Planet Mozilla DS

How cool is this?

Yes, the post title is the right way round.

November 15, 2008 09:48 PM

Since my first announcement about my little api reference tool I’ve slowly been working on updates to make it more useful and easier to navigate around. I’ve not gone and pushed the latest version live. A few of the new features:

• The main and platform lists of interfaces are split by the module where the interface lives.
• Interface lists have a quick filter box, type in it to filter the list quickly.
• Any interfaces used as return types or parameters are now links to get you straight to the information about them.
• Full IDL support so it now lists all the special attributes and for the uninitiated they have tooltips that explain what they mean.
• You can now list all usage of an interface by other interfaces.
• Constants are ordered the same as in the source IDL since they tend to make more sense that way.
• Includes direct links to the source IDL file.

I’ve also updated the database with the latest APIs in 1.9.1b2pre and as soon as 1.9.1b2 is frozen I’ll update it again just to be sure it has the latest versions.

You can also search the API for interfaces. There isn’t any UI for this right now but it is perfectly set up for a smart bookmark. Just use http://www.oxymoronical.com/experiments/apidocs/search/interface/%s for the url and an appropriate keyword and you can do quick searches for substrings of the interface name.

November 15, 2008 08:29 PM

Bond tonight, I'm trying not to get too excited. I wish I liked martinis.

Jo loves her new MacBook, an early gift when the drive on her old one died in a spectacularly audible fashion. The lack of FireWire is quite annoying, but at least I have other machines from which I can network-share my existing backup drive. She loves the speed, she loves the feel, but most of all, she's mesmerized by the gestures on the trackpad. Who knew?

We are also the proud owners of a new elliptical machine. This thing is a beast. I can't believe we got it down the stairs, and then that we were able to assemble it. It only squeaks a little and we only broke one plastic tab. Have I mentioned it's a beast? We're never moving. Ever.

November 15, 2008 05:58 PM

The folks at mission control and the astronauts at the Endeavour launch yesterday had PRACA available to them, which is a modification of Bugzilla that Everything Solved (my company) worked on with the NASA Ames Human-Computer Interaction team. I'm super excited that we were able to help out with the shuttle project, and that our software will continue to be used by the agency for the International Space Station and the future Constellation missions! :-)

-Max

November 15, 2008 04:53 PM

As of midnight Pacific time yesterday (roughly six and a half hours ago) we're in string freeze for the Thunderbird 3 beta1 release.

This means that any l10n strings in the mail/ and editor/ui/ directories in the comm-central repository are now frozen. Since Firefox is also in string freeze for it 3.1 beta2 release right now the strings in browser/, dom/, netwerk/, security/manager/ and toolkit/ are frozen as well. So we don't need to worry about any breakage that might come from that front.

The code freeze for our beta 1 will be on Tuesday 18th November at 23:59 Pacific time. We'll cut the release sometime after that once we've had some baking. So this means basically that your locales should be ready by that date. I'll open up a opt-in thread for you guys as soon as the code freeze is in effect.

We will be having a test day for beta 1 soon, that will be covering the new features and checking for any significant regressions. More details coming soon.

Please check the dashboard for up-to-date information on the state of your locale. We also have l10n nightly builds available at the regular location.

November 15, 2008 02:41 PM

This page has some of the best and coolest Firefox wallpapers that I've seen.

So check it out

November 14, 2008 10:25 PM

• Looking into Mollom for blocking spam (comments, content, and registrations)
• Working on project/user creation
• Lots of improvements to pending project admin page to make it more usable as a task list (lots of new todo items for bugzilla, maillist, newsgroup, users; new actions for marking pending projects ignored/verified/waiting response/complete)
• Getting new mirror machine ready

Next week I hope to get the new mirror machine in service, get the log replay script running better (currently taking too long; it isn't forking or performing queries properly), and continue working on getting the CVS creation scripts running from a job runner.

November 14, 2008 09:17 PM

November 14, 2008 08:17 PM

Yesterday we had our first public Ubiquity planning meeting. What made this meeting particularly interesting for me was the fact that we were trying something a little different from most standard Mozilla project meetings I’ve attended.

Generally, project meetings consist of one group of people who are in the same room together and can communicate very efficiently while all the folks calling-in can barely hear them, dramatically increasing their barrier to participation. Jono, Aza, and I experienced this first-hand when we were still in Chicago at the beginning of this year and had to call-in to meetings in Mountain View; as Jono eloquently put it, “some people were huddled around the fire while others were cast into the outer darkness.”

So this time, we all tried calling in to the conference so that everyone was on a level playing field: despite the fact that Jono and I were in the same building, we actually were in separate rooms during the conference call. The result was something that I felt was much more egalitarian and didn’t confer any special advantages to people who happened to be geographically local.

That said, though, the sound quality still left something to be desired. Skyping-in to Mozilla’s Asterisk system resulted in horrible audio quality, and my call was unceremoniously dropped less than five minutes in. I then used my cell phone, which had slightly better audio quality. It was still a far cry from the crystal clarity of Ventrilo using GSM—a VOIP solution traditionally used in the context of multiplayer gaming yet perfect for these kinds of meetings—but unfortunately the GSM codec is only available on Windows, and apparently the proprietary software isn’t yet available at all on Linux. Perhaps I’ll just try SJPhone next time, though I’d love to hear of any better solutions.

Aside from that, we also encouraged everyone to simultaneously gather on the #ubiquity channel on IRC to provide an additional channel of communication. This was particularly useful when someone wanted to provide supporting information while another person was speaking, and for providing information that’s better communicated through a textual medium such as URLs and phone numbers.

I’ve written up some meeting notes on the wiki detailing what we agreed upon as a road-map for Ubiquity 0.2, which we’re aiming to release in December. Those who attended are welcome to add anything I missed. If you have any questions about what was discussed or would like to help out, you’re welcome to join us in the ubiquity-core Google group and #ubiquity on irc.mozilla.org.

November 14, 2008 06:39 PM

A bunch of Mozillians are up in San Francisco today as part of our involvement with the SF Green Festival. It’s certainly a new type of conference for us, but when you look at the core values of the various other affiliated organizations there are a lot of commonalities in terms of trying to affect change through community building and grassroots action.

We’re also using this as a platform to communicate our “100% organic software” concept, so from a design perspective this gave us a great opportunity to use one of my favorite elements from the Mozilla.com redesign: our little family of egg illustrations. They’re so bizarre and yet, so perfect.

We worked with designers Monique Johnson and Rhonda Spencer to create egg-based collateral that included a print ad for the festival guide (below), landing page, affiliate buttons (available for download) and more.

There will be Mozilla-related activity at the festival all weekend long, so if you’re in the area definitely stop by and check it out. Mary has a good overview of the details up at her blog.

November 14, 2008 06:08 PM

One of the new features introduced since Firebug 1.4a2 is possibility to extend Net panel with additional info. There are new APIs that allow to create a custom info-tab for network requests (like Headers, Params, etc.) from within a Firebug extensions.

This post is intended (a) to show how these APIs should be properly used by Firebug's extensions and also (b) to gather some feedback about the architecture.

So, let me know please, if there is something I haven't thought about when designing this new extension point.

(more...)

November 14, 2008 05:49 PM

I’ve had the good fortune to visit the Stanford CS department twice this week — on Monday I visited with some of the current section leaders to talk about Mozilla some, and last night I was on a CS careers panel with my very good friends Schrep & Mauria and got to see Mehran & Jay as an added bonus.

It’s been interesting to be back — both incredibly familiar and pretty foreign to me. [As an aside, I have different feelings when I engage with the d.school -- I think maybe it's because I've gotten more involved with Diego & Bob & George and design later in my life, and am increasingly interested in those sorts of problems -- so I associate undergraduate CS education at Stanford with some exceptionally strong (and fond) emotions that come along with growing up in college.]

On the incredibly familiar side, I understood all the language; I recognized section leaders pulling a huge stack of papers out of their bags; using the time before the class to grade those programs; talking about whether something deserved a “check” or a “check plus.” I recognized the tiredness that comes from going all the time, but also the common fun & shared interest of the section leaders. And while I guess my time at Stanford pre-dated Joss Whedon, I even recognized the feeling when they all started talking about how much they love Dr. Horrible. And of course, of course, I remember looking forward and wondering what life in the world was going to look like, how I was gonna convince someone to give me a job I probably wasn’t really qualified for, and, really, what the hell people at work did with all their time.

On the unfamiliar side, holy cow these students know so much today, about so many things that are important. In 1995 when Bryan and I were both getting ready to start at Trilogy, I think we had a pretty good idea of what companies like Apple and Intel and HP did, but beyond that, not so much. But the students I talked with yesterday & Monday are incredibly informed. They understand the differences between Firefox & Chrome & Safari & IE, and even the implications of those differences. They understand how the Facebook platform works — many have written Facebook apps or web apps that are already in the world. And they understand more than I would have imagined about open source, which makes me hugely optimistic.

They asked lots of great questions. Some were super-specific, about things like what we’re going to do with Ubiquity over the next year, how we think about competition with Chrome, what it is, exactly that product managers do. (That last question I told them they’ll be asking for a pretty long time.)

But also things like how to decide what job to take? How to measure success? How much risk should I take right now? Does it matter if I do systems or AI or HCI?

And, of course, all of us older folks on the panel found ourselves saying things like “well, you won’t really get this now, but…” or “it took me 3 jobs to really figure out anything about that”. But the coolest thing, really, was that everyone on the panel agreed that the single most important thing was to not over-think it, to do what makes you engaged and interested — to do, in Tom Kosnik’s words, “things that make your soul sing.” And more importantly, to do things that matter to people, that change the world, that make things better. And even with all the economic doom around (more on that in my next post), that message of small groups of people getting together to change the world really resonated and made sense.

So with distance now, some things are clearer, some things not so much — that’s a characteristic of being human, I suppose. But I’m excited about this next group of people who are ready to change the world.

November 14, 2008 05:35 PM

November 14, 2008 05:28 PM

Here are the most noteworthy and complete features we’d like to call out in RC2 and get your feedback on:

• Importing iTunes libraries will no longer trigger a hang.
• Using the the Windows Media Playback and QuickTime Playback add-ons we’ve brought back the ability to play pre-authorized DRM media: WMA DRM on Windows; Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
• mashTape has been updated and will no longer invoke Flash player security warnings.
• We’ve adjusted the buffer size for streaming media but we’re still working on the final setting. If you think it’s too high you can adjust it by following these steps.
• Video support has been temporarily removed from the application. Our move to GStreamer introduced some new video related bugs that couldn’t be addressed in time for this release. Since video has been an unsupported feature we decided that this was the prudent thing to do for now. You can absolutely count on us re-introducing video support in a future release down the road!
• When viewing Album art at fullsize you can now easily close the window.
• When clicking on a track in the library invoking inline editing of metadata is now less likely to appear when you weren’t looking for it.
• We resolved a number of bugs that could crash the application (thanks for always submitting your crash reports. Your anonymous data really helps us track down issues!)

The RC2 release notes contain additional details about this build including a list of known issues.

As always, please file any issues, bugs, or crashes you find in Bugzilla so that we can address them before 1.0 final!

November 14, 2008 04:57 PM

Jminta’s js driven folder pane has landed in the trunk. This will allow us to much more easily extend the folder pane, and do interesting things going forward. Right now, you shouldn’t notice much difference, except that the extra columns are not supported, nor is the drop down folder picker. Thx to jminta for all his hard work, and to Standard8 for his excellent reviews. See bug 414038 for more info.

- David

November 14, 2008 04:02 PM

我平常在Amazon上买不少书，有空就东翻西翻。某些书则是仔细斟酌，从头“嚼”到尾。不时想到应该找机会分享一下体会。今天开个头，先挑两本旧书聊聊。

首先推荐Dealers of Lightning， 作者是Michael Hiltzik，讲世界著名的Xerox PARC在70-80年代为当今的计算机行业所奠定的基础。当年PARC如日中天，首先发明个人电脑，以太网，激光打印机等等。最令人震撼的是他们的做事精神。举个例子。以Butler Lampson为首的团队，想买一台DEC公司出品的PDP机作为研发平台，因为PDP上的软件丰富。但Xerox刚刚并购了CDC，是DEC的竞争对手，所以公司上层不批准买PDP的请求，而是只让买CDC。PARC的牛人们当即决定就是不买性能低劣的CDC，而是自造一台PDP的兼容机，以便利用PDP已有的软件平台。就这样从零件开始，一步一步搭建，不仅造出了先进的设备，也造就了一群有抱负的人才。我有幸与Butler等书中角色有识，自然读起来更有一番感触。

第二本介绍的是 In an Uncertain World，作者为 Robert Rubin，律师出身，曾任Goldman Sachs总裁，美国财政部长，现任花旗银行董事长。书中讲到他个人的成长历程，值得借鉴，但更主要的更值得学习的是他如何做决策的观点，特别是在没有（也无法掌握）完全信息的情况下，如何处理危机。他在财长任中正赶上亚洲金融危机，得以大显身手。本书不仅对目前全球金融危机是及时的参照，也是一个人成长过程中的上好的养料。

最后补充一句，建议尽量看原文书。即使是非英文的外文书，也建议看国外的英译本。因为原文传达的更确切，更完整。

November 14, 2008 05:49 AM

Last night we held a really fun Labs Night at Mozilla’s Building K in Mountain View, California. The Thunderbird team was here for their work week, some folks from Seedcamp dropped in, and Dion and Ben of the Ajaxian and the new Mozilla Developer Tools Lab were all here, which made for a night of innovative presentations that got lots of interesting conversations started.

The evening started out with Jono presenting a quick overview of all the currently active Labs projects while wearing a large sombrero. This was followed by Ben and Dion presenting an incredibly cool demo of something they worked on before they joined Mozilla, which wowed everyone in the audience. Personally, I was equally impressed by the way that they were able to literally finish each other’s sentences as a buzzer went off at random intervals, signaling them to switch speakers.

After that, Dave Ascher stepped up to present some really terrific new prototypes of Thunderbird user interface experiments. One of them, currently in the form of an extension called the ThunderBar, is essentially a Thunderbird translation of Firefox’s touted AwesomeBar: instead of showing you items from your browsing history and bookmarks, it shows you contacts and mail messages that match your search criteria in real-time, using Thunderbird’s brand-new global database extension dubbed “Gloda”.

Ascher also showed off a very cool prototype of a Gmail-style conversation view, along with a mashup of email data with the MIT SIMILE widget that presented a timeline of the user’s messaging activity.

He then explained that they were doing a lot of this new work using standard HTML rather than XUL, the XML UI language that comprises the UI of most Mozilla-powered applications. Among other things, this allowed the Thunderbird team to easily and quickly leverage the work of an incredible number of people working on the open web—an extremely well-documented and flexible platform used by designers and coders alike—rather than using what ultimately amounts to a user interface platform with few consumers and little documentation, tailored specifically for the functionality needed by Firefox and little else.

Coincidentally, this is the exact same reason that Ubiquity features as little XUL as possible; the command prompt is done entirely in HTML, and everything that might normally be a XUL window in an ordinary extension is done as an HTML page loaded in a browser tab. Aside from its many other benefits, using open web technologies in Mozilla client-side code also drastically lowers the barrier to entry for anyone to contribute to such projects, since it allows contributors to reuse skills that they’re likely to already have.

The Thunderbird presentation got me really excited about Thunderbird and its many possibilities; over the past few days that the Thunderbird team has been here, I’ve switched from Mail.app to nightly builds of “Shredder”, the codename for the upcoming Thunderbird 3, and I’m looking forward to seeing this project progress. I’m currently quite addicted to Gmail, but I think that Thunderbird has the potential to far surpass its awesomeness while being extremely respectful of my privacy.

After some lively discussion about all this, we took a quick break and came back to a bevy of 5-minute lightning talks, powered by Myk Melez’s egg timer to ensure that no one went past the time limit.

Jono kicked off the lightning talks by presenting his explorations in the land of pie menus. This was followed by a presentation by Alex Peake on his new world-bettering startup, EmpowerThyself.com. Vladimir Oane then presented his Seedcamp startup uberVU, a cool aggregator for conversations that span websites and web services. I did a quick talk on Ambient News, which was followed by an intriguing static HTML mock-up Bryan Clark made for conversation views in Thunderbird. Last to talk was Christopher Clay, who gave a presentation of soup.io, an interesting new service that lets people express themselves in a lot of different ways through the use of what appears to be an elegant, humane UI with plenty of support for undo.

All in all, I thought this Labs Night went really well, and I was particularly impressed with all the cool ideas that non-Mozilla folks brought to the table. Labs itself is meant to be a community of innovators, and in this respect I thought that last evening’s gathering brought us closer to what we’d ideally like to have: a place where everyone participates and contributes to the ongoing dialogue of figuring out how to make technology less frustrating and more empowering.

We just need to take pictures next time.

November 14, 2008 03:59 AM

I did it. I have released Birdtorrent 0.2. Feel free to download it here and try it out. After installation you should find a Torrent bookmark node with 5 bookmarks (based on results from my survey this past week). Clicking on any of those should navigate to their respective pages in a new tab. You can also conduct searches on these pages from any tab using the integrated search at the top-right of the screen. Just click the drop down favicon to select the site you want to search, type your search term and press ENTER. I have set up the search engines to filter out everything that is not audio.

Some Digressions
This release was far simpler than the previous release. In retrospect, dealing with chrome is far easier than dealing with the build systems. Minefield, the nightly version of Firefox, is appropriately named. The following details some of the lessons I learned throughout this release.

Lesson 1: Detecting First Run of Add-on
Detecting first run of an add-on is fairly critical to the user experience when dealing with UI elements. Afterall, you do not want duplication of UI elements. This was fairly easy to implement.

First, you need to create a preference (something accessible through about:config). To do this, we set up a prefs.js file in birdtorrent\defaults\prefs. This file is used to create and maintain any preferences you want set when your addon is installed. For my purposes, this means a single line in the file:

pref("extensions.birdtorrent.firstrun", true);

In addition to this, you need to inform your Makefile of prefs.js:

SONGBIRD_PREFS = defaults/prefs/prefs.js

Now with a simple IF in overlay.js, we can make sure the code in our init() method is only called on first run:

if (Application.prefs.get("extensions.birdtorrent.firstrun").value) {
Application.prefs.setValue("extensions.birdtorrent.firstrun", false);
... rest of my code goes here ...
}

Lesson 2: Songbird Bookmarks Service
Using the Songbird source repository via OpenGrok, I was able to see rather easily how to tap into the Bookmarks service.

First we create a Service Pane Service instance:

var SPS = Components.classes['@songbirdnest.com/servicepane/service;1']
.getService(Components.interfaces.sbIServicePaneService);

Then we initialize the service:

SPS.init();

Now we create a Bookmark Service instance:

var BMS = Components.classes['@songbirdnest.com/servicepane/bookmarks;1']
.getService(Components.interfaces.sbIBookmarks);

Next we create a folder, aka parent node, to hold the bookmarks. This is completely optional. If you leave this out, the bookmarks will be created in the Bookmarks node.

var torrentBookmarkNode = BMS.addFolder("Torrent");

Next we create the bookmark itself:

var piratebayBookmark = BMS.addBookmarkAt("http://www.thepiratebay.org/",
"The Pirate Bay",null,torrentBookmarkNode,null);

Finally, we give it a favicon to make it all pretty like:
piratebayBookmark.image = "chrome://birdtorrent/skin/favicons/piratebay-favicon.ico";

Notice in the above that I bundle the favicon with my addon. This is completely optional. An image can be a remote URL. The primary disadvantage to using remote images is the availability of the source. If you bundle the image with the add-on, the image will always be available.

Lesson 3: Search Engine Service
Search was fairly simple to implement as well. Again, I used the Songbird Source Repository to find the code I needed. However, the search service uses Open Search plugins (I will go into this later). The search service is far simpler than Bookmarks. It requires two lines of code:

First, we create an instance of the search service:

var searchSvc = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/search-service;1"]
.getService(Components.interfaces.nsIBrowserSearchService);

Then we tell Songbird what Open Search files to use for search engine generation:

searchSvc.addEngine("chrome://birdtorrent/content/piratebay.xml",
Components.interfaces.nsISearchEngine.DATA_XML,
null, false);

Lesson 4: Open Search
Open Search is pretty straightforward, but is hard to troubleshoot. In fact, if there is one character out of place in the Open Search file, Songbird will not create the search engine. It won't throw any error, it just won't create it. This can be quite frustrating. Thankfully, there is an Open Search search-engine that allows us to search for valid files. The following is an example of my Pirate Bay file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>The Pirate Bay</ShortName>
<Description>Search The Pirate Bay</Description>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">
chrome://birdtorrent/skin/favicons/piratebay-favicon.ico
</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://thepiratebay.org/search/{searchTerms}/0/7/100?src=
{referrer:source?}"/>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Most of this is standard to Open Search. In fact, you can copy this code and implement it for almost any search engine. You need only change four lines in this code:

<ShortName> - change this to the name of the search engine
<Description> - change this to what you want to display in the search box when no search term is entered
<Image> - change this to the URL of the favicon you want displayed (notice how I used the same chrome URL as the bookmark)
<Url> - this is the URL used for searching. You can actually get this from almost any search engine. Just go to the site, search for something and copy the URL that is generated. Replace the search term in the URL with {searchTerms}. Go to www.thepiratebay.org and search for U2 in Audio. You will see how it maps to the example code above.

Lesson 5: jar.mn.in
There are basically two ways to package chrome elements in an extension. The first is to manually add them to the xpi. The second is to have them packaged into a jar file. A jar file is basically java-based zip archive. Since I am running Make for my component, the logical thing to do is to package them in a jar file. Jar.mn.in is basically the same thing as Makefile.in, just for jar files.

There is not much to jar.mn.in files. Firstly, we must tell the system to create the jar file:

birdtorrent.jar:

Then we must map our primary chrome directory, which is called content in Mozilla-land:

% content birdtorrent %content/

Then we map the locale directory:

% locale birdtorrent en-US %locales/en-US/

Then we map the skins directory:

% skin birdtorrent classic/1.0 %skin/

Then we create our overlay. The following basically says to overlay layoutBaseOverlay.xul with overlay.xul from my extension:

% overlay chrome://songbird/content/xul/layoutBaseOverlay.xul chrome://birdtorrent/content/overlay.xul

Finally, we add one more line to include all files in the jar:

@include_all_to

Final Lesson: Failure of Code
The final lesson I learned is that code in chrome sometimes fails silently. The biggest clue to this is if some of your code seems to run but the rest does not. For example, I found my bookmarks were being created, but the search engines were not. All of this was in the same block of code. Basically, it was hitting something it did not like between bookmarks and search, then failing but not giving me an error. Placing alert() methods in my code helped me to track this down. A simple, but very valuable lesson.

Wrapping Up
So, this is pretty much everything you need to get this add-on creating it's own bookmarks and search engines. One last line that you need to have in your overlay.js file is:

window.addEventListener("load", birdtorrentInit, false);

Place this following your init() method. Basically, this calls your function as soon as the main window has loaded.
Very important. Otherwise, how will Songbird know when to load your elements :P

Anyway, I consider this release to be much more of a success than my beleaguered 0.1 release. I am actually extremely happy with how it turned out.

A big thank you to Stephen Lau at Songbird for helping me to navigate through this project.

Onward to 0.3!

November 14, 2008 02:04 AM

I was fortunate to be able to attend this year's Mozilla EU Camp in Barcelona, and I took advantage of the opportunity to shoot some footage while I was there. I was able to get a few of the participants...

November 14, 2008 12:35 AM

One of the really interesting things about the social-network-oriented website for the Obama campaign, my.barackobama.com, was the fact that it was essentially an online nexus that connected people who were interested in political and social change. And as Henry Jenkins mentioned in February, what Obama has created over the past year has not been a campaign, but a movement that would have lived on even if he’d lost the election.

Skeptics have wondered how exactly this “change” Mr. Obama has been talking about will happen. But what’s really interesting is that it’s already going on, and actually may have been going on for quite some time. As today’s MyBO blog post states, the online campaign headquarters for Obama’s movement has now effectively transformed into a social networking site that provides individuals with the tools they need to effect social change: already, people are using the site to organize book-club meetings, pet adoption events, and all kinds of community service meetings.

The word “empowerment” seems to be surfacing itself more and more lately, and not just in relation to Obama’s campaign. At yesterday’s Labs Meetup, Alex Peake gave a lightning talk on his new site Empower Thyself. Suneel Gupta’s been writing an excellent series of blog posts about how Mozilla can help give individuals the tools they need to start movements. The Mozilla mission at its core is about empowering individuals with the tools they need to shape their own internet experience and make the web the way they want it to be. In a lot of ways the Open Web itself is a social movement.

So empowerment has been on my mind a lot lately. The three main things I’ve involved myself in over the past few months have been a political movement, an organic software movement, and a World of Warcraft community that seeks to empower people to make the game what they want it to be. The extent to which these three things have informed each other is impressive to me, and I guess what I like most about them is the common attitudes that the participants of these communities tend to share: a sense of transparency, openness, and curiosity that lends itself to trust, solidarity, and learning.

It’s pretty awesome to see.

November 13, 2008 11:46 PM

We will have a scheduled maintenance window tonight from 7:00pm to 11:00pm PST. This is being tracked in master bug 464743. The following changes will take place:

• 7:00pm PST (0300 UTC) support.mozilla.com updates. We’ll be updating support.mozilla.com to pick up code updates. No downtime is expected.
• 7:00pm PST (0300 UTC) Root-level DNS changes.  We will be updating root-level DNS for mozilla.org, mozilla.com, and spreadfirefox.com to Mozilla-operated nameservers. No downtime is expected.
• 7:00pm PST (0300 UTC) mozilla.com MX change.  We’ll be updating mozilla.com MX records as per bug 464745.  No downtime is expected.
• 7:00pm PST (0300 UTC) Netscaler OS upgrade.  We’ll be upgrading the Netscaler load balancers in San Jose, Amsterdam and Beijing to pick up code fixes.  No downtime is expected.
• 10:00pm PST (0600 UTC) Cisco FWSM OS upgrade.  We’ll be updating the Cisco firewalls to resolve bug CSCsd67334. The two FWSMs run as an HA pair and this upgrade should be hitless.  No downtime is expected.

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

As mentioned, this maintenance window is tracked in bug 464743. Feel free to comment directly in that bug (or this blog) if you see issues past the planned downtime.

November 13, 2008 11:41 PM

Finally gotten around to visiting the cage where the MoMo hardware is living. Couldn't resist snapping a few pictures, so here it is.

For the curious, here is what they are, from the top:
- Apple X-Serve
- Sun Fire 4150 x 4
- Sun Thumper (aka Sun Fire X5400) 18 Terrabytes of disk space

What's missing from the picture is the networking hardware.

November 13, 2008 11:00 PM

November 13, 2008 07:25 PM

For my Slovene speaking readers…

The Slovene locale team made the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 cutoff, so now test builds are available. Please try them out and report any issues. More details are over at our new blog set up by Matjaž Horvat.

Our work is not done. Next up we are going to finish the rest of the in-product Web pages, and then begin to tackle Thunderbird and Calendar which have not got much attention (esp. TB) in a while.

If anyone wants to help out beyond testing, e.g. with translations, let me know.

November 13, 2008 05:55 PM

Yesterday, for the Lightning Talks portion of the Mozilla Labs Meetup, I couldn't find a good online egg timer, so I created a simple one and put it up at eggtimer.org.  Since then I've found lightningtimer.net, so I guess it wasn't necessary, but it's there now anyway.

November 13, 2008 05:52 PM

Since I’ve blogged totally failed to blog about the work I’ve been doing on documenting DOM workers recently, I figured it’s only fair to mention that I’ve gotten word that the specification may be changing soon.  So that writing work is on hold for a bit.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of other stuff to write about!

November 13, 2008 05:13 PM

November 13, 2008 03:14 PM

Back in the mid to late 90s, a slew of business was done porting “green screen” applications to web apps. These old text based menu UIs had a steep learning curve but supported high levels of mastery. A user with 5 years experience in a system could execute a half dozen keypresses and move through a set of menu choices in an order of magnitude less time than a novice user. The port of these applications to the web dramatically increased the learnability, friendliness, and approachability of the systems, but had disastrous effects on overall productivity for experienced users.

With Oracle and SAP being early adopters of the Ubiquity command line interface (CLI) as an opportunity to extend web applications, I’m confident that the CLI is actually a frontier for enterprise web applications.

We’ve released an initial command set at VersionOne using our REST api and the jQuery functions in Ubiquity. We have noun types for our core vocabulary. This has a bit of a wrinkle as the product can be configured for Scrum, DSDM, or the Rational RUP meets agile AUP. Our find and checkmail commands have rich previews re-using our iconography. GoTo has a custom nountype to auto-complete to page names. I’ve named commands with the “v1″ prefix, pulling us out of contention with most other commands.

I’m just starting to scratch the surface of what it means to design a good command line vocabulary. Equally critical is working with the Ubiquity team to improve the overall UX. I submitted a patch for some of the changes I recommended in the last post and have teamed up with a Mozilla intern doing tests on Ubiquity.

The work on pie-menus for the ubiquity context menu is very cool. I’ve been a fan of this since before I did the first marking menu Mozilla implementation in ‘01, but I actually place more value in selection independent operations, perhaps using the current page or automated extraction of information from a page. The context menu (of whatever) form is great for selection based operations, but in our enterprise use case, it seems more valuable to craft dynamic nouns. Text selection, and subsequent deep menu navigation, is always going to have a higher raw cost in time and effort than a well crafted command line with fluent keyboard driven auto-complete and selection from suggestions.

November 13, 2008 11:36 AM

When you look at recent posts in the Mozilla l10n space, sooner or later you'll find out that a lot of localizations only exist for Firefox, but not for the comm-central application Thunderbird, Sunbird or SeaMonkey. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Firefox 3.1 currently has 65 localizations compared to 48 localizations for Thunderbird 3.0, 36 localizations for Sunbird 1.0 and 18 localizations for SeaMonkey 2.0.

This is not totally surprising, since Firefox has many more users and much more buzz than all three other applications combined. And even for locales that support more than just Firefox, Firefox is the natural leader in terms of localizer attention and status, because of its market share and popularity. This is nothing to complain about since people generally are more likely to work on something that makes a big difference and localizing Firefox into e.g. Vietnamese makes a much bigger difference than localizing Sunbird into Vietnamese instead.

For us in the Thunderbird/Sunbird/SeaMonkey communities this means that we need to adjust to this fact. To be more precise we need to make the actual localization for people as easy as possible, because when push comes to shove our apps will always come in second, third or fourth.

Most of us obviously can't help a new localizer with the basic translation parts, since in most cases we don't speak the language, but what can be done is to make all the other aspects of localizing a Mozilla application as easy and as less burdensome as possible. This means

1. reducing the bureaucracy around the l10n processes
2. providing better tools for localizers
3. communicating clearly and effectively with localizers
4. making sure, that localizers can concentrate on what they are good at, the actual translation/localization part

On the first item, I think we are doing pretty well, since we do not require nearly as many approvals, reviews, etc. from localizers as Firefox does. I hope we can continue to keep our processes lean as we grow our communities and get more more localizations.

The second item is very well covered by the growing l10n team at Mozilla Corporation. Especially Pike and Gandalf are currently doing great stuff in the tools space, that will make life easier for many localizers.

The third item is hard for me to comment on, since I'm doing the l10n communication for Thunderbird and Sunbird and it is hard to judge yourself. I haven't heard any complaints yet, but maybe I just missed it. I certainly hope that people will give me constructive feedback if I screw up.

On the last item, we made a few huge steps lately. For two weeks various people (including me) have done a script-based analysis of our codebase in search of unused strings. Unused strings are bad for new localizers, because you need time to translate them, which could be put to better use. We recently fixed three bugs or are in process of fixing them, which removed (or will remove) a total of 670 strings (219 for Thunderbird, 127 for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, 324 for SeaMonkey. This is a lot of stuff (for Thunderbird roughly 1/8 of all localizable strings) that a new localizer will no longer have to wade through.

November 13, 2008 08:43 AM

A few weeks ago, Tara mentioned that we’re open-sourcing our t-shirt process in the form of the soon-to-be-live Mozilla Community Store. The basic concept is that anyone will be able to design a Mozilla t-shirt and both order it for themselves and make it publicly available for others to buy. I’ve always been impressed by our community’s creativity, so our hope is that over time we’ll build up quite a collection of designs.

We’ve already seeded the new store with 40+ of our favorite designs from last spring’s Firefox 3 t-shirt contest and our amazing Web Dev and QA teams are in the process of getting it ready for launch. Should be good.

The exact go-live date is still being determined, but in the meantime here are a couple of pictures for your enjoyment:

(Thanks to Bret, Ryan, Melissa, Juan and Amie for striking the poses, and to David for his expert photography skills.)

November 13, 2008 07:23 AM

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.18 and SeaMonkey 1.1.13 have been released. These releases contain several critical security updates, which include patches for crashes and remote code execution. All users are encouraged to update to the latest versions.

For more details, please refer to Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 Release Notes, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.18 Release Notes and SeaMonkey 1.1.13 Release Notes

Talkback

November 13, 2008 07:15 AM

November 13, 2008 06:23 AM

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 2.x and 3.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox 2.0.0.18 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.0.4 is available at http://getfirefox.com/
• Firefox 2.0.0.18 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3 or Firefox 2, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.0.4 Release Notes and the Firefox 2.0.0.18 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.4 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

November 13, 2008 04:32 AM

November 13, 2008 04:30 AM

CNet recently reviewed the upcoming Songbird 1.0 release, with a title I can certainly identify with.

([Possibly?] obviously, the 1.0-era is a stressful time for everyone, including your resident release engineer; as such, I haven't had a chance to write about the many unique experiences a one-dot-oh release of a product entails¹. Despite this, I'm still intending to loop back around and discuss some interesting bits...)

Anyway, I thought calling it out appropriate, especially since I noticed it on GREEADER while I was tallying up my logbook so I could file the paperwork for my high performance endorsement.

Makes me wonder what Songbird's future clearances will be...

_________________________________
¹ Which [also possibly?] surprisingly is my first...

November 13, 2008 04:00 AM

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox 2.0.0.18 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.0.4 is available at http://getfirefox.com/
• Firefox 2.0.0.18 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3 or Firefox 2, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.0.4 Release Notes and the Firefox 2.0.0.18 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 2.0.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.4 by downloading it from http://getfirefox.com/.

November 13, 2008 02:34 AM

Today, the SeaMonkey project released a new version of its all-in-one internet suite. SeaMonkey 1.1.13 closes several security vulnerabilities and fixes several smaller problems found in previous versions.

SeaMonkey 1.1.13 is available for free download from the open source project's website at www.seamonkey-project.org.

Read the full article on the SeaMonkey news page.

November 13, 2008 02:03 AM

Welcome to the first issue of about:labs, a new weekly newsletter that showcases innovation across the Mozilla community. In the coming weeks we’ll adopt the same infrastructure as the popular about:mozilla newsletter.

Concepts of the Week

Here’s some ideas we’ve found that have sparked thoughts in our minds from the Concept Series and across the Web; we hope they inspire you, too.

Please do join us and contribute your own thoughts, mock-ups, or prototypes. We’ll be highlighting new concepts each week.

• Herdict Web is an upcoming project that aims to make diagnosing network accessibility problems a lot easier.
• Web of Trust is a Firefox extension that aims to warn you before you enter a risky website through a social web-of-trust model.
• Maxview of Browser History is an interesting mock-up of visual browser history.
• Adaptive HTML Rendering Lens is a fascinating proposal for new Firefox functionality.

Ubiquity Update

The Ubiquity team is currently working on Ubiquity 0.2 Roadmap Proposals to determine the feature set of Ubiquity 0.2 and figure out how to get there from here. Feel free to contribute to this wiki page or the ongoing discussion in the mailing list.

Weave Update

The Weave team is currently working on version 0.3 and has recently released a proposed Server 0.3 API, along with a new server prototype.

Additionally, Jono DiCarlo just posted an awesome new UI proposal for Weave on Fennec. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Snowl Progress

The Snowl team is working on the next version of Snowl, with more and better views, the ability to send messages, and a bunch of bug fixes.

Monthly Labs Meetup - November 2008

It’s time for another Monthly Meetup. This month’s Labs Night will be next Wednesday, November 12th, 6pm at Mozilla’s office - 1981 Landings Drive, bldg K in Mountain View, California.

We are super excited about this session. The teams from Seedcamp are spending the week in Silicon Valley and will be joining us on Wednesday evening. Several Mozilla folks will be giving lightning talks - Dion Almaer will be discussing the Ajax revolution and how it dovetails with UX; Jono DiCarlo will give an update on Mozilla Labs projects; and David Ascher and the Thunderbird team will discuss their latest UI experiments. We’ll also have time for discussion, hacking, and of course, pizza. :)

If you are in the Bay Area we’d love to see you next week! Please RSVP in the comments of this blog post so we know how many to expect. Thanks!

November 13, 2008 01:28 AM

This is actually the second blog post of mine to have that title. The first was in 2004 when I said Thunderbird needs a similar effort. A little more than 4 years later, I’m really glad to see it finally become a reality.

As a side note, a lot of my old blog posts are becoming a reality these days. I find that to be rewarding.

November 13, 2008 01:23 AM

(Apologies for the short notice.  We generally want to stick to our normal advertised maintenance windows but sometimes technology works against us.)

We will have an emergency maintenance window tonight from 6pm to 11:00pm PST.

The following work will take place:

• 6:00pm PST (0200 UTC) ) EqualLogic storage array firmware upgrade.  See bug 464458 for details.  We’ll be locking the tree to all check-ins at 5:00pm PST tonight to start the maintenance window and will unlock it once the machines have come back up and gone green for a cycle.

Last night one of our network attached storage devices experienced an error and didn’t fail over properly.  The effect was such that we had to close the tree as Tinderbox wasn’t getting proper data for updates, and we couldn’t tell what was happening with our builds. While we were able to restore that functionality, there is a high chance that any of our VMs attached to this storage device may experience further problems.

To fix this, we’ll need to pause all of our VM systems (most notably build machines & unit test machines, but also litmus and some others) for a few hours. The affected systems would be:

fxdbug-win32-tbox
fx-win32-1.9-slave2
moz2-linux-slave1
patrocles
fx-linux-1.9-slave09
try-master
try-unit-linux-01
xr-linux-tbox
egg
fxdbug-linux-tbox
fx-linux-1.9-slave2
moz2-linux64-slave01
l10n-linux-tbox
prometheus-vm
tb-linux-tbox
try1-win32-slave
try-unit-linux-02
bm-l10n-win2k3-01
dm-bugs-test-app01
dm-graphs-stage01
dm-litmus02
dm-mailman01
fx-win32-1.9-slave08
fx-win32-1.9-slave09
moz2-linux-slave04
moz2-win32-slave04
pm-app01
sand
sm-summit01
moz2-linux-slave09
moz2-linux-slave10
moz2-linux-slave11
moz2-linux-slave12
moz2-win32-slave09
moz2-win32-slave10
moz2-win32-slave11
moz2-win32-slave12
moz2-win32-slave13
test-linslave
test-mgmt
moz2-linux-experimental1
moz2-linux-slave01
moz2-linux-slave13
moz2-linux-slave14
moz2-linux-slave15
moz2-linux-slave16
moz2-win32-slave14
moz2-win32-slave15
moz2-win32-slave16
moz2-win32-slave17
moz2-win32-slave18
try-unit-win32-01
test-winslave
try-linux-slave03
try-win32-slave03
bm-buildgraph01
bm-symbolfetch01
dm-ausstage01
dm-chat01
geodns01.sj
dm-graphs01
dm-webtools01
im-bes01
mrapp-intranet01
mrapp-stage01
pm-ns03
production-1.9-master
qm-evtest01
tm-amo01-webdev01

After discussing this with the sheriff, product leads and release engineering team, we’ve decided it would be best to do this as soon as possible. We’ll be locking the tree to all checkins at 5:00pm PST tonight to start the maintenance window, and we’ll unlock it once the machines have come back up and gone green for a cycle. Vlad will try to shepherd the remaining patches for beta 2 blockers that are in the checkin queue before 5pm, but at that time we’ll stop all work and pick it up tomorrow morning.

Let us know if there are any objections as soon as possible.

November 12, 2008 11:27 PM

Mozilla Messaging today announced the beta launch of SpreadThunderbird.com.  Spread Thunderbird is the volunteer-run Mozilla Thunderbird advocacy site where community marketing activities are organized to raise awareness and to promote the adoption of Thunderbird.  The Spread Thunderbird site is powered by the open source Drupal web site software.

Community members may submit ideas and join in the effort by visiting today!

November 12, 2008 11:23 PM

November 12, 2008 11:04 PM

There were two events recently that made me quite concerned.

First, I was looking through some of the results from the Dromaeo test suite and I noticed a bunch of zero millisecond times being returned from tests. This was quite odd since the tests should've taken, at least, a couple milliseconds to run and getting consistent times of "0" is rather infeasible, especially for non-trivial code.

Second, I was running some performance tests, on Internet Explorer, in the SlickSpeed selector test suite and noticed the result times drastically fluctuating. When trying to figure out if changes that you've made are beneficial, or not, it's incredibly difficult to have the times constantly shifting by 15 - 60ms every page reload.

Both of these cases set me out to do some investigating. All JavaScript performance-measuring tools utilize something like this to measure their results:

The exact syntax differs but the crux of the matter is that they're querying the Date object for the current time, in milliseconds, and finding the difference to get to total run time of the test.

There are a lot of extenuating circumstances that take place every time a piece of code is run. There could be other things running in another thread, maybe another process is consuming more resources - whatever it is it's possible that the total run time of a test could fluctuate. How much that test fluctuates is largely consistent, following somewhere along a normal distribution:

(Performance test suites like SunSpider and Dromaeo use a T-distribution to get a better picture of the distribution of the test times.)

To better understand the results I was getting I built a little tool that runs a number of tests: Running an empty function, looping 10,000 times, querying and looping over a couple thousand divs, and finally looping over and modifying those divs. I ran all of these tests back-t0-back and constructed a histogram of the results.

Here's what the results look like for the major browsers on OS X:

The results here are terrific: There's some clumping around 0ms (with some results spread to 1-4ms - which is to be expected) and a bunch of normal-looking distributions for each of the browsers at around 7ms, 13ms, and 22ms. This is exactly what we should expect, nothing out of the ordinary taking place.

I then fired up VMware Fusion to peek at the browsers running in Windows XP:

Huh. The results are much stranger here. There aren't any, immediately, pretty clumps of results. It looks like Firefox 3 and Chrome both have a nice distribution tucked in there amongst the other results, but it isn't completely obvious. What would happen if we removed those two browsers to see what the distribution looked like?

Wow. And there it is! Internet Explorer 8 (I also tested 6, for good measure, with the same results), Opera, Safari, and WebKit Nightly all bin their results. There is no 'normal distribution' whatsoever. Effectively these browsers are only updating their internal getTime representations every 15 milliseconds. This means that if you attempt to query for an updated time it'll always be rounded down to the last time the timer was updated (which, on average, will have been about 7.5 milliseconds ago).

I was worried that these results were from the virtual machine (I also loaded up Parallels but saw similar results to running VMware) so I just loaded Windows XP proper:

Nope, the results are the same as using the VM.

Let's think about what this means, for a moment:

1. Any test that takes less than 15ms will always round down to 0ms in these browsers. It becomes impossible to determine how much time the tests are taking with consistently zeroed out results.
2. The error rate for any test run in these browsers would be huge. If you had a simple test that ran in under 15ms the error rate would be a whopping 50-750%! You would need to have tests running for, at least, 750ms before you could safely reduce the error overhead of the browser to 1%. That's insane, to say the least.

What test suites are affected by this? Nearly all of the major ones. SunSpider, Dromaeo, and SlickSpeed are all predominantly populated by tests that'll be dramatically effected by the error rate presented by these browser timers.

I talked about JavaScript Benchmark Quality before and the conclusion that I came to still holds true: The technique of measuring tests used by SunSpider, Dromaeo, and SlickSpeed does not hold. Currently only a variation of the style utilized by Google's V8 Benchmark will be sufficient in reducing the error (since the tests are only run in aggregate, running for at least 1 second - reducing the error level to less than 1%).

All of this research still left me in a rough place, though. While I now knew why I was getting bad results in Dromaeo I had no solution for getting stable times in Internet Explorer. I did a little digging, tried a couple more solutions, and stumbled across ies4osx. Ies4osx is a copy of Internet Explorer 6 running in Wine, running in X11, on OS X. It works 'ok', although I've been able to get it crash every so often. Disregarding that, though, it's stable enough to do testing on.

Running the numbers on it yielded some fascinating results:

ies4osx provides some surprisingly stable results - we even have something that looks like a normal distribution! This is completely unlike the normal version of IE 6/8 running on Windows. It's pretty obvious that the Wine layer is tapping into some higher-quality timer mechanism and is providing it to IE - giving us a result that is even more accurate than what the browser normally provides.

This is fantastic and it's dramatically changed my personal performance testing of Internet Explorer. While I'm not keen on using anything less than "IE running on XP with no VM" for actual testing - this layer of higher-detailed numbers has become invaluable for testing the quality of specific methods or routines in IE.

In Summary: Testing JavaScript performance on Windows XP (Update: and Vista) is a crapshoot, at best. With the system times constantly being rounded down to the last queried time (each about 15ms apart) the quality of performance results is seriously compromised. Dramatically improved performance test suites are going to be needed in order to filter out these impurities, going forward.

Update: I've put the raw data up on Google Spreadsheets if you're interested in seeing the full breakdown.

November 12, 2008 10:52 PM

November 12, 2008 09:18 PM

It's actually been a couple of days, but I am just getting around to announcing it.

Mozilla Messaging now has it's own planet, planet.mozillamessaging.com, aggregating blog feeds from various Thunderbird sources. It's a complete ripoff copy of Planet Mozilla, just with different feed configuration.

It should get redesigned at the same time as the next incarnation of our main web site, so pay little attention to what it actually looks like, and just subscribe to the feed already.

Cheers.

P.S. If you feel like your feed (or a feed you like) should be on there, file a bug asking for it to be added

November 12, 2008 06:40 PM

Here’s a thought: why don’t the buildbots report to Twitter?  If the mars lander can twitter, why can’t the Mozilla tree?  It would be cool to have it report with some wit:

“Um, John Smith, you totally broke the tree! [links]”

Why not?

November 12, 2008 06:31 PM

November 12, 2008 02:14 PM

It suddenly occurred to me I’ve not shared information about the status of the Mozilla Developer Center in a while, so I thought I’d go ahead and write that up since the World of WarCraft servers are currently all screwed up.

There are currently two significant issues in work:

1. There is a minor but annoying security glitch that is in the process of being addressed.  In theory it is now fixed, but testing is underway to be sure of it.
2. The “what’s changed” RSS feeds are broken.  We installed a fix this evening but it doesn’t appear to have resolved the problem — instead, the symptoms just changed.  I’ve sent new email to MindTouch to get further information on what’s going on here.  This is of course a serious problem for us, so I’m pushing hard to get it fixed as soon as possible.

There are of course other things going on, but most of those items are going to come in the Lyons release of MindTouch Deki, which I’ve talked about before.

Most of my time right now is being spent on documentation for Firefox 3.1.  I’ll blog more about the progress on that soon.

November 12, 2008 05:11 AM

A very cool change landed in Firefox 3.1. View source will now create links where appropriate (a rather old bug I might add). I must have copy/pasted millions of URL’s over the years out of view source so that I can look at a JS or CSS. This is an immense help for anyone who does this quite often.

Just another great piece of polish for Firefox 3.1.

November 12, 2008 03:42 AM

The current all.html page is an important part of the user experience at mozilla.com--it's the one page we have to help our users find the right system, language or version of Firefox from the home page. More than that, it's our central portal to all the languages and language tools we offer and it represents all the hard work and dedication the l10n community has put in to make sure that everyone has access to Firefox.

The link can only be currently found under the green download button on the en-US home page and is the main way that people from communities without localized landing pages access their language tools (another project Seth Bindernagel and I are working on). Regardless of how people get there, the all.html page is important to maintain and improve because it is one of the principle ways people access Firefox in different languages.

Having said this, the current all.html page not performing well: 44% of users are bouncing (ie, immediately leaving the page). With more than 250,000 users hitting that page everyday, the page is an important web property and we need to try and maximize the number of these people that actually download by making the download process as easy to understand and as intuitive as possible. Right now, only 25% of those 250K hits (54K) manage to hit download.html which signals to me that either people are not finding what they are looking for or we're doing a bad job of explaining the purpose of the page. I personally believe that it is a combination of the two.

I think that the majority of people hitting this page speak a minimal amount of English and thus do not understand what to do because the page is

1) Wordy and written in English
2) most of the page is displayed below the fold
3) Although the information is displayed in list form, it is overwhelming to a non-English user.

After going through a lot of internal discussions, particularly with Faaborg and other UE experts, I decided that it was worth talking to The Royal Order, a website design firm that designed Mozilla.com, to see if they could make a create an all.html page that would be more intuitive, visually interesting and more obvious in its call to action.

Below you will find the jpegs of the first round of mock ups that the TRO delivered today. Although it is early in the re-design process, I think its important to get the community's input as early in the process as possible in order to ensure that we create the best site we can.

Let me reiterate that these mock-ups definitely need some work before we consider going live. This is why we need your help...we want to hear your thoughts about the design direction for each so we can decide which one to pursue. Essentially, I need to know which of the two concepts, overall, do you like/prefer?

Option 1, Page 1

Benefits:
-Map is Intuitive
-When you mouse over the continents/regions they are highlighted orange.
-Visually interesting
-Not too many words

Other thoughts:
Overall, we feel like this page needs a stronger
instruction on how to find the right download for you--maybe with a demonstrative graphic at the top of the page?





Option 1, Page 2

Benefits:
-Organization by region is intuitive
-Native form of language displayed first.
-Easily toggle between systems, versions
-Differentiates between packs, beta versions, localized versions.
-The entire box is highlighted green and to download you click on the box you want.
-Information on page is not too overwhelming.
-Can easily add languages to each region without mkaing the page seem longer.

Other thoughts:
We're thinking that the break down of continents into mini-regions is a concept we want to rethink before going live. There seem to be too many ways to mis-categorize countries and groups of people and we don't want to offend or upset anyone. Be assured that we're working on this issue.














Option 2, Page 1

Benefits:
-Page split up by continent
-Intuitive
-Click on a continent, you can use drop down to select a region.
-Native form of language listed first.
-Toggle between systems easily.
-Whole line highlights green when you scroll, and you click the entire line to download.

Other thoughts:
The list format, though easier to read, still seems overwhelming.




















Option 2, Page 2

Benefits:
-Continents section highlighted when you scroll over it.
-Easily add other languages to the list.
-Separation between language pack, localized version, beta versions.














We're eager to improve this page, so please send us your feedback as soon as possible.

Thanks for the thoughts!


P.S.
I want to note even though we will decide to go with a version of these two options, this does not mean that the old page will be thrown away. If it turns out that the old page does a better job of securing downloads, we will revert back and try something else.

November 12, 2008 02:51 AM

November 12, 2008 02:51 AM

One of the cool new features of the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is Private Browsing. Essentially, when you enable Private Browsing, nothing of what you do in Firefox is recorded. Great when you want to hide something from a nosy flatmate. So in Ubiquity fashion, here’s a command to easily toggle Private Browsing mode.

Once you’ve subscribed to that command, all you need to do is open Ubiquity, and start typing “private-browsing”. Typing “p” may even be enough, depending on the commands you have. By default, it will toggle Private Browsing to the opposite of the state its currently in. You can also explicitly specify whether you want it on or off by specifying “on” or “off” respectively. That way you don’t have to actually remember or check whether you’re already in Private Browsing.

The command can be subscribed to from here:
http://theunfocused.net/moz/ubiquity/verbs/?cmd=private-browsing

Note: You’ll need to be running a nightly build of Firefox 3.1, or 3.1 beta 2 (when it gets released) or newer.

November 12, 2008 12:40 AM

November 12, 2008 12:26 AM

52.

That’s a big number.

Incredible thanks to all the localizers who participated.  The teams are listed below where you’ll find a cut-and-paste of the patch that updates the shipped-locales bug filed by Axel.  If you’re unfamiliar with the notation below, the “+” signs are locales we added from last time.  The “-” are locales who didn’t make it.  (See all of you in by RC1! )  You can tell the localizations by the locale codes: in some case it is two letters (ab) and in others it is four letters separated by a hyphen (ab-CD).

diff --git a/browser/locales/shipped-locales b/browser/locales/shipped-locales
--- a/browser/locales/shipped-locales
+++ b/browser/locales/shipped-locales
@@ -1,27 +1,39 @@
+af
+ar
 be
+bg
+bn-IN
 ca
 cs
+cy
 de
+el
+en-GB
 en-US
-eo
 es-AR
 es-ES
+et
 eu
 fi
 fr
 fy-NL
 ga-IE
+gu-IN
 he
 hi-IN
 hu
 id
+is
 it
 ja linux win32
 ja-JP-mac osx
+ka
+kn
 ko
 lt
+lv
+mr
 nb-NO
-nl
 nn-NO
 pa-IN
 pl
@@ -31,7 +43,11 @@
 ru
 si
 sk
+sl
+sq
 sv-SE
+te
+tr
 uk
 zh-CN
 zh-TW

November 12, 2008 12:22 AM

Greetings Testers!

Firefox 3.1beta 2 is just around the corner, and we're in need of your help!   A ton of new features and bug fixes have been put into this release. Please come out and assist the community to find bugs!

What: Firefox 3.1 beta 2 testday

When: Friday, Nov 14th from 7am - 5pm PDT

Where: IRC on irc.mozilla.org, channel #testday

How you can help

read more

November 12, 2008 12:15 AM

Once upon a time, I posted a video of Mitchell Baker on this blog, and I explained that it was the first of a series of two. I planned to post the second part "shortly". It was 7 months ago (I just forgot that I still had to post the second half).

Anyway, for those of you not tired of waiting, here is the second half, where Mitchell talks about the origins of the Mozilla project and Firefox. Just four years after the Firefox 1.0 launch (and while we're still at 10 years for the Mozilla project), I realized it may make sense to look back at the way Firefox was born.

(I'm still trying to figure out how to encode this into Ogg/Theora for the <video> element, but in the meantime, Flash will have to do the trick.)

November 11, 2008 11:56 PM

Today, the Spanish community site is one year old.

One year ago, Mozilla Hispano the Spanish community site opened to the public his website as a community site aimed to promote and improve the Mozilla-based products, not just as an end-user support site, also as a central piece in the Spanish community ecosystem (users, localizers, developers and enthusiasts) and promoter of the Mozilla project and philosophy in Spanish-speaking countries.

In the last year we have been improving these ideas, we have an updated news section about Mozilla World, an end support forum and documentation and a podcast as a way to tell the people what we think about Mozilla. But this is just the first step on a long way, and for that reason we need the people's support and collaboration to improve and organize this community created by and for the users where everyone can participate helping on the site or even becoming a member and defining the future of the Spanish community.

Thanks to everyone who makes this possible!

November 11, 2008 10:49 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 45/2008 (November 3 - 9, 2008):

• Typeaheadfind:
  Besides reading the comments on my typeaheadfind blog post and the newsgroup thread, I also removed the last pieces of the old implementation from our tree while Neil is working on a new implementation based on toolkit, I'm testing the current work in progress and it seems to move along nicely.
• Feed Reading:
  After the mailnews feed reader landed (thanks IanN!) I've been looking into how to tie the lose ends up. Callek has promised to look into connecting browser feed detection with that feed reader for Alpha 2, so at least the connection is there before we implement full feed preview in the browser with a selection of feed handlers. The thing I looked into myself was displaying the originating website as a "header" for feed "messages", it's now shown and has a right-click context menu for copying the link location (more items to come) but the third part of click-opening the link in browser isn't in yet, I need some input from Thunderbird folks on that, as we share that XBL binding.
• SeaMonkey Releases:
  Some more release process stuff for SeaMonkey 1.1.13, but more this week, as it's still targeted Wednesday, November 12.
• German L10n:
  Lots of work to get German toolkit and SeaMonkey current, including a lot of obsolete string removals made for editor and suite - thanks a lot to sipaq and wladow for the work on the original string cleanups!
• Various Discussions:
  Test failures, download manager, parallel builds, 1.9.1 branching, Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8.1 EOL plans, Tiger EOL plans, EV UI, new cert error page, etc.

The SeaMonkey project goals thread has taken lots of more or less off-topic turns, which is business as usual for newsgroups, but there was some interesting input as well and I've flagged a handful of posts that contain key statements already. We'll probably go and summarize those, discuss them in the Council and/or a status meeting and finally come up with a draft or even final vision statement for our project. If you still want your voice to be heard on this topic, please head over there and state your opinion in that thread!

November 11, 2008 08:18 PM

I did expect the community to get interested in extending the Private Browsing mode by developing extensions, but I didn't expect it to happen this soon!  I'm happy to announce that the first Private Browsing extension has been developed by the community member Kurt Schultz! This extension adds a toolbar and a status bar button to Firefox for quick access to the Private Browsing feature, and lets you toggle a few of the underlying preferences as a bonus!  Grab it while it's hot from AMO!

Here's a screenshot provided by Kurt:

Thanks for the great work, Kurt!

November 11, 2008 08:17 PM

Look what Curtis just did:

Curtis Bartley is the newest member of the Firefox front end team and, to get his feet wet, he made the world a better place by fixing a very old bug. And its 7 duplicate bugs.

Specifically, he set it up so that resources which are referenced in source are now clickable links.  Want to know what that external javascript does?  Click the link, and it will be loaded in the source viewer.  Likewise CSS.  Maybe you clicked “View Source” only to discover you were looking at a frame set, and actually wanted the source for a frame - that works too.

And yes, back and forward keyboard shortcuts work. And yes, both relative and absolute links work. And yes, you can have this in a tab instead of a separate window, either by sticking view-source: on to the front of your URLs (see?), or by finding one of the addons that does it for you.

Way to go Curtis, keep ‘em coming!

November 11, 2008 08:11 PM

I have just pushed an improvement to address collection in the Address Book.

In Thunderbird 2, when you send an email, and you have address collection switched on, it checks only within the address book you are collecting email addresses to for existing addresses on contacts.

After the next nightlies, the Thunderbird 3 development builds will now check for email addresses across all local (but not LDAP) address books before creating a new contact. This is a significant improvement over the current functionality, and should help to reduce duplicate email addresses and allowing users to organise their emails how they like.

There is still an outstanding issue, covered by a few bugs, that we do a case-sensitive match for the email address and I hope to resolve that before Thunderbird 3.

November 11, 2008 08:09 PM

I’ve adapted Ehsan Akhgari’s recent blog post on private browsing into an article on MDC with some added details.  In addition, I’ve written the reference material for the nsIPrivateBrowsingService interface.

So that should be pretty much done now.  Enjoy!

November 11, 2008 07:43 PM

For those who may not follow his blog, KaiRo (Robert Kaiser) did a nice analysis of the first 1000 days of SeaMonkey (stable) downloads.

Rather than repeat his fine work, I'll just direct you to his entry: Over 1000 Days Of SeaMonkey Downloads

November 11, 2008 05:55 PM

In this issue…

• Firefox Turns 4
• Impact Mozilla Finalists Announced
• Call For Feedback: Add-ons Developers and Firefox 3.1
• Preparing Your Add-on for Private Browsing
• This Weekend: Mozilla Developers Conference in Tokyo
• This Weekend: Mozilla at the Green Festival in San Francisco

Firefox Turns 4
On November 9th, 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released. In those four years Firefox has been the catalyst for change on the web. Tristan writes: “In just 4 years, things have changed tremendously in the browser space: more innovation, more players. Overall, the Web is in a much better shape than before, and the outlook is much more positive. One should remember that in 2003, anybody building Web sites made them exclusively for Internet Explorer, a browser which was not maintained at the time. How things have changed since then! In places like Spain, France, Germany and Poland, Firefox is used by 30 to 40% of Internet users.” There’s also a post on the Mozilla Blog and a nice article on Mozilla Links as well.

Impact Mozilla Finalists Announced
Impact Mozilla, the open marketing challenge to improve retention rates of Firefox users, has received over 300 submissions from all over the world. Out of those submissions, 10 finalists have been selected for a final vote in December. Please see the post on the Impact Mozilla blog for more information.

Call For Feedback: Add-ons Developers and Firefox 3.1
Paul Rouget has put out a call for add-ons developers who are migrating to Firefox 3.1 to report problems they have run into. He’s asking any developers who have issues migrating add-ons to write a comment in the blog post. Also, for people who are filing bugs, Paul has asked developers to put specific keywords in bugs in a post on dev.apps.firefox. Please see his post on the add-ons blog and his post in the newsgroup for more information.

Prepare Your Add-on for Private Browsing
Ehsan Akhgari has an excellent technical article written up for add-ons authors who want to integrate with Firefox 3.1’s new private browsing feature. He covers both APIs for detecting changes in the browsing mode and also how private browsing mode affects theme authors. Please see the post in his weblog for more information.

This Weekend: Mozilla Developers Conference in Tokyo
On Sunday, November 16th the 2008 Firefox Developer’s Conference 2008 will be held in Tokyo, Japan. Speakers will include Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs, Jay Sullivan, VP of of Mobile at Mozilla and many others. Discussions will range from mobile to the latest web standards to what’s going on in Mozilla Labs. Please see the post on spreadfirefox or the post on the Mozilla Labs weblog for more information.

This Weekend: Mozilla at the Green Festival in San Francisco
If you’re in San Francisco this weekend (November 14-16th) Mozilla will be at the Green Festival in force. The Green Festival is the largest green conference in the U.S. Mozilla folks will be there talking about our mission and global community and will also be working with similar groups who are interested in green computing issues. See the post on the Mozilla Blog for more information.

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

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

November 11, 2008 05:16 PM

The W3C CSS validator has a long story. A long, happy and sometimes sad story. Long because it represents MANY years of work for many people. Happy because zillions of people are using the W3C Validators, including the CSS one. Sad because the Consortium never really acknowledged the value, intellectual and potentially financial, of these tools. A while ago, my friends Yves Lafon, Karl Dubost and Olivier Théreaux all W3C staff complained about the complexity of the CSS Validator induced by CSS "levels". Because CSS has levels and not versions, the validator is in fact multiple validators in one single app and determining the "level" of a single CSS instance at parse time is difficult, very difficult.

Olivier is now leaving the World Wide Web Consortium for other skies and I was the first one (outside of W3C staff) to express real and repeated concerns about the fate of the CSS Validator. We discussed it during last W3C TPAC in Mandelieu. Elika Etemad did great gathering important people around one single table for a BOF session and we hope we secured a fate for the CSS Validator. I suggested myself a few areas of change for a "new" version of the CSS Validator:

• first, whatever the zealots think of CSS "levels", my Microsoft friends (top of list here is Markus Mielke) are perfectly right saying we have here CSS versions and not levels. We should not care about CSS 1 any more. Granted, the froward-compatible grammar of CSS helps BUT what really matters is the grammar of CSS 1, CSS 2 and CSS 3. Implementing and maintaining all parsers is hard, time-consuming, and pretty useless for desktop and mobile browsers that never implement two different levels of CSS in the same engine.
• the current validator's code is written in Java. I think that if a new validator is built, it should create a community of maintainers and be integrable easily in third-party apps. The speed of JavaScript improved so vastly and so many people are experts of that language that I think a validator written in JS now makes total sense.

So please, make sure to read Olivier's article about it, take some time to think about it, and leave a comment. Thanks.

November 11, 2008 04:27 PM

When I just updated my local spreadsheet with current download data collected by the "bouncer" tool at download.mozilla.org, I noticed we now have over 1000 days since SeaMonkey 1.0 was released (1016 days since January 30, 2006, actually), so it might be interesting to publish some stats.

First, note that only our main download links from the website are tracked by the tool, i.e. the Windows full installer, Mac disk image and Linux full installer for en-US builds in the case of SeaMonkey 1.x, and the Windows installer, Mac disk image and Linux tar.bz2 for all available languages for SeaMonkey 2.x builds (even though this still means en-US only for 2.0a1, later releases will include locale builds built by us in bouncer).
This means any install of any other build, esp. localized ones, is not tracked, as well as direct downloads from FTP servers or installations delivered by Linux distributors, etc.



In total, most downloads stem from the 1.1.x series, which has taken over the "most recent stable" slot from 1.0.x after about a year and has been there since, while 2.0.x only has it's first alpha out currently, so no big surprises when comparing raw data of the release series.

While the download stats page linked from the first paragraph gives you raw download numbers and even a simple bar graph, the downloads per day are a number I personally am quite interested in. In my spreadsheet, I'm calculating the number of days a release was the most recent one (at least for its release series) and averaging its download over that timespan, which gives us interesting numbers about how well releases are doing.

Overall, in the 1016 days since SeaMonkey 1.0, we averaged about 4200 SeaMonkey downloads per day, 1.0.x had 1700 dl/day (2300 for 1.0-1.0.7, i.e. before 1.1 was released), 1.1.x averages at 5000 dl/day and alphas/betas at 320 downloads per day.

The uptake from 2300 to 5000 for 1.0.x vs. 1.1.x in the timespans where those release series were/are the most current stable releases is still quite impressive and shows that the first stable post-1.0 series was/is considered a better thing to adopt than the 1.0 series itself.
The fluctuations within the release series themselves show that every release starts off significantly higher in the first days and than averages out lower over time, the shorter a release is out there, the higher its download average tends to be.

SeaMonkey 2.0a1 currently is at about 300 dl/day, which is higher than 1.1a (which had 230), but it's only been out for 38 days (1.1a had 70). Still, that's 300 people every day who try out our first alpha of the next generation, and we get very encouraging and positive feedback from that testing.
Fun fact: Looks like we had the 11,111th download of this Alpha 1 today, at 11/11 of this year - a quite large number of ones at once, actually

While I'm at it, from daily pings to AMO for the add-ons blocklist (so we can deactivate add-ons for users if identify one containing malware or causing certain app versions to crash or such) we can now get rough statistics of daily users of 2.x versions - and we constantly have about 800-1000 users every day on the *pre versions (telling from the update channels, almost 1/3 on self-built ones, the rest on nightlies), which is quite good for on-the-edge development builds of a niche product!
On October 19, when I got the last statistics update on those blocklist builds out of MoCo (I don't have direct access), we had about as many daily users on 2.0a1 as on 2.0a2pre, about 750 for each, which is a good uptake for two weeks after the release of that first alpha as well.

Overall, I think we can be satisfied with how well we were doing in our first 1000 days of having stable releases out the door, but there's still enough room for doing even better!

November 11, 2008 03:13 PM

Golem.de, one of the preeminent sites for technology in Germany, wanted to know more about how we design interfaces. As we passed through the reconstructed space-station-from-the-future C-Base, they caught up with us for an interview.

All thanks go to Jane Finette for all the hard-work in setting everything up, and Golem.de founder Jens Ihlenfeld for the questions and great discussions that unfortunately weren’t captured on film.

November 11, 2008 02:39 PM

The next test day will be held on Thursday, November 13th. We want to put email-based scheduling (iTIP/iMIP support) to the acid test on our testday. Please keep in mind both are alpha versions! Therefore you should take following steps:

• Though we do not expect things to go wrong, we always strongly encourage you to back up your profile, and to do your testing on a "test" profile.
• Backing up a profile is easy:
  1. Find your profile directory:
     Windows: %AppData%\Thunderbird
     Linux: ~/.thunderbird
     MacOSX: ~/Library/Thunderbird
  2. Copy the root of it somewhere else, for example copy the Thunderbird directory and everything below it.
• Creating a testing profile is also easy:
  1. Launch your application with a '-P' option.
  2. Create a new profile by clicking the 'Create Profile' button.
  3. Click 'Next', Give it a name like "Testing Profile", click 'Finish'.
  4. Select the testing profile, and click the 'Start Shredder' button.
• Remember that you will have to start the application with the -P option during testing so you can pick your testing profile.
• Once you have finished testing, you can delete the extra profiles, and you will be back to normal. If something goes terribly wrong (although we do not expect it to), close the application, and just replace the profile with the backed up copy. That will reset the application to the way it was before you started testing.

There are also some fixed tb-integration bugs that need to be verified. You simply have to add a comment to the bug report stating what version and operating system you used while verifying the bug fixed.

The outcome of our last testday: 39 tests run and 11 marked 'failed'. Many thanks go to karora, whose comments in the failed test cases let us file two new bug reports.

Join us in the #calendar-qa IRC channel on Thursday. All the information on the testday is on our usual Test Day wiki page.

Hope to see you in #calendar-qa!

Andreas
Calendar QA Team

November 11, 2008 12:55 PM

Apple, and the WebKit team, have recently proposed two different additions to CSS: CSS Transitions and CSS Animations.

The two specifications are confusingly named - and it's hard to tell what the difference is between them at first glance. However, to put it simply: CSS Transitions are easy to use, while CSS Animations are made for programmers.

CSS Transitions

CSS Transitions provide you with the ability to force CSS property changing to occur smoothly over a period of time, rather than immediately and coarsely.

For example if you were to set elem.style.width = "500px";, and its current width was 100px then the element would, normally, jump up to 500px wide. With a CSS Transition it would smoothly move from 100px to 500px - the full CSS required would look something like this:

This would make it such that any manipulation of that element's width would be done as a smooth transition. Note that no other properties are listed and, thus, are not affected. You can list as many properties as you wish, in a list: "width, heigh, opacity" (for example).

CSS Transitions complement the existing tools that we have for working with CSS from JavaScript. Any changes to a CSS property still work - they just happen much more smoothly.

Of course transitions can also be injected dynamically from JavaScript, like so:

Since you can hook in these custom transitions it makes it possible to use them directly from JavaScript and within frameworks. Which leads to the question: Can the core of JavaScript animation frameworks be replaced with CSS Transitions, if they exist?

We had this discussion recently on the jQuery dev list and one user, Jonah, implemented a quick proof of concept to demonstrate how it CSS Transitions would work within jQuery. He also wrote up a stress test to see how it scaled.

Give the stress test a try in WebKit (or on the iPhone, if you have access to one) and you'll definitely note an increase in animation smoothness - especially when a large number of animations are being run.

So why not just add in the CSS Transition code today?

There are a large number deal-breaking gotchas:

1. You can't stop an animation that's already running.
2. You get no feedback as to how the animation is running - only an event callback once it has completed.
3. There's no way to synchronize multiple animations.
4. There's no way to specify custom easing functions.

The inability to stop an animation is absolutely killer - and a huge requirement for any JavaScript framework that would be looking to adapt this as part of their code base.

That being said, the current transition code does have its place (namely within iPhone development) so I wouldn't be surprised to see a solid jQuery plugin popup that iPhone devs start to use.

CSS Animations

CSS Animations are a second proposal from Apple/WebKit that embodies a much-more-complex way of doing animations. To give you an idea of the level of power that's provided observe this quote from the proposal:

"Many aspects of the animation can be controlled, including how many times the animation iterates, whether or not it alternates between the begin and end values, and whether or not the animation should be running or paused. An animation can also delay its start time."

The ability to pause animations is crucial - and immediately makes CSS Animations a more-viable candidate for use from JavaScript frameworks.

Here's an example of how you would set up a CSS Animation, from the proposal:

CSS Animations also provide a greater number of callbacks (letting you know when an animation has started, every step of the animation, and when it has ended) which can be important for doing animation synchronization.

Although the CSS Animation proposal has a number of things going against it:

1. Its syntax and usability is far more confusing than that of the, relatively simple, CSS Transitions.
2. It includes the concept of keyframes - while I'm sure this might be useful for someone I just can't see a large enough benefit for such a large feature.

Honestly, at this point, I'd prefer to see CSS Transitions come around, but with a few additions:

1. The ability to pause or stop transitions.
2. Animation start, step, and end callbacks (along with information about how far along the animation is).
3. The ability to provide a custom JavaScript function which would provide a custom easing function.

#1 and #2 are much more important here - but seeing both of those additions would help to make CSS Transitions actually a viable tool for web developers (not to mention that it would provide the best of both worlds - ease of use for non-framework-using developers and power and control for those using frameworks).

November 11, 2008 11:12 AM

You may have noticed a decrease in the number of Camino updates coming from this source over the past, uh, couple of months. Alas, I have found myself quite busy with the rest of life (or with things like releasing Camino when less busy), so if you’ve assumed nothing has been happening in the world of Camino development, I’m back for the moment to inform you that you’re sadly mistaken.

• Since the last regular weekly update, we’ve released Camino 1.6.4 (which added Catalan to the list of localizations) and shipped the first early preview of Camino 2. We’ve also been hard at work getting fixes ready for Camino 1.6.5, the next security and stability release on the agenda.
• Stuart Morgan landed the “Recently Closed Tabs” sub-menu before 2.0a1, worked on a fix for a case of buggy dragging in the bookmarks manager, and has been performing a large share of review and super-review work in recent months. He’s also chased down bugs and regressions in interactions with Gecko and has helped with work on some of the Mac Gecko topcrashers, including the crash that makes users of Mac OS X 10.4 weep.
• Sean Murphy has been hard at work on a feature I very much would like to write about, but I haven’t had very good luck reporting early on features that haven’t landed , and I really don’t want to “jinx” this one. In addition to his work on the unnamed feature, Sean has fixed several follow-up issues from the keyboard loop landing, revised his patch to fix font name issues in the Fonts preferences, and reviewed several other patches.
• While dodging buses and surviving mid-terms, Jeff Dlouhy has been dusting off some of his old patches to bring further polish to the new Tab Overview (née Tabsposé) feature.
• Christopher Henderson has continued attacking any and all bugs relating to the location bar. In the past week he’s been working on site icon sizing and blurriness issues. His “use UTF-8 display for URLs everywhere” patch is waiting for superreview, and he has a patch up for review that fixes an edge-case issue with displaying the autocomplete window. Christopher has also picked up Håkan Waara’s work on supporting middle-click in the Bookmark Bar and is shepherding it through the review process again, and he is implementing our “down arrow to show autocomplete” heuristic in search fields in order to provide a keyboard shortcut for showing search field menus. (In the middle of all this, Christopher also had a fortnight of vacation where IP-over-ovine-transport provided the best available connectivity.)
• Chris Lawson has worked on bugs in a number of areas, including adding more sanity to the code that syncs preferences states when opening or changing preference panes, to our feed-handling, and to our special collections code. He has also made fixes to our Dock menu code and is working on some polish for selections and searches in the bookmarks manager. The other half of our “dynamic Chris duo” has also been coordinating with Bryan Atwood on the long-delayed whitelist for Flashblock.
• In addition to my usual QA and triage work, most of my efforts over the last couple of months have been focused on our releases, though I did go through a spell where I finished a number of long-suffering tasks related to our website content. I’ve also helped dig in to a handful of “interesting” Gecko bugs that have crossed my plate, and I snuck in one of my trademark “wow, I can’t believe I can fix this with two lines of Cocoa!” fixes for a bug that proved a constant annoyance in my work. Recently I’ve spent time working to make some of the Gecko strings accessible to our localizers for Camino 2, which brings us a step closer to being able to ship a fully-localized application.

I know I’ve left out a number of things here and there, but that list captures a good chunk of the work from the last month and a half. We’ve also had some visits from long-time friends and former developers we hadn’t seen in a while, and that always brings positive energy to the team. On the horizon are Camino 1.6.5 and Camino 2.0b1, the former soon and the latter after a bit, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to write about landing the latest round of Sean’s hard work instead of tip-toeing around it.

November 11, 2008 03:48 AM

Patrick helped me registering with Flying Blue before our flight to Paris for the MAOW event, but he accidentally mixed up the fields for first and last name (because KLM is stupid enough to ask for the last name first, and the first name last) so I ended up with a card that says “Tenser David.”

What’s worse, it seems this is now slowly being picked up by our good friends across the Atlantic too:

By the way, I’m in Mountain View right now for a marketing work week with Mozilla. I love it!

November 11, 2008 02:59 AM

By clicking on this link, you’ll see the newly created download page for Firefox in Afrikaans.

This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions.  We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox.  This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.

So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team.  We started by researching which locales lacked a download page.  Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe.  But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones.  We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month.  Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages.  Let’s see how it impacts downloads.

November 11, 2008 02:34 AM

Thursday we focus on bringing new life to old bugs - updating bugs that have not had a comment since April 07, 2007.

See http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2008-11-13 for schedule, bug list and tips. Help is available on IRC in #bugday.  And see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing about how you can contribute to Thunderbird's progress.

read more

November 11, 2008 01:13 AM

SQLite only supports a simple set of data types and the only one that really matters is “INTEGER PRIMARY KEY” so you can have it auto-increment. In fact, by default, I can declare the columns as anything I want and it doesn’t even throw a warning.

sqlite> CREATE TABLE t2(c1 wtf, c2 yomama);
sqlite> INSERT INTO t2 VALUES(1, 'blah');
sqlite> SELECT * FROM t2;
1, blah


This is all documented and explained so I can’t complain to much but it’s still an interesting concept.

November 11, 2008 12:18 AM

Hi Everyone,

Just another friendly reminder to join us Tuesday in #bugday on irc.mozilla.org :

*Tuesday, 11 November 2008 :*

* Asia session - 14:00-16:00 (Beijing)
* Euro session - 14:00-16:00 (Berlin)
* Amer. session - 12:00-14:00 (Los Angeles)

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November 10, 2008 10:50 PM