draw from this is: a shared toolbar makes sense in contexts that share the primary activity of that toolbar. This is why Firefox can get away with tabs-on-bottom for most of their UI.

Now, on to Thunderbird.

The rationale behind tabs-on-top in Thunderbird is somewhat different from Firefox’s. In Thunderbird, a tab can be many other things than just another Inbox tab.

Lightning, for example, gives us a tab that becomes a full-blown Calendering client. Unfortunately, they’ve had to deal with tabs-on-bottom, and have therefore been forced to shoehorn Calendering UI into the mail toolbar. If you’ve used Lightning, you know what I’m talking about.

This is not unique to Lightning. When viewing a content tab in Thunderbird, the mail toolbar above the content really makes very little sense - just like having the browser navigation bar in the Downloads Manager would make very little sense.

This is also quite restrictive. Thunderbird’s UI trajectory is tending towards more tab types (Search, Instant Messaging, eventually Compose in a tab, eventually Address Book in a tab). Having the toolbar exist *within* the tabs allows us a separation between these functions - and allows for a greater degree of customization *within* those tabs.

So I don’t think it’s fair to say that preventing tabs-on-bottom is making Thunderbird less configurable. On the contrary, I suggest that enforcing tabs-on-top is an investment that *ensures* greater flexibility and customization in the future.

All the best,

-Mike

Michelle Thorne: Feature Requests for Webmakers

thornet — 2012-02-07T14:01:29+00:00

As part of the on-going efforts to help webmakers the world over build & learn together, we’re collecting specs for event infrastructure. The Mozilla event menu is a piece of this, guiding community members to the event formats that best suit their needs and interests.

Once they’ve decided on an event type, organizers need a simple way to write up the event, spread the word, communicate with participants, and track outcomes.

Feature Requests

Thanks to conversations with Ben Simon, Jess Klein, Ross Bruniges, Matt Thompson, and others, we’re getting crisper on what features are essential to the Mozilla event infrastructure.

As an initial strawman, I proposed these features:

super simple event creation & categorization
localization-friendly
easy & secure data portability
good developer APIs
participant email capture and ability to mail them

I also think payment support is important, but not essential. At first, I argued strongly for it, because some organizers may need to recoup costs. But perhaps this is addressed by clearer sponsorship options and encouragement to use additional payment services, rather than a core requirement of our event infrastructure.

Another bonus feature is if the tools are already widely used and familiar to our communities. I think this is important for ease-of-use and discovery. For example, my friend Johannes uses Lanyrd to explore interesting upcoming events. Just yesterday he booked tickets to a festival he just discovered on Lanyrd that day. This suggests that if we don’t use popular listing sites, we miss out on potential participants. At the very least, strategic cross-posting should be encouraged.

Ben Simon has written an excellent post in response to the feature requests strawman. In it, he argues for these additional functions:

Ability for event organizers to organize over time: Communicate with participants before & after an event, plus allow sign-ups for single instances & repeated events
Groups: Search & find relevant events by geography, theme, skill level, etc.

Both of these are right on the money in terms of what we want our event infrastructure to support.

Prioritizing

Big questions we have now are:

Are the above features the most important?
Are we missing any?
And, once the list looks right, how to we deploy/build the infrastructure?

Over the coming weeks, I’m hoping to chat with people who’ve already organized events like the talented Heather Payne in Toronto (check out her upcoming Hive Toronto Pop-Up), Mozilla Kenyans Cliff Argwings & Alex Wafula and Product Dundee’s Jon Rogers & Mike Shorter, as well as people who’ve expressed interested in hosting something like Nick Doiron from CodeforAmerica, Christian Villum from Platform4, and Henrik Sandklef from FSCONS.

I’d like to get feedback on whether we’re prioritizing the right features and what would be helpful for them in future events.

There is also a big effort at the Mozilla Corporation to improve their event infrastructure, and we should definitely sync up & share solutions as much as possible.

3rd Party Audit

In parallel, we’re preparing for an audit of 3rd party event sites.

Considering there are companies that spend all of their time building event platforms, I argue that we should use those services, insofar they meet our needs, rather than coding something from scratch and maxing the bandwidth of our software team.

Ideally, the 3rd party site will feed into make.mozilla.org, a yet-to-be-coded aggregator for all the Mozilla webmaker activities.

On the list to investigate:

Lanyrd
Eventbrite
Meetup
350.org
Controlshift (still being built)
BlueStateDigital (which we currently use for some events and for Mozilla’s membership program)
also the Mozilla wiki, Where is Mozilla? and other in-house solutions

What other event sites do you really like? What do you use or see other people using well?

Images by Cyberdees from the Knight-Mozilla Hack Jam in Dundee.

Laura Hilliger: More System Thinking (at a Micro-Level)

laura — 2012-02-07T13:12:54+00:00

We’re still working on the Mozilla/P2PU Challenges for running an event. We’ve been through a number of iterations and are, at the moment, settling on a 1-2-3 format in which participants can access planning materials and sample content for any of the three types of events Mozilla champions. Michelle Thorne has created an Event Menu Lite that explains the event types, and we’re using the Hackasaurus Hacktivity Kit as a model for the “how to run a Learning Lab” portion of the Challenges.

Based on my system thinking chart, the event kit should include the three types of curriculum (ice breaker, instruction, design challenge), regardless of the type of event. The trick is defining each piece in a way that is broad enough that each event type can be included.

I’m thinking around this problem like this:

	Meetup	Learning Lab	Hackjam
Ice Breaker	Show and Tell. Discuss Concepts and Problems.	Show and Tell. Explain Concepts.	Show and Tell. Define Problems.
Instruction	Definition of the group’s goals.	Introduce Targeted Learning Objectives.	Crash Courses
Design Challenge	Make a plan to expand conceptual ideas from the Ice Breaker. Make a plan to reach goals defined in the Instruction.	Make using acquired knowledge from the Ice Breaker. Make using acquired skills from the Instruction.	Make by working to solve defined problems from the Ice Breaker. Make using acquired skills from the Instruction.

From a didactic standpoint, there are a couple of types of knowledge that are addressed in the three event types. A meetup could likely be categorized as “orientative knowledge” because participants are learning the connection between the chosen topic and their own lives (meetups are basically discussions). Learning Labs would likely be the next evolution with “instructional knowledge” because participants are receiving targeted lessons with specific learning objectives. A hackjam, then, serves to transfer “practical knowledge” as a participant will use pre-acquired knowledge to solve problems.

None of this is to say that one event type can’t or won’t transfer other types of knowledge, it’s simply a way to distinguish the learning goals of each event type. Understanding the overarching knowledge types will help us create curriculum that fits into each event type. This will allow us to be more efficient in our content creation, which means we will be able to create more content.

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated.

System Thinking (zythepsary.com)

Identity at Mozilla: ID provider support now live on BrowserID

2012-02-07T13:04:00+00:00

Last week we pushed out a BrowserID feature that gets us closer to the decentralized identity system we envision for the Web. But more than that, it enables a truly awesome user experience—registration flows go from 8 screens to one simple sign-in. Seriously! See for yourself:

Chicken or egg

Some context: Building a distributed system is a chicken and egg problem - you have to design a system that can demonstrate the power of your idea and the advantages of a distributed architecture while you bring in participants who will become actual nodes in the system. That’s why, so far, BrowserID has operated with scaffolding that uses the BrowserID service itself to vouch for email addresses.

With our latest update, however, we’re setting aside some of that scaffolding and allowing a fully decentralized system to emerge: Identity providers can become full-fledged participants in BrowserID and directly vouch for their users’ email addresses.

What’s changed and what you need to know

If you’re a website that’s already implemented BrowserID, you don’t have to do a thing: BrowserID is just better for you! Up to this point, Browser ID has been vouching for users’ email addresses on behalf of participating websites. Now email providers can directly vouch for their users, eliminating the need for an email confirmation step or a BrowserID password.

Note that this change only takes effect when the email provider for a given address implements BrowserID support. Other email addresses continue to work in the same way they do today, with an email confirmation and password from the BrowserID service.

With ID provider support, users will have a better, faster, smoother registration experience.

Give it a spin.

Attention email providers large or small: whether you’re an enterprise, an ISP, a university or institution, you owe it to your users to check out this key new feature of BrowserID. Now it’s easy and incredibly simple for any email provider to become an identity provider for their users.

Try out our demo ID provider at eyedee.me and your @eyedee.me address on any BrowserID site. Take a look at our code and documentation. Let us know what you think via our mailing list, IRC channel, or via the Twitter hashtag #browserid.

Dan Sinker: The Knight-Mozilla Partnership Evolves

2012-02-07T12:55:00+00:00

Change is awesome—it’s a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it’s with real excitement that today I’m announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original Partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010’s problem-sets. Two years is an eternity on the internet—it was time to rethink and retool for today.

The community around code in journalism is vastly different today than in 2010: There are a number of app teams in some of the world’s best news organizations that embrace the “show your work” philosophy of open-source; organizations like Hacks/Hackers, NICAR, the Online News Association, and others are embracing the idea of hackfests and code-driven collaboration; and independent developers are starting to become interested in hacking journalism in earnest. These are awesome developments—this community is vital and growing.

The changes to the Knight-Mozilla Partnership for 2012 engage this larger community in meaningful ways:

We’re helping to sponsor and organize more than a dozen hackdays around the world this year. Hackdays are one of the best ways to get developers from all over to experiment with the idea of coding for journalism, and a great way to get some open-source code back into the community.
We’ll be increasing the opportunities for online learning that address the needs of the high-end developers we want to get interested in journalism, as well as a separate track for journalists who want to start becoming webmakers.
We’re also developing a stand-alone site, Source, dedicated to shining a spotlight on the vital work going on in the journalism code community through case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, code snippets, and much more.
Of course, the biggest element of the Partnership, our Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, stays a vital center to the program. And in 2012 it grows—from five year-long fellowships to eight. There are some other changes in store for the Fellowships as well—that’ll be a topic for a blog post of its own soon.

These aren’t small changes—they alter what we’re doing in a lot of exciting ways. In fact, they’re big enough that we decided a new name and identity was in order. So the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, also known as MoJo, is no longer—welcome to Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. A new year starts right now.

Bogomil Shopov: Why the heck we need marketing guys at our perfect IT company?

Bogo — 2012-02-07T10:26:30+00:00

I am sure you know this modern company structure scheme:

пидорась == faggot
IT отдел == IT crowd/department/section

The past
I remember when I was younger and I was writing some bytes for living. I still know that there are just 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

WTF?
I was wondering all my life why the heck we need a marketing and community management droids at our team. We create a kick-ass products that we can sell them via our web-page using 33 lines of HTML code an an Paypal account.

I am on the dark side of the force now and I know why.

The truth in 5 points*

If there is no marketing droids:

Less people know about us – our clients are our friends and peers and visitors from Google are welcomed too.
1 = Less money – well, I don’t have to explain this, do I?
2 = No salary++
3 = No beer money NOR I just got an invitation to work for another company that has a great marketing department.
R.I.P GPWGFTCCW (Great Product with great functionalities that can change the world.)

If there is no community management guys:

No community around us = We have to test our product by ourselves in any possible OS, CPU, RAM, ….
No community around us = How to know what to improve and what the clients really need from our products?
No community around us = How to get ideas for new products?
No community around us = How to find someone that will tell you honestly “You’re wrong”
No community around us = How to find someone who will help you with documentation, bug hunting, beer drinking, and to cheer you up – “You’re good. I love your product.”

* I am so sorry, but someone should change the ordered list to start from 0/zero/. Starting from 1 is so lame.

Jet Villegas: How to get started hacking the Firefox browser engine

jet — 2012-02-07T09:58:53+00:00

One of the Gecko Layout & Rendering team’s main responsibilities is the continuing development of CSS in Firefox. I recently modified the CSS style system to allow nested rule parsing. This bug fix taught me a lot about the CSS parser and how styles cascade through the rest of the Layout engine. It took me a little while to set up a dev environment, understand the bug, write tests, get the code written, reviewed, and checked in. I now have a much better understanding of what it takes to move code through the Mozilla source trunk.

I suspect that there are other programmers out there currently lurking around the Mozilla community, intimidated by the scale of the source tree, and wondering where to start hacking on Firefox. I highly recommend starting with the Gecko Overview started by L.David Baron, Mozilla Principal Software Engineer, to help beginners understand the browser engine. Thanks, David!

hacks.mozilla.org: Using the Battery API – Part of WebAPI

Robert Nyman — 2012-02-07T09:03:06+00:00

Detecting battery level in a device or computer can help you inform the user of the current status. Within Mozilla’s WebAPI, we have the Battery API to offer that possibility.

Accessing the battery

First, it’s a matter of accessing the battery object:

var battery = navigator.mozBattery;

Properties

There are a few properties offered to detect the charging level of the battery in the device:

Battery level: Check the currenty battery level. Returns a value between 0 and 1.
Battery charging: A boolean, returning if the device/computer is currently being charged.
Battery chargingTime: Time left in seconds until it is fully charged. Available when charging.
Battery dischargingTime: Time left in seconds until it is discharged. Available when not charging.

// Get battery level in percentage var batteryLevel = battery.level * 100 + "%";


    // Get whether device is charging or not

    var chargingStatus = battery.charging;
    // Time until the device is fully charged

    var batteryCharged = battery.chargingTime;

// Time until the device is discharged var batteryDischarged = battery.dischargingTime;

Events

There are four events available for detecting changes to the battery’s status:

levelchange: If the battery level changes.
chargingchange: Detect if the device went from being charged to unplugged, or vice versa.
chargingtimechange: When the device’s charging time changes (when plugged in)
dischargingtimechange: When the device’s discharging time changed (when unplugged)

battery.addEventLister("levelchange", function () {
    // Device's battery level changed
}, false);

battery.addEventListener("chargingchange", function () {
    // Device got plugged in to power, or unplugged
}, false);

battery.addEventListener("chargingtimechange", function () {
    // Device's charging time changed
}, false);

battery.addEventListener("dischargingtimechange", function () {
    // Device's discharging time changed
}, false);

Device support

Battery API is supported in Firefox Beta on:

Android (Firefox Aurora only, for now)
Windows
Linux (for those distros that have UPower installed – bundled with most nowadays)

Right now we don’t have anyone working on the Mac OS X implemementation, so if you have the skills, we’d love to see you contribute!

Demo and code

I’ve put together a basic demo of the Battery API and code is also available in the Battery API repository on GitHub.

If you don’t experience the expected results on your device, please file a bug and we can look into it. This feature is experimental at this time, and may not be ready for production use just yet.

Bonjour Mozilla: Tim Taubert et Felipe Gomes

clarista — 2012-02-07T09:00:00+00:00

(Photo : autonome)

La semaine dernière, en préambule du Fosdem, l’équipe performance et une partie de l’équipe frontend de Firefox étaient en goguette à Bruxelles. Enfin… en goguette… Nos vaillants développeurs se sont astreints à une difficile semaine de travail (une vidéo ici), entrecoupée de moments de détente. Comme ici, Tim Taubert et Felipe Gomes. Tous deux travaillent sur l’interface utilisateur de Firefox.

Depuis Berlin, où il réside, Tim a pour habitude de coder en musique. Il conjugue ainsi ses 2 passions : le son, et le code. Tim est libriste affirmé, contributeur à Gentoo, ainsi qu’au noyau Linux… avant de rejoindre le Panda Roux qu’il décrit comme un “compagnon loyal”. Bonjour Mozilla vous conseille de lire son billet sur la façon dont il est devenu un contributeur Firefox, très instructif.

De son côté, Felipe Gomes est un jeune développeur, tout juste diplômé, qui n’a qu’une ambition: “aider Mozilla à rendre le Web meilleur”. Jeune diplômé, donc, mais contributeur de longue date, et nouvel embauché. Felipe a fait le code initial pour gérer le multi-touches dans Mobile, alors qu’il était stagiaire. Aujourd’hui, le voici donc dans l’équipe frontend, où sa bonne humeur est très appréciée !

Bonjour Tim, et bonjour Felipe !

PS : et merci à Mike Hommey (Glandium) pour son aide !

Last week, as a preamble to Fosdem, the Firefox performance team and a part of the frontend team were gallivanting in Brussels. Well, not exactly… Our brave developers compelled themselves to a hard work week (a video here), interrupted by some recreation times. Like here Tim Taubert and Felipe Gomes. Both are working on Firefox user interface.

From Berlin, where he lives, Tim is used to listening music while he writes code. He combines his two passions as well: sound and code. Tim is a Free Software advocate. He contributed to Gentoo, and to the Linux kernel… before joining the Red Panda which he describes as a “loyal companion”. Bonjour Mozilla advises you to read his post about how he became a Firefox contributor: very informative.

Felipe Gomes, on the other hand, is a young, recent graduate developer, whos one and one ambition is to “help Mozilla make the Web better.” Recent graduate, then, but long-time contributor and new employee. Felipe created the initial code to handle multi-touch in Mobile when he was an intern. Today, he is part of the frontend team, where his good humor is much appreciated!

Bonjour Tim, and good morning Felipe!

PS: thank you to Mike Hommey (Glandium) for helping!

Paul Rouget: Bugzilla Activity Report

Paul Rouget — 2012-02-07T08:00:00+00:00

Bugzilla has an interesting feature: User Activity Report.

I didn't know about it until someone mentioned it on IRC yesterday. It's quite useful if you keep track of your daily/weekly work.

Also, if you want a prettier output, here is a script that will help. Run it in Scratchpad (Shift-F4):

Gian-Carlo Pascutto: New SafeBrowsing backend

Gian-Carlo Pascutto — 2012-02-07T07:45:35+00:00

Today, the SafeBrowsing rewrite me and Dave Camp have been working on for several months finally landed in the Mozilla Nightlies, and it should be part of the Firefox 13 release, narrowly having missed Firefox 12. It reduces the disk footprint of our anti-phishing and malware protection from about 40-50Mb to 5-6Mb, changes all related I/O from pure random access to a single serial read, and refactors a single 4000+ line C++ file into a bunch of modules. An earlier part of this work landed in Firefox 9 and reduced the memory footprint from potentially up to 40-100M to 1.2M, as well as removing the need to do some random I/O on every page load.
Aside from the performance gains, the reduced footprint is an essential step to enable us to extend our SafeBrowsing protection to Mobile devices, which is why we undertook this in the first place.

It was an interesting assignment, and being my first real project for Mozilla, a bit more involved than we thought at first. I blogged in July last year about our plans for this feature. Some of the optimizations we had in mind didn't work out, while others did end up being implemented.

Eliminating the host keys

One of the things touched upon in the previous blog post was that we used to store 2 32-bit hash prefixes for every blocked entry: one encoding only the host and the other encoding the full URL. Strictly speaking, we only need the full URL part. The old SQLite based code used the host key to SELECT and load all keys for a certain domain at once, but our new in-memory prefix-trie based approach has no such needs. However, as Justin Lebar alread touched upon in the previous blog, this does significantly increase the likelihood that we get a false positive. We now expect to have a false positive for every 7000 URLs visited. This will not cause us to block out any legitimate sites, as any positive hit in the local database is queried against the full, 256-bit hash at a remote server (hosted by Google, who provides the SafeBrowsing data).

This does mean we will increase the traffic to this remote server by a large factor. Scary as it may sound, some back-of-the-envelope estimates shows its not really that bad: say there are about 420M Firefox users, browsing for 8h/day. They load on average 1 URL per second. This means about 140M URL loads per second, causing about 20000 hash requests per second to Google. Google confirmed they can handle this with ease.

Now, there is still a problem when doing this: any collision will appear for all users on exactly the same URLs. This means that if you're unlucky enough to be a a site owner that has an URL that happens to collide, every visitor to your site will have a slightly slower browsing experience. Even worse, should you get linked in a popular forum, or be in the news, there will be a storm of false positives to the server all at once. We thought this to be problematic enough that we implemented a workaround: every user will generate a unique randomization key and re-randomize all his hashes with it. Collisions will happen on a different URL for every user, and consequently also be much better spread through time.

Eliminating chunk numbers

After some discussion, it turned out eliminating the chunk numbers isn't as easy as hoped. First of all, the observation in the previous blog posts that chunk expires only seem to happen when the chunks are in fact old, doesn't hold after observing the protocol for a longer time. It also happens very regularly that a chunk is added, deleted, and added back again, particularly in the malware list. In those cases, it is important to know which add chunk a delete is referring to, so it won't delete the later add. It would still be possible to deal with that if the server recalculates the prefixes to send for every client, but this is less efficient on the server side compared to the bigger, more static downloads that the server can point to now, and which are easily mirrored on Google's network.

Sub prefixes compress harder

In line with the previous paragraph, it happens that we receive sub prefixes for add prefixes we never received. These must be kept around until we receive an expire for them, as we can't know if the add they belong to is outdated or just not downloaded yet. Note also that we usually receive updates backwards, i.e. the most recent data will be sent to the clients first, as it's the one believed to be most relevant. Because sub prefixes contain both an add and a sub chunk, they are also bigger than add prefixes. This causes the eventual size of the database to be a bit more than the minimum guessed in the previous blog post, which more or less ignored sub prefixes entirely. If you peek in your profile, you can see that the goog-malware-shavar.sbstore will tend to be the biggest file: this is exactly due the many sub prefixes in the malware list.

Detection performance

It should be noted that these improvements are purely focused on the footprint of the feature. They will improve the resource usage of the browser, but they do not change the detection performance in any way.

NSS Labs Report

In what is somewhat of a funny coincidence, the same day I am writing this blog NSS Labs published a report "Did Google pull a fast one on Firefox and Safari users?". The main points of this report shouldn't be much news as I pointed out over half a year ago the discrepancy between Chrome, and Firefox and Safari in my previous blog post, as well the reason ("Performance differences between Firefox, Chrome and Safari").

I have two remarks to the report: one, as I've already pointed out in the past, false positive control is an important part of effective malware detection. Internet Explorer flags many malware sites, but it also flags legitimate sites, undermining the true effectiveness.

Secondly, the problem isn't so much that the "new" SafeBrowsing protocol is proprietary or non-documented; it's implemented in Chrome and Chromium is open source, so at the very worst we can go study that code to see how to implement it. The problem is that permission is required to use Google's SafeBrowsing servers, and ~~Firefox does NOT have permission to use the download protection list~~. Edit: Please see the statement from Ian Fette below.

Smokey Ardisson: Dear Apple

Smokey — 2012-02-07T07:34:06+00:00

Someday—in my lifetime—will you please make the current, native, recommended .sdef scripting definition format less buggy than the old, less powerful, and implicitly not recommended .scriptSuite / .scriptTerminology format?

Thank you. That is all.

Gen Kanai: Mozilla Myanmar at Barcamp Mandalay

Gen Kanai — 2012-02-07T06:11:29+00:00

Chit and Thanyawzinmin (Tin Aung Lin) from the Mozilla community in Myanmar recently represented Mozilla at BarCamp Mandalay. Please go over to Chit’s blog to read all about it!

https://ahkeno.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/mozilla-myanmar-at-barcamp-mandalay/

Jess Klein: Storytelling- Day One of Design Sprint "Webmaking for Journalists"

Jess — 2012-02-07T04:12:51+00:00

Today was the first day of the Open News - Webmaking 101 design sprint. Thanks to Hive NYC member Peoples Production House for graciously volunteering to host us! The team for our sprint includes:

pictured: erin knight, chris lawrence, michelle levesque, dan sinker, atul varma, brian brennan, jess klein and mark surman (not included are some top secret special guests who shall be named later this week!)

We started the day airing out our joint concerns about the direction of the project. It turns out, I wasn't the only one who was concerned about the tool not making sense within the range of potential tools that we might be developing at Mozilla. We all discussed what a journalist would want to make- and agreed that a journalist would want to use the web to tell their story. While this might sound simplistic, this is a topic that I am much more comfortable developing a project around compared to something like Webmaking 101 for Journalists. As I talked about in my last post, here is an example of a potential user who has a deep interest and motivation to make something (a story) using the web- and thus there is the opportunity to embed learning into this moment. Also, I think that the idea of storytelling has the potential to reach different kinds of learners (although it could certainly appeal to journalists)- including filmmakers, poets, youth etc.

We came up with a few goals for the week, including:

create a dirty working prototype- it doesn't have to be pretty, just having some functionality
designing some badges for the prototype

After determining our goals, we set to work reviewing the learning objectives for the project. This is a key thing for us to to review, because we wanted to make sure that the project fell within the scope of web literacies that are being defined for Mozilla. We had a good conversation about what could be included and what was out of scope for the project. Here is a little venn diagram that shows the domains within Mozilla's web literacies that this particular project will be addressing.

Essentially, there are 6 clusters/modules/ steps that we will be exploring through this exercise in helping people to tell their story through the web (below). While we will offer the skills in a series, ideally the user will have the opportunity to take these modules out of any particular sequence.

All about Tags
Style Your Stuff
Images
Links and the Open Web
Embedding and Beyond
Sharing

In our first brainstorm, we discussed using these 6 modules as guides for badge distribution within the context of the prototype.

Tomorrow we will be mapping these modules and learning objectives to storyboards for the instructional overlays and starting to work on developing out the content and copy for that section. I am really excited with the direction that this project is going and with our re-envisioning of the learning objectives as well as scope.

Planet Mozilla

Bonjour Mozilla: Mime Cuvalo

Daniel Glazman: CALL FOR ACTION: THE OPEN WEB NEEDS YOU *NOW*

THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN.

Jess Klein: Open News Design Sprint Day 3: Meet the Journalists

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mobile Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-08

Mobile/Notes/08-Feb-2012

Contents

Details

Schedule

Major Topics for This Week

Stand ups

James W. (snorp)

Kats

GBrown

AlexP

Chris Lord (cwiiis)

Chris Peterson

GCP

Brian N

Sriram

WesJ

LucasR

MBrubeck

Margaret

Scott (jwir3)

BLassey

DougT

MFinkle

Madhava

Ian Barlow

Patryk Adamczyk

BenWa/AJuma

Round Table

SUMO

QA

Project Management

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2012-02-08

Firefox/Planning/2012-02-08

Contents

Actions from Last Week

Schedule & Progress on Upcoming Releases

Firefox Desktop

Release (3.6, 10)

Beta (11)

Aurora (12)

Nightly (13)

Firefox Mobile

Firefox Sync

Add-on Builder

Add-on SDK

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Mobile

UX & User Research

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Google

Microsoft

Opera

Other

Mobile

Marketing, Press & Public Reaction

Desktop

Mobile

Press

Questions, Comments, FYI

Actions this week

Ricky Rosario: SUMO Development: 2012.2 Update

Onward to 2012.3

Robert Kaiser: Weekly Status Report, W05/2012

Pascal Finette: Coffee - The Rabbit Hole Edition

Erin Knight: Open Badges Roadmap

Smokey Ardisson: Dear CCAS

hacks.mozilla.org: Announcing the December Dev Derby Winners

Chelsea Novak: More locales for Firefox Affiliates

hacks.mozilla.org: Wiki Wednesday: February 8, 2012

Eric Shepherd: Wiki Wednesday: February 8, 2012

about:mozilla: FOSDEM, Mozilla Antarctica, WebFWD and more…

Web FWD: Forming Your Company: Key Decision Points

Daniel Glazman: CALL FOR ACTION: THE OPEN WEB NEEDS YOU NOW