Archive for September, 2010

Firefox, Drumbeat, TryChooser, MozFdn, Consumer Education, Thunderbird, PICs, Web video, and more…

In this issue…

Firefox 4: extension installation changes
The next beta of Firefox 4 will include a change to how Firefox installs and uses extensions. Dave Townsend explains, “Previously the files from the extension’s XPI would be extracted into their own directory and read from there, now the default is to just keep the XPI and load files out of it directly.” These changes cause no problems for many extensions, but if your extension’s code tries to access its files directly or if your extension includes binary code, search plugins, dictionaries or window icons, then you may need to make some changes. See Dave’s blogpost and the Updating extensions for Firefox 4 MDC page for more information.

Webdev teachers needed for Drumbeat Festival
The Drumbeat “Learning, Freedom and the Web” Festival is taking place in Barcelona from November 3 – 5, 2010, and organizers are looking for more people to help teach web development at the event. “One of our big aims with the Festival is to encourage people to teach and learn web development in interesting new ways. If you teach web development in one way or another, Barcelona is a chance to both learn and contribute a ton.” If you’re interested, you can find out more and register at the Festival website.

Speed up TryServer by using TryChooser
TryChooser is a new TryServer feature that allows developers to ask for only the builds and tests they actually want in their push-to-try commits. This avoids wasting CPU cycles on unwanted jobs, speeding up TryServer wait times for everyone. The Release Engineering team is requesting that more people give TryChooser a shot, as usage uptake has leveled off and there are still plenty of CPU cycles that could be saved. You can learn more about TryChooser (including the needed TryChooser syntax) from John O’Duinn and Lukas Blakk.

Drumbeat & Mozilla Foundation update
Mark Surman has posted another Drumbeat and Mozilla Foundation update. “This month’s status update is focused on the question: ‘where next for Drumbeat?’ There has been good conversation on this topic over the last few weeks — first on my blog and in the Drumbeat newsgroup and then in a recent MozFdn board meeting. The general consensus seems to be: Drumbeat is finding a solid footing as it does projects like Web Made Movies and School of Webcraft. Keep going on this track, use it to show what Mozilla can be beyond the browser. On the flip side, we haven’t yet found big new ways to build participation. Drumbeat (and all of Mozilla) needs to focus on this for 2011.” Read more at Mark’s blog.

Mozilla Consumer Education project
“There is a Consumer Education project under way at Mozilla to help non-technical users of the Open Web increase their general level of web-savvy.” The team is hoping to create engaging, easy-to-understand content that helps users better understand the Web, starting with topics such as: Shopping safely on the web, Protecting online identity, Choosing more secure passwords, Social media privacy, The risks presented by cookies, and Adding extra features to the browser. “If you are a writer, film-maker, teacher, cartoonist, artist or musician, you can help.” If you would like to get involved, head over to the Drumbeat project page to learn more.

Introducing polymorphic inline caches (PICs)
Chris Leary has written an extensive introduction to polymorphic inline caches (PICs), explaining what they are and why they’re useful to JavaScript Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers like JaegerMonkey. “Inline caching is a critical ingredient in the delicious pie that is dynamic language performance optimization. JavaScript gets a nice speed boost by enabling PICs: x86 JaegerMonkey with PICs enabled is 25% faster on SunSpider than with them disabled on my machine. If something makes a dynamic language fast, then it is awesome. Therefore, inline caches are awesome.”

Thunderbird “mute thread” add-on
The Thunderbird team has created a new experimental add-on that gives users the ability to “mute” an email thread. “One thing that has been requested over the years is the ability to mute an individual email thread, so that once you’ve decided you don’t care about a particular conversation, you don’t have to wade through more messages in it as they continue to arrive. Mute Thread currently adds ‘Ignore Thread’ and ‘Ignore Sub-Thread’ menu entries to the Message menu for email messages, like Thunderbird already does with newsgroup messages.” The add-on is currently advertised as having “rough edges” and largely being a place for developers to experiment, but if you would like to try it out, head over to the project page to learn more.

Web video & the future of education
Mark Surman has written a great post in which he reflects on how web video is changing both how we learn and how we teach. “YouTube alone holds over 10 million tutorials. Videos with people teaching everything from how to set up WordPress, how to curl your hair with a paper bag, to how to moonwalk. If you look at the young people making these tutorials, web video isn’t just making learning easier. The web is creating a generation that takes it for granted that we can all be teachers. Teachers driven by the best aspects of the word ‘amateur’ — a love of a subject and a desire to share that knowledge.”

Mozilla user data privacy & vendors
The Mozilla legal team has shared a contract addendum they have created to help simplify the process of negotiating privacy terms in contracts with outside vendors. “We wanted to share these publicly so other organizations and individuals can use them as they see fit and hopefully contribute to the addendum’s evolution over time. Feel free to use and share these terms, but we hope you will share back your improvements so everyone can benefit.” Read more, including the full “Protection of Mozilla Data” addendum, at Julie Martin’s weblog.

Release Engineering & student projects
The Release Engineering team is hoping to get students involved with Mozilla by working with them on a variety of different projects. “A release engineer at Mozilla creates, maintains, and automates systems to deal with the release infrastructure. Our work affects you every time you get an update with Firefox. We generate releases and updates for all different platforms. Our systems also manage the continuous integration for developers working on Firefox and other Mozilla projects generating build, test, and performance results as developers commit changes.” Armen’s post goes on to outline a handful of projects for which they’re hoping to find help.

Reflections on a week long “bugday”
Anthony Hughes has written the results of a recent experiment, where the QA team held their first ever week-long bugday-like event. “Essentially, it was a week of workshops, writing test cases, bug triage, and testing new features. It was an effort to organize and execute, but it was very rewarding too.” Anthony’s post discusses what they learned related to community feedback, advertising and communications channels, documentation, and tools. “Overall, the bugweek was great. I can’t thank the contributors and people who helped enough. It took a lot of work to organize the bugweek but it gave us the opportunity to try out some new ideas and learn some lessons.”

Software releases
* Add-ons Builder 1.0a5
* Jetpack SDK 0.8
* RequireJS 0.14.1

Upcoming events
* Sep 30-Oct 1, Paris, Open World Forum & Open Diversity Summit
* Oct 1-2, New York, Open Video Conference
* Oct 28-29, Toronto, FSOSS
* Nov 3-5, Barcelona, Drumbeat Festival 2010
* Nov 5-7, Gothenburg, FSCONS

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

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

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

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

about:mozilla

28 Sep 2010 comments off

Firefox, Fennec, Kraken, OIN, MDN, Zaphod, Narcissus, Thunderbird, P2PU, Firefox Home, and more…

In this issue…

Recent changes to Firefox 4
Paul Rouget has collected a list of recent changes that have appeared in the pre-release version of Firefox 4. Included are new and improved features related to JavaScript, hardware acceleration, mozRequestAnimationFrame, the video implementation, HTML5, CSS, the file API, and more. Paul’s detailed list (with links for more information!) appears on the Mozilla Hacks weblog.

Fennec 2: new and notable
Fennec (aka: Firefox for mobile devices) has been under rapid development lately and a host of new and improved features have been introduced. Mark Finkle has blogged about some of those that are part of the recent Fennec 2.0 nightly builds, including: a newly designed awesomescreen, changes to the search providers list, SiteMenu and ContextMenu APIs so add-ons can access these more easily, awesomescreen “badging”, more context menus, Android notifications, and right-to-left language support. Read more over at Mark’s weblog.

Kraken: New browser benchmark
“We’re pleased to announce the first version of Kraken, a new browser benchmark. More than Sunspider, V8, and Dromaeo, Kraken focuses on realistic workloads and forward-looking applications. We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks to reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available.” Robert Sayre writes more about this new benchmark, including some future plans and current Firefox Kraken results.

Mozilla joins Open Invention Network
Harvey Anderson writes, “This week Mozilla joined Open Invention Network as a licensee. OIN is an organization which helps protect the Linux ecosystem by building a variety of defenses against patent attacks. As a licensee, we’ll have access to OIN resources in case we’re threatened by operating entities with patents, and over time we’ll likely become more involved in providing our own ideas and resources to OIN projects. This doesn’t mean we’re suddenly enthused about patents in any way, but OIN is doing some good work, and I believe that any protections that they afford Mozilla are on the whole more positive, and outweigh reservations about the patent system.”

MDN survey for web developers and designers
The Mozilla Developer Network team is looking for web developers and designers to take part in a new survey that will help them better understand the web development landscape and how MDN can be a better resource within it. “This survey asks questions about the web development experience: the technologies and resources you use, the communities you join, and the companies that influence the realm of your work. We plan to use your responses to improve our developer engagement efforts and deliver relevant programs and content through the Mozilla Developer Network.” Read more at Mozilla Hacks, and be sure to take the survey.

New tools for JavaScript language research
Tom Austin has released the first versions of Narcissus and Zaphod, two tools that open up the world of JavaScript language and virtual machine research to JavaScript programmers. Narcissus is a JavaScript virtual machine written in JavaScript, and Zaphod is a Firefox extension that allows using Narcissus as the default JavaScript engine in Firefox 4. “It is no longer necessary to modify complex C++ code to implement new prototype language features for JavaScript. Similarly, Narcissus/Zaphod can also be used to try out new JavaScript optimizations and static analysis.” There’s a lot more information about Zaphod and Narcissus available from Andreas Gal, Tom Austin (with a second article on Mozilla Labs), and Robert Sayre.

Hackers wanted to help fix Firefox 4 UI bugs
The Firefox UX team is looking for help in getting a short list of bugs cleared up in time for Firefox 4. “There’s a lot being worked on for Firefox 4 already, these are simply the bugs that are stuck in one way or another, or don’t have any implementers assigned to them yet. If you want to help make Firefox 4 the best browser it can be, these are good bugs to help out with getting resolved. Some of them are small, some are larger in scope, but all are important as far as the UX team is concerned.” The current version of the list is available on the Mozilla wiki. If you have time, the team would really appreciate your help!

Thunderbird needs more beta testers
Ludovic Hirlimann and the Thunderbird team are looking for more people to help with beta testing. “If you are currently running the 3.1 series or the 3.0.x series, we would appreciate having a few more folks on the beta channel and getting very early feedback on issues before we push releases to a wider audience.” To find out how to help, see Ludovic’s post.

P2PU School of Webcraft begins
The first session of the P2PU School of Webcraft is underway, and Matt Thompson has blogged about the first week of classes. “15 courses are now up and running on everything from WebDev 101 to Beginning Python to Programming Visual Media. Over 500 people applied for Fall Semester courses. 345 of those were approved to take part — with many more auditing or casually following along. This far exceeds the original goal of 12 courses with 200 learners — so an A+ on early metrics!” The School of Webcraft has set an aggressive goal to double the number of courses and learners for the January semester, and they are looking for help. Head over to Matt’s weblog to read more about the School’s first week and to find out how you can get involved.

Firefox Home now available worldwide
Firefox Home, a free app that syncs your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs to your iPhone or iPod Touch, is now available in 15 languages worldwide. Get Firefox Home in your language now! If you use Firefox 3.6 on your desktop, you’ll need to install the Firefox Sync add-on and create a Firefox Sync account in order for Firefox Home to work. See the full release announcement for more.

Visualizing Firefox 4 beta usage
The Mozilla Metrics team has started assessing the impact of recent Firefox 4 UI changes with the first update to the UI heatmap originally released last July. “By intuitively presenting usability data on top of the Firefox UI, we aim to reduce speculation about Firefox usage and help designers make better informed product decisions, faster. Here are just a few of the questions we can now answer: 1) Will users prefer tabs on top, or switch back to tabs on bottom? 2) Will Windows users smoothly transition to the combined Firefox menu button? 3) With fewer options to open new tabs, will use of the (tab bar) New Tab button rise? 4) Do advanced users interact with more of Firefox’s features, and, if so, which?” The Blog of Metrics article covers all of this and more.

Help with Firefox hardware acceleration
Joe Drew and the team working on Firefox hardware acceleration could use some help both testing and hacking on these new features. “Right now, Firefox has layers/compositing hardware acceleration enabled on Windows, and we have clean test runs on OS X. However, enabling our implementation of accelerated composition using OpenGL on Linux currently causes a lot of test failures, and we’d be ecstatic if you would try to help us fix them.” Joe has also written a post about how you can help with hardware acceleration testing on all versions of Windows.

PreFox is now available for testing
Dave Townsend has been working on a side project to port Firefox to the Palm Pre, and recently announced an initial alpha release. “I’ve finally been able to make some early alpha builds of PreFox available for testing. As someone who uses Firefox all the time, I felt that the Pre’s built-in browser was lacking in a number of ways. Fennec (which is the code name for the development versions of Mozilla Firefox for mobile) seemed like it would solve all those issues.” Dave has set up a PreFox project page, and you can read more on his blog post and release announcement.

Akirachix: Empowering women in Africa
William Quiviger spent some time in Africa recently and encountered a fantastic initiative called Akirachix, a forum for women interested in technology whose membership includes developers, system administrators, computer science students, digital marketers, and graphic designers among others. Judith Owigar, Akirachix’ president, works as an IT Engineer in a Peace Building NGO in Kenya, and has written an article about Akirachix that Delphine Lebédel has posted on the WoMoz weblog.

Software releases
* Firefox 3.6.10 and 3.5.13
* Thunderbird 3.1.4 and 3.0.8
* Firefox Home
* Zaphod + Narcissus
* PreFox
* SeaMonkey 2.0.8

Upcoming events
* Sep 25-26, Berlin, JSConf.eu 2010
* Oct 1-2, New York, Open Video Conference
* Oct 28-29, Toronto, FSOSS
* Nov 3-5, Barcelona, Drumbeat Festival 2010
* Nov 5-7, Gothenburg, FSCONS

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

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

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

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

about:mozilla

21 Sep 2010 comments off

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