Category Archives: Announcements

The new Reset Firefox feature is like magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Notes:

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

The 8th SUMO sprint

Last Tuesday we finished the 8th SUMO sprint of this year. I’s been a short sprint, because for half of it Mozilla web developers met for a work week in California. Nevertheless we were able to land some great improvements to SUMO.

  1. One of our top priorities right now is improving our search results. To that end we started an initiative to rate KB and forum results as equals, based solely on the content instead of showing KB articles on top and forum posts at the bottom. We hope that this step will result in better search results by higher click through rates. This is a project that will take more than one sprint to be implemented. We completed the first of 3 phases in this sprint and are planning to implement the rest over the next sprints. You can read Will’s bug comment about it, if you want to know more about the gory details of the unification work.
  2. We were also able to implement a feature in the forums that gives our community an indicator for how we are doing and shows everyones impact on the forum: We call it the forum feedback indicator. It shows you how many questions were asked in the last 3 days and how many have a reply. It also links to the questions that haven’t been answered yet. The progress bar is orange, for any values below 100% and turns green when all questions are taken care of.

As with every sprint we also fixed a number of annoying bugs, and you can always follow along on the excellent scrumbugs. Here is the list for the 8th sprint.

However I’d like to point out one specific issue, that was bugging us in the forums for quite a while, creeping back when we thought we had squashed it: In some cases, a question displayed “No replies”, even though it already had replies. That bug is now hopefully fixed for good.

Thursday, March 29th is SUMO Day!

It’s time for a new SUMO day! This will happen on Thursday, March 29. We’ll be answering questions in the support forum and helping each other in #sumo on IRC from 9am to 5pm PST (UTC -7).

Join us, create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Additional tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to respond to every new question posted Thursday, so please try to answer as many questions as you can throughout the day.

Let’s make this an awesome day!

Madalina

Welcome Madalina Ana, SUMO Community Manager!

I’m pleased to welcome Madalina Ana to the spectacular SUMO team! SUMO is betting a lot on organizing itself around community growth as the primary way to provide kick-ass support to our worldwide users of Firefox and its related services. Madalina joins this movement as our new community manager, and together with Rosana Ardila, who only had the luxury of being the newest SUMO hire for two short weeks, the two are forming a focused group of community experts that will help us grow and strengthen our community like we’ve never done before.

Madalina is from Romania, but is currently based in Dublin in the land where the hangover is always postponed until tomorrow. She previously worked at Google with user-to-user support communities and brings both people skills and hands-on community management experience to the SUMO team. She is also a football goalie in her spare time — we expect this skill to come in handy numerous times here at Mozilla.

Welcome, Madalina!

Welcome Rosana Ardila, Community Support Program Manager

I’m thrilled to welcome Rosana Ardila to Mozilla and the SUMO team! Rosana is our Community Program Manager and will work closely with our incredible support community around the world, as well as lead efforts to grow and strengthen our community x100. (No pressure!)

Rosana is based in Berlin (born in Colombia) and has a background with Sun Oracle, where she’s worked on product marketing and management of the OpenOffice.org community. She has a Sociology diploma and is truly passionate about people. Her other passion is languages — if you want to get in touch with her, there’s a good chance you can do it in your native language as she speaks Spanish, English, German, French and Italian fluently. She actually just started to speak Portuguese, too; just give it a few weeks…

Please join me in welcoming Rosana to SUMO! If you want to get in touch with her, you can visit her blog or send her a PM from her SUMO  profile.

Goodbye to the Sync add-on

Today we are announcing the end of official support for the Firefox Sync add-on, focusing resources on improving and supporting the Sync experience for those users in the latest versions of Firefox. This means that the add-on will not be available at addons.mozilla.org and the only way to get Firefox Sync features will be to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox where they are built into the browser.

A lot has happened since Mozilla launched Weave back in 2007: We launched Weave as an add-on, rebranded it as Firefox Sync, moved Firefox to Rapid Release and eventually integrated Firefox Sync into the browser. Our goal has always been to offer the best service so you can seamlessly share your Firefox experience across devices

Since the launch of Firefox 4, the browser comes bundled with all the goodness of Firefox Sync. Because of the continued support for Firefox 3.6, we have continued to support the add-on. This causes a great deal of engineering & testing headaches between the add-on and the integrated Sync. We also see a lot of users unhappiness since the add-on does not support some of the newer, highly desired, features we’ve added to Sync.

Keep in mind the add-on will still be usable for now, but we will not guarantee its reliability in the following months and foreseeable future. We ask everyone still using the Sync add-on to move to newer versions of Firefox to enjoy the best online and Sync experience.

– mconnor & ibai, on behalf of the Services and SUMO teams

SUMO Day December 1st

Thursday is SUMO Day!

We had a great group of heroes answering questions on our last SUMO Day, so a big Thank You to all of the following contributors who made our last SUMO Day so awesome:

  • ChrisBell
  • kirchiri
  • memcda02
  • AliceWyman
  • silkphoenix
  • xr417
  • jack013
  • dmcritchie
  • Swarnava
  • nov2011
  • ioana.chiorean
  • Kierenblade
  • Kosh
  • Ketonom
  • ideato
  • knorretje
  • aspock
  • kbrosnan
  • SafeBrowser
  • Ibai
  • ajgodinho
  • John99
  • the-edmeister
  • cor-el
  • rbillings

So, this Thursday, as always, I will help moderate the support forum from 9am to 5pm PDT to encourage new forum helpers with answering support questions. I’ll be available on the #sumo IRC channel, michelleluna, or by private message to myself using the SUMO web site.

Just create an account and then take some time on Thursday to help with unanswered questions. Tips for getting started are on the etherpad. Our goal is to answer 200 additional questions throughout the day as this is the average number of questions each day that go unanswered. We need your help!

It is a very rewarding contribution that will instantly put you in touch with Firefox users! Even just 30 minutes of your time would help us immensely! And you’ll feel good afterward. Put it on your calendar and contribute your expertise.

Help us test private messaging and group dashboards today

Hey everyone,

This is a quick reminder about our test day for private messaging and group dashboards today, Friday, July 8th, from 3pm to 12pm UTC. We want to test the recently finished implementation of private messaging and the groups dashboards on SUMO, and will meet on IRC, in #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo).

Especially for private messaging it’s important to have many people on IRC at the same time. So if you can manage it, please join us between 3pm and 7pm UTC , but of course we will be around all day. Also, we have a test plan ready, so you can systematically check if things are working as they should.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team. You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

All info about the testday:

Date: Friday, July 8th
Time: 3pm to 12pm UTC
Place: IRC #testday (please note, it’s not #sumo)
Testplan: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Execution/Web_Testing/SUMO/2.8
Feedback: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/kitsune-groups-and-messages

Thanks, and hope to see you later today!

SUMO is adding new features: group dashboards and private messaging

Hello everyone,

Starting today we will be beta testing the new groups and private messaging features of Kitsune. We want to start with a small number of people for now, so we are going to cap this at about ten. We will have a test day for everyone on July 8th. If you are interested in testing private messaging and giving feedback on it, please let me know in this thread on the support community forum and I’ll activate it for you.

If you are a localizer, you can also request the group dashboard feature. This will add another tab to your dashboard and those of your team members. That tab will hold your localization dashboard and a message on top that you as the locale leader can change to message your team. Also, your localization group will get a profile page listing the locale leader and every member of the team.

You can see here what the German localization group profile looks like.

For the groups dashboard I wrote a short tutorial that you can see here.

Private messaging should be fairly intuitive. Once the feature is activated, just click on “Inbox” on the upper right corner of the page. Make sure that you only message people who are listed in the forum thread for now.

Please report any issues that you encounter on this etherpad so we can fix them quickly.

And of course, please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!
Kadir

Localization for Firefox 5 and beyond on SUMO

If you are a SUMO localizer now is a good time to prepare for the upcoming Firefox 5 release. Firefox 5 will be released on June 21, which is less than 2 weeks away and our articles are now ready to be localized. There are 7 updated articles for Firefox 5, and many of the updates are rather small, so you should have no problem updating your articles if you had them up to date for Firefox 4 already. As we have discussed before, in the future there will be 4 weeks of localization time beginning from the third week of the Beta period for every new Firefox release. But for Firefox 5 the time for localization is a bit shorter since the whole Firefox 5 development cycle is kept shorter than normal.

Michael Verdi has create a special page that let’s you easily keep track of all the articles that we have changed between Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. If you are a localizer you should bookmark that page so you can see at a glance the upcoming changes for future versions of Firefox.

As always your Localization Dashboard is the most important metric to see what to localize or update next. If you keep the top 20 articles localized at all times you cover over 50% of all visits to the KB already. But with upcoming new Firefox versions we can sometimes predict that an article is going to be very popular after the release, even if it doesn’t show up on the Localization Dashboard yet. So we’ll make sure to inform everyone about those cases.

If you have any questions about the process, an update is unclear or you want to help localize support articles into your own language, please don’t hesitate to contact us in the community forums.