Mozilla Firefox

Last month (Oct. 15th to Oct. 18th, to be precise), twenty volunteers descended on Mozilla’s Toronto office to discuss Mozilla Thunderbird. This included Mozilla employees, Thunderbird contributors of all sorts (developers, user interface designers ... [More] , add-on reviewers), Lightning contributors, and chat/Instantbird contributors. It was great to spend some quality hacking time with Florian and to meet Nihanth, both Instantbird guys who I talk to most days on IRC! I also had the pleasure of re-meeting a few people from the Mozilla Summit last year (I attended in Toronto) and to meet some brand new people! A few pictures of the chat contributors: Nihanth; me, Florian and Nihanth; and Daniel (dialing in!) It was really nice to actually sit down for a few days and work on Instantbird/Thunderbird without the distractions of "real life". I, unfortunately, spent the first day fixing an Instantbird bustage (from a mozilla-central change that removed some NSS symbols…why, I have no idea). But after that, we got some really exciting work done! We started cleaning up and finalizing some patches from Google Summer of Code 2014 to add WebRTC support to XMPP! You can check out the progress in bug 1018060. First working call over Instantbird WebRTC. Other highlights of the trip include eating the "Canadian delicacy" of poutine (with pulled pork on it)! [Less]

Last Thursday we had our regular weekly call about the Reps program, where we talk about what’s going on in the program and what Reps have been doing during the last week. Summary New Reps dashboard Portal UX initiative WoMoz update FX10 ... [More] celebrations Detailed notes AirMozilla video Don’t forget to comment about this call on Discourse and we hope to see you next week! [Less]

Because late is better than never, right? Web literacy was, of course, a theme that ran through all of the Mozilla Festival this year. However, in this post I want to focus on a couple of sessions that focused specifically on the Web Literacy ... [More] Map. Prototypes and Pathways for Web Literacy Session details (from schedule) This session was led by Karen Smith, with me supporting. It was a practical, hands-on session where participants were able to chart learning pathways around the Privacy competency of the Web Literacy Map. This was based on a deliverable from the Badge Alliance working group on Digital & Web Literacies. We also used the recent UX Personas work to help frame the discussion. Participants were asked to choose a persona and stick it to a large sheet of paper. They then explored what things that person was likely to want around privacy, and which things they’d like to avoid. We then went through the kinds of badges from the Badge Alliance deliverable, and participants were asked to construct pathways that would make sense in their persona’s context. Etherpad: https://bit.ly/PrivPathways Resources: the resources from this session can be found here. Towards v2 of Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map Session details (from schedule) I ran this session with community members Ibrahima Saar, Alvar Maciel, and Kim Wilkens. We led three groups of participants through the current Web Literacy Map and encouraged through what’s changed in the year since v1 was launched. What’s missing? How could it be better represented? We ended up with some interesting results. As you can see with the group above, they imagined the Mozilla Manifesto as being the roots of a ‘tree’ that also included additional competencies. Another group though three-dimensionally almost in terms of 'synapses’. The also experimented with a 'layered’ approach. The third group used 'refurbishing a house’ as an organising metaphor. The journey started by looking underneath the carpets, then exploring further… MozFest 2014 photo set: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk29E96p Remotee challenge My super-talented colleague Jess Klein unfortunately couldn’t be at MozFest, so she put together a number of 'remotee challenges’. One of these was how might we visualize the information in the Web Literacy Map? It’s worth reading the whole thread, as there’s a lot of back-and-forth. I’d like to highlight a few things in particular: Greg McVerry geeked out on the etymology of the current strand names (Exploring / Building / Connecting) and a suggestion of what we could change them to (Reading / Writing / Participating). Chad Sansing suggested separating out the 'back-end’ and 'front-end’ aspects of the Web Literacy Map. Jess riffed on this with a chore chart approach. Caleb got involved by imagining and then drawing and interactive 'filter’ for web literacies. We’ll be discussing these approaches in next Monday’s community call. The focus of that call is on looking at responses to Proposal 3 of the community survey: 'I believe the Web Literacy Map should look more like a 'map’. Join us! The canonical URL for all development relating to v2.0 of the Web Literacy Map is: https://bit.ly/weblitmapv2 Comments? Questions? Direct them to [email protected] or add them to the #TeachTheWeb discussion forum [Less]

28 changesets 109 files changed 4554 insertions 219 deletions ExtensionOccurrences cpp17 html11 js10 build9 h6 ini4 in4 xul3 xml3 webidl3 manifest3 html^headers^3 sh2 py2 mn2 jsm2 java2 idl2 txt1 mk1 list1 json1 conf1 c1 automation1 asan1 ... [More] ModuleOccurrences security30 browser19 dom18 content12 mobile7 gfx6 b2g5 build4 toolkit3 tools1 testing1 modules1 media1 List of changesets: Phil RingnaldaBug 978211 followup, make compare-mozconfig work on Win64 again, r=glandium a=NPOTB - 8201c42832ef Mike ShalBug 1072073 - pretty-l10n-check should also be -j1; r=glandium a=NPOTB - 6ab542eb236d Mike ShalBug 1013730 - Have mach ignore broken disk io stats; r=gps a=NPOTB - daabf4d8995f Mike ShalBug 1077597 - force -j1 for {pretty-}package-tests; r=glandium a=NPOTB - 8a6160e2ef98 Mike ShalBug 1084163 - Remove 'make check' from automation/build; r=glandium a=NPOTB - 5591e0a83c4d Mike ShalBug 1085026 - Use sha512 hashes for mar files; r=glandium a=NPOTB - 72d8ba95b2db Mike ShalBug 1087104 - Implement partial mar generation in make for 'mach build'; r=glandium a=NPOTB - ee2c3cfb4a7b Mike ShalBug 1087104 - Set the partialInfo property for Balrog; r=glandium a=NPOTB - dc18ad2b4816 David KeelerBug 1085509 - Add telemetry for how many permanent certificate overrides users have. r=mmc, r=jcj, a=lsblakk - 1f1e5b70a075 Christoph KerschbaumerBug 1069762 - Make CSP violation reports match the spec for redirects. r=sstamm, a=dveditz - b77384b124a4 Gavin SharpBug 1061736: add DuckDuckGo as a search engine option in Firefox, r=dolske, a=gavin - 2231ed05a1b8 Paul Kerr [:pkerr]Bug 1023539: Fix occasional timeouts of TURN webrtc transports with one-way connections r=bwc a=lmandel - d73c4671a18f Jan KeromnesBug 1011562 - Ship Firefox OS fonts in Mulet. r=mshal, a=NPOTB - 00f9c65b2f83 Gijs KruitboschBug 1062096 - browser_aboutHome should use a fake search engine instead of google to test FHR reporting. r=adw, a=test-only - e32540fb1289 Gijs KruitboschBug 1094421 - Prepend www. to the search suggestion URL to avoid intermittent timeouts. rs=Mossop,me, a=test-only - db6d19e2b8e6 Mark FinkleBug 883254 - Add the duckduckgo searchplugin. r=margaret, a=sledru - f1c1658280cd Nick AlexanderBug 883254 - Add the duckduckgo searchplugin to certain locales. f=glandium, r=mfinkle, a=sledru - 32c3529eb076 Markus StangeBug 1061327 - Don't stop searching for scrolled layers when encountering a ScrollInfoLayer. r=botond, a=lmandel - 0174d3047d1a Markus StangeBug 1061327 - When the scrolled layer is not an ancestor of the scrollbar layer, search the whole layer tree. r=botond, a=lmandel - eed413466305 Panos AstithasBug 1090967 - Don't use the Aurora-specific profile by default if this is not Aurora. r=bsmedberg, a=lmandel - 46829698a2b9 Gijs KruitboschBug 690307 - Make trimURL not generate URLs that parse back into search queries. r=mak, a=lmandel - ffb4891a237d Gijs KruitboschBug 690307 - Add more tests for the localhost + spaces case. r=mak, a=test-only - 9ebc7ee50a9c Margaret LeibovicBug 1093871 - Telemetry probe for number of items in reading list. r=rnewman, a=lmandel - f85f63d11f68 Dão GottwaldBug 1093368 - Customize mode theme picker shouldn't pass the default theme object to LightweightThemeManager.previewTheme. r=jaws, a=lmandel - fa1706ebf845 Jeff MuizelaarBug 1021265. Fix DisplayLink version expansion code. r=Bas,a=lawrence - 252c3ab238d0 Benoit GirardBug 1089380 - Remove ClipRectInLayersCoordinates. r=mattwoodrow, a=lmandel - 1e8f0a8c4474 David KeelerBug 1083118 - backout removal of unsafe, non-standardized legacy window.crypto functions r=bz a=lmandel ba=lmandel - fea4ac1165f9 David KeelerBug 1083118 - re-enable unsafe legacy window.crypto functions by default r=bz a=lmandel ba=lmandel - 87fd4f56cfed [Less]

It was summer 2002, and I was on a bike tour across Michigan. For downtime reading I’d brought a bunch of unread magazines. One of the magazines I brought was a semi-recent PC Magazine with a review of the various browsers of the time. The major ... [More] browsers were the focus, but a sidebar mentioned the Mozilla Suite and noted its being open source and open to downloads and contributions from anyone. It sounded unique and piqued my interest, so I filed the information away for future reference. Sometime after I got home I downloaded a version of the Mozilla Suite: good, certainly better than Internet Explorer, but ponderous in its UI. I recommended it to a few people, but because of the UI somewhat half-heartedly, in an “if you can tolerate the UI, it’s better” sort of sense. Somehow I stumbled into downloading betas and later nightlies, and I began reading and triaging bugs, even reporting a few bugs (duplicates!) of my own. Sometime later, probably through the MozillaZine default bookmark, I learned about Phoenix, the then-current name of the browser whose ultimate name would be Firefox. (Very shortly after this it acquired the Firebird name, which stuck for only a couple releases until the ultimate rename.) It seemed to do everything the Suite did (or at least everything I cared about) without the horrible UI. I began recommending it unreservedly to people, surreptitiously installing it on high school computers, and so on. One notable lack in Firebird of the time was its lack of help documentation. Firebird was good stuff. I wanted to see it succeed. I could fix this. So I began contributing to the Firebird Help project that wrote built-in help documentation for the browser. At the time this was an external project whose contents were occasionally imported into the main tree. (I believe it later moved directly into the tree, although I’m not certain. Ultimately the entire system was replaced with fully-online documentation, which fixed a whole bunch of problems around ease of contribution — not least that I’d lost time to contribute to that particular aspect, mostly having moved onto other things in the project.) Thus began the start of several years of work writing help documentation describing various parts of the UI, including a late-breaking October 2004 weekend spent documenting the new preferences UI in 1.0 — in just before the buzzer! I observed release day from a distance in my dorm room, but Air Mozilla made that experience more immediate than it might have been. (218 users on the IRC channel! How times have changed. Our main developer channel as I write this contains 448 people, and that seems pretty typical.) Air Mozilla wasn’t nearly as polished or streamlined as it is now. Varying-quality Creative Commons music as interludes between interviews, good times. But it was a start. Air Mozilla on the Firefox 1.0 launch day (Ogg Vorbis). My first inclination is to say this was recorded by people on the ground in the release itself, and I downloaded it later. But on second thought, I can’t be certain I didn’t stream-capture live using VLC. Ten years (and two internships, one proto-summit and two summits, and fulltime employment) later, I think it’s both surprising and unsurprising just how far Mozilla and Firefox have come. Surprising, in that entering a market where the main competitor has 95% of the market usually isn’t a winning strategy. (But you can’t win if you don’t try.) Yet also unsurprising, as Internet Explorer was really bad compared to its competition. (When released, IE6 was a really good browser, just as Tinderbox [now doubly-replaced] was once a really good continuous-integration system. But it’s not enough to be good at one instant.) And a serendipitously-timed wave of IE security vulnerabilities over summer 2004 helped, too. Here’s to another ten years and a new round of challenges. [Less]

A principios de este año Mozilla inició un proyecto para explorar las posibilidades de llevar la realidad virtual a la Web, y en junio lanzó una versión experimental de Firefox con soporte para Oculus Rift, uno de los más populares receptores de ... [More] cabeza de realidad virtual. MozVR tiene como objetivo compartir todo tipo de experiencias virtuales en la Web, proporcionar recursos y mostrar el trabajo de los desarrolladores en la creciente comunidad web relacionada con la realidad virtual. Permitiendo que los usuarios experimenten la potencia de las posibilidades de la RV en Internet. Hasta el momento han sido creados varios demos demostrando hasta donde puede llegar la creatividad humana, entre estos demos podemos encontrar: Sechelt (un vuelo en 3D basado en WebGL a través de la Columbia Británica) y The Polar Sea (un documental que llevará a los usuarios a través del ártico mediante videos de 360º). Al visitar MozVR.com, los usuarios podrán seguir una serie de indicaciones para configurar y usar Oculus Rift sin problemas con Firefox. Para disfrutar de esta nueva experiencia, hay que utilizar una versión de Firefox que debe descargarse desde aquí, en estos momentos no tenemos disponible su descarga desde Firefoxmanía. En Mozilla también están trabajando para llevar la realidad virtual a Chromuim y su código fuente está publicado en GitHub. Fuente: MozVR [Less]

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to work on a sequel to The Pragmatic Programmer titled The Unhinged Technical Architect. While we argue over the use of oxford commas, we find time to talk about the work that we’ve ... [More] shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by! You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla, or attempt to decipher the aimless scrawls that are the meeting notes. Or just read on for a summary! Shipping Celebration The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library. New Mozilla.org Pages and The Open Standard craigcook stopped by to share a bunch of new things that launched from the Web Productions team, including a new mozilla.org homepage and a new contribute page. He also mentioned The Open Standard, which was launched with support from the Web Productions team. Sites using contribute.json We heard from peterbe about a new listing of sites with a contribute.json file. The listing pulls info hourly from the contribute.json files for each site in the list. Pull requests are welcome to add more Mozilla sites to the list. Humble Mozilla Bundle and Voxatron Snippet Yours truly mentioned the Humble Mozilla Bundle, a promotion with Humble Bundle where we offered several popular games for purchase that can run within a web browser. To promote the bundle, jgruen and other Mozillians worked with Joseph White to make a minimal port of the Voxatron for use in an about:home snippet. All told, the snippet was about 200kb large and still managed to cram in a full 3d voxel engine that Firefox users were able to play with on their home page. Open-source Citizenship Here we talk about libraries we’re maintaining and what, if anything, we need help with for them. Except this week there was nothing shared. Never mind! New Hires / Interns / Volunteers / Contributors Here we introduce any newcomers to the Webdev group, including new employees, interns, volunteers, or any other form of contributor. Name IRC Nick Role Project Kristján Oddsson koddsson Volunteer careers.mozilla.org and snippets.mozilla.com Roundtable The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else. configobj ErikRose wanted to use configobj and asked for opinions on the library. peterbe gave a positive recommendation based on his experience using it in configman. Tabzilla Update Bar mythmon wanted to let people know about a new feature in Tabzilla. You can now trigger a feature called the Update Bar, which notifies users on old versions of Firefox that they should update their browser. pmac also called out the Translation Bar, which offers localized versions of the current page to users viewing your site in a language that doesn’t match their preferred locale. Workweek at Bernie’s I also gave a reminder about the Webdev meetup happening at the Portland Coincidental Workweek, an event now known as the Workweek at Bernie’s. Follow that link for more details, and if you’re going to be at the workweek and want to attend, contact me to RSVP. After skimming the back cover of The Pragmatic Programmer, we came up with an outline describing how our book can teach you how to: Fight software; Not just duplicate knowledge, but infinitely copy it for massive gains; Write code so solid and enduring that it will run until AWS randomly kills your box; Encourage programming by fate; Nuke-proof your code using aspect-oriented programming and a few pounds of refrigerator-grade steel; Capture real, living requirements for sale as folk medicine in foreign countries; Test ruthlessly and physically punish any code that misbehaves; Delight your users with micro-transactions; Build teams of slouching young programmers wearing hoodies and jeans to attract investors; and Automate yourself out of a job. If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the [email protected] mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you! See you next month! [Less]

Since I left Mozilla last year, I have been working on Crypton ( https://crypton.io ), an HTML5 application framework that places privacy above all else. Last month, my team was invited to the ‘Hack In The Box’, Malaysia security conference to lead ... [More] a Lab Session on Crypton. We were required to write a whitepaper for HiTB to publish, which was a great exercise, as my team has been meaning to write a paper for some time. It was a long trip, but worth it. We led a group of engineers through most of the Crypton API in about 2 hours. I lived-coded the ‘skeleton’ of a messaging application in 74 lines of JavaScript. The coolest thing about this session was using Firefox’s Scratchpad for all of the live-coding. It worked so well, we plan on doing more sessions like this. Crypton is intended for use inside of mobile and desktop applications (FirefoxOS, too). Our initial target for development is via Cordova and node-webkit. The API hides all of the complexity of cryptography from the developer. Developers use APIs that look like any other hosted API, for instance, account creation looks something like this: var myAccount; crypton.generateAccount('alice', 'password', function callback(error, successResult){ if (error) { console.error(err); return;} myAccount = successResult; }); Beneath this elegant, every-day-looking API call, a set of encryption keys are generated for encryption, signing and HMAC as well as a stretched key via the password that wraps all other keys. This keyring is then stored on the server making multiple-device operations easy. As we move forward with the Crypton framework, we are building a “private backend service” which will make using Crypton trivially easy to use and require no system administration. More on this in a future post. [Less]

In August, I wrote about why we believe that trust is the most important currency of the Web. As I explained then, putting the user first, through transparency, choice and control is the only way to bring about the Web we want. In that post, I ... [More] described several of our efforts designed to help us positively influence the ecosystem to garner more trust from users. One of those efforts was the Tiles feature. To influence the ecosystem, we have to participate in it. As we move forward with Tiles, we wanted to share more details on our approach and invite your feedback. On November 10, we announced the release of a 10th anniversary edition of Firefox and firmly took our stand as an independent voice on the Web. With the anniversary edition, we made the Tiles experiment a part of Firefox. We developed Tiles as an engaging and useful experience for our users. We designed the feature with a core focus on our Privacy Principles. Here are a few examples of how those principles influenced the feature: We ensure that no data is sent to us until you interact with the feature. You control the feature and can turn it off easily if you don’t find it useful. You can audit us – all of our code is open and auditable by you. In particular, you can learn more about the code that powers this feature here. If a user has previously opted into Do Not Track, we assume this means the user does not want to see Tiles so we pref Tiles off for those users. (Note: If a user subsequently opts in to DNT, the user will need to switch Tiles off). The data we collect is transmitted over HTTPS/TLS. We’d love your feedback on these principles, and any ideas or suggestions you might have to make Tiles more valuable to users. Leave a comment, or better yet, use this form to submit feedback directly to the Tiles team. We’re excited to move forward with Tiles and will continue to innovate with ways we can create positive impacts through this feature. Simultaneously, we will use our experiments through our Polaris initiative to test additional ways we can help create transparency, choice and control for our users. [Less]

With the 10th anniversary update to Firefox, there was an important update to the new tab experience, promoting Tiles to the Firefox stable build, and making them available to hundreds of millions of users around the world.  Today we are excited to ... [More] announce our first two sponsored Tiles partners: CVS Health and their media agency Mindshare North America, and Booking.com. What are Tiles for? For years, the new tab page in Firefox was unique in being intentionally blank – but by 2012, we learned that we could facilitate many users’ workflow through the new tab page.  We added thumbnails based on a calculation of “frecency” (frequency and recency of a user’s browsing history, essentially the same way that the Awesome bar calculates relevance). We learned that many users find these history thumbnails useful; but we were not entirely satisfied with the feature.  Thumbnails might be broken, and the experience could be much more dynamic. We need to be able to use our voice with our users, for example to raise awareness around issues that affect the future of the Internet, and to promote those causes that we believe are important to that future. We have been exploring the content discovery space.  There are many aspects of digital advertising that concern us: from the overall integrity of the advertising system on the Web, to the user having control over what happens to their data, and then to what happens to the data once the user has given their consent.  I have been writing for a while on this blog about the principles we follow and the ideas we have to improve digital advertising. Lastly, we wanted to explore ways to contribute to the sustainability of the project in a way that we felt could align with Mozilla’s values. Tiles are our first iteration on starting to solve these problems.  They create a more useful, attractive and dynamic new tab page.  Tiles also represent an important part of our efforts to create new communications, content and advertising experiences over which Firefox users maintain control. Partnering with Mozilla We’re very excited to have partnered with CVS Health (and Mindshare/GroupM) in the United States and Booking.com globally as our first two Firefox sponsored Tiles partners.  We are live in 8 languages and 25 different countries*, and will continue to iterate with Mindshare/GroupM and Booking.com, as well as with our community, as we continue to improve on the experience. We have been delighted to work with Mindshare/GroupM and Booking.com.  When we collaborate, we need to understand the vision and objectives of the partner, and to understand if that partner is able to work within the framework of Mozilla’s principles.  Running sponsored content in Tiles is results-based, not surveillance-based. We do not allow tracking beacons or code in Tiles. We are not collecting, or providing them with, the data about you that most digital ad networks do.  There are certain categories that require screening or what’s commonly known as age-gating, or have other sensitivities, that we will stay away from, such as alcohol and pharmaceuticals. The user’s experience For users with no browsing history (typically a new installation), they will see Directory Tiles offering an updated, interactive design and suggesting useful sites.  A separate feature, Enhanced Tiles, will improve upon the existing new tab page experience for users who already have a history in their browser. Tiles provides Mozilla (including our local communities) new ways to interact with and communicate with our users.  (If you’ve been using a pre-release Firefox build, you might have seen promotions for Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden and the NSA, appearing in your new tab in the past few weeks.) Tiles also offers Mozilla new partnership opportunities with advertisers and publishers all while respecting and protecting our users. These sponsorships serve several important goals simultaneously by balancing the benefits to users of improved experience, control and choice, with sustainability for Mozilla. What users currently see in the New:Tab page on Firefox desktop will continue to evolve, just like any digital product would.  And it will evolve along the lines I discussed earlier here. Above all, we need to earn and maintain users’ trust. Looking ahead User control and transparency are embedded in all of our design and architecture, and principles that we seek to deliver our users throughout their online life: trust is something that you earn every day.  The Tiles-related user data we collect is anonymized after we receive it – as it is for other parts of Firefox that we instrument to ensure a good experience.  And of course, a user can simply switch the new tab page Tiles feature off.   One thing I must note: users of ad blocking add-ons such as Ad Block Plus will see adverts by default and will need to switch Tiles off in Firefox if they wish to see no ads in their New Tab page.  You can read more about how we design for trust here.  (Note:  AdBlock Plus is not a Mozilla product and their content blocking mechanism is under their control.  We expect that they may add support for the Tiles in future releases) With the testing we’ve done, we’re satisfied that users will find this an experience that they understand and trust – but we will always have that as a development objective.   You can expect us to iterate frequently, but we will never assume trust – we will always work to earn it.  And if we do have and maintain that trust, we can create potentially the best digital advertising medium on the planet. We believe that we can do this, and offer a better way to deliver and to receive adverts that users find useful and relevant.  And we also believe that this is a great opportunity for advertisers who share our vision, and who wish to reach their audience in a way that respects them and their trust.  If that’s you, we want to hear from you.  Feel free to reach out to [email protected]. And a big thank you to our initial launch partners, CVS Health, Booking.com, and Citizenfour  who see our vision and are supporting Mozilla to have greater impact in the world. * that list in full: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela. [Less]