Like last time, let’s start with the punch line:

• People love Firefox!
• People are also notably frustrated with two experiences – (1) Firefox crashing too often, and (2) Firefox not saving their settings (e.g., home page)

These insights were arrived at via our current user outreach efforts.  When people visit the Firefox “Whatsnew” page – which users automatically hit after each Firefox update – they have the option of providing feedback and comments.  More than 16,000 people have been kind enough to provide feedback over the past six weeks.  If you’re curious how this works from the user’s perspective, click here to the Fx3.5.4 whatsnew page and then click on the orange feedback button.

Here’s a breakdown of what has recently been on the mind of users:

We previously shared analysis of comments from people visiting the Firstrun (installation) page, and the chart above looks somewhat similar.  The fact that so many people made a point of saying something positive is amazing!

On the other hand, there is one negative item that we first took note of last time.  A significant number of people left a comment along the lines of, “why does this page open every time I open Firefox?  Please get rid of it.  I previously set my home page and Firefox won’t save the setting.” On the plus side, we have already taken this insight and turned it into action.  The Firefox team has prioritized a fix via bug 495735, and it should ship it in the next release of Firefox.

Lastly, there was one other group of people who were particularly frustrated.  For each of the groups in the pie chart above, we can also look at their average satisfaction score (scale of 1 to 5):

Fortunately, the crashiness of Firefox is a known issue, and making Firefox less crashy has been a top priority for the Mozilla community in recent months.  Given our current focus in this area, I would guess that if we rerun this same user outreach program a few months from now, we’d see that green pie slice either dramatically shrunk or completely eliminated.

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.0.

New features in Thunderbird 3 that require feedback include:

• New Search Tools
• Tabbed Email
• Message Archiving
• New Mail Account Setup Wizard
• Improvements for Developers

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 49 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.0 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Personas announces winners of the first-ever Student Signatures Art Competition

Over the past few months, artists have been working diligently to create Personas that would inspire and intrigue those around them and enter these design into the first Personas Student Signatures Art Competition. The competition was designed to give artists at all levels, and from all areas of the world, the opportunity to share their creations with millions of Firefox users.

We are excited to announce the three winning students from this competition. Their entries were a hit within the Personas community and received high marks from a panel of judges.

Top Design:
Space Station Holiday created by John LeMasney

Runners Up:

Electro Muse created by Manuel Alejandro Regalado Solís

Splatters created by Ben Rollins

The top design artist John Le Masney is earning his Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership at Rider University and Personas was part of his final project. Le Masney told us that he “jumped at the chance to get involved and do everything I can to forward open source and Firefox in particular.”

A special thank you to our panel of expert judges Alan Bamberger, Anna Sui, Greg Storey, Mitchell Baker, and Timothy Hogan who took time out of their busy schedules to judge this competition.

Please be on the lookout for our next competition!

- Amy Zehren and Suneel Gupta on behalf of the Personas development team

Last week I visited parts of the Middle East for the first time. I hope to get a summary and some photos up soon. For now I want to thank a few people of the amazing people who went far, far out of their way to host Mozilla and me.

First, Donatella Della Ratta of Creative Commons, who did an amazing amount of work to arrange a series of Creative Comments events in Amman, Damascus and Beirut and invited me along. I attended only a few of these at the beginning of the Creative Commons tour, but it was enough to see how much was involved and how much Dona pulled together stunningly diverse set of activities. Unfortunately, my involvement caused Dona to miss a pivotal event while she sat with me at a long (6 and 1/2 hour) wait at a border crossing, something I regret deeply.

Bassel Safadi, who showed immense hospitality, patience and flexibility. Bassel is the kind of person who makes it seems as if a large group of people are working on something, when in reality a lot of the work is just one person. And with an attitude that’s hard to match. My prolonged border crossing threw a wrench into Bassel’s day as well but he managed with grace and engineered a series of great gatherings.

Samer, who spent close to 7 hours with me at the border and remained gracious and professional and positive throughout.

Andre Salame, director-general of a publishing organization Al-Aous that gets “open.”

Eman, Issa, Rami and Ashraf of the Mozilla Club and Jordan Open Source Association, who arranged a Mozilla event in Amman, where I met a set of people interested in Mozilla, and to those — you know who you are — who stayed and spent a portion of their evening talking about software, open source, and life in general with me.

Everyone at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and the Young Entrepreneurs’ Association in Amman, especially Mohammed Khawaja, Mohammed Kilani, Aya, Basel, Evelyn, Ayman Azzeh, Catherine and Habib, all of whom went out of their way to make a great trip. They organized a week’s full of activities for the celebration of Entrepreneurs’ Week in Jordan, including several that I participated in. And Samer for helping me get to the airport, and offering to pick me up from the border if I got turned back. This turned out to be unnecessary but it was very reassuring to know the offer was real if I needed it.

We’ve just released Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate 1 check out the post on the Mozilla Developer Center for details.

Like reading? Want to support a good cause? Welcome to the Project Gutenberg Project*!

If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

Firefox needs an extension that can produce very high-level performance profiling numbers with only casual effort.

We often get bug reports that say “Firefox is painfully slow on site X”. It takes rather a lot of effort just to direct this kind of bug to the right person, because it’s usually not immediately clear why the site is so slow. It would be awfully nice to be able to load a page and see not only how much time Firefox spends waiting for the network (something Firebug can already do) but also how much time we spend doing style resolution, reflow, frame construction, garbage collection, compiling JavaScript, running JavaScript, and so on. Even Boris Zbarsky, who’s probably as comfortable using a profiler as anyone I work with, says such an extension would save him time.

On Mac, you could get this information using dtrace. If you’re a programmer, you have a Mac, and you’re interested in a fun side project, please get in touch with Boris or me.

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site.

Most current solutions involve lots of redirects or iframes, which leads to a confusing and phishable experience.

Besides the poor user experience, we are seeing market-moving effects of the identity/log in problem. Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect both let you use your pre-existing identity and social graph to super-power other websites. The problem?

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.

A Solution

The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).

At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft.

Some key points:

• * Identity is part of where you are, and what you are looking at (Amazon looks different depending on if you are signed in or not). That’s why we put it in the URL Bar.
• * For most sites, you’ll probably only have one identity, so login will be a single click or automatic.
• * Putting verbs into the navigation bar isn’t new. See Taskfox.
• * To increase visibility, webpages should be able to make a Javascript call that opens the login/signup bubble.
• * For webpages that want to own the login-process, the account creation simply acts as the ultimate form-fill.

For those interested in the evolution of the idea, you can see an early mockup with comments as well as Alex Faaborg’s similiar mockups.

Next steps

Chris Messina and others has been advocating for a model which follows the Facebook Connect lead: a single verb, to connect. Once connected, you decide exactly what information to share in an asynchronous manner. Unfortunately this bleeds information — your name is known to all websites which which you connect. We’d like to explore what a connect metaphor in combination with the ability to remain anonymous but connected means.

Get involved here.

What are your thoughts? How would you expose identity in the browser?

Poramate at Kapook has organized a Firefox 5th anniversary party in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov. 26th at GreenSpace by Greyhound, Central World. If you’re in Bangkok, this is the place to be on the 26th!

Firefox 5th Anniversary @ #CODEFAIL Party Bangkok Thailand

When working with the DOM .nodeName property there are two hard-and-fast rules that most people abide by:

1. The node names of HTML elements are always uppercase, even if they're explicitly created using lowercase characters. <html> will result in a .nodeName === "HTML" (see the HTML 5 draft).
2. The node names of XML elements are always in the original case, as specified when they're created. <data> will result in a .nodeName === "data", <DATA> will result in a .nodeName === "DATA".

Knowing these rules can be useful because it allows you to optimize your code. If you know that you're in an HTML document you can avoid having to upper/lowercase your .nodeName checks and you can just always assume that you're dealing with a .nodeName that's uppercase. This results in faster selectors for Internet Explorer and other minor optimizations.

However recently I've been running across two cases that've been especially problematic and have bucked the trend.

Importing Nodes from XML

The first is for browsers that support the adoptNode/importNode DOM methods. These methods allow you to move (or clone) a node from one DOM document to another. In this way you can move an XML node from an XML document and insert it into an HTML document. Normally this shouldn't matter much but, as it turns out, the original .nodeName case sensitivity is preserved from the original XML-ness of the node.

Thus if you have a lowercase XML element (<data>) and you use adoptNode or importNode to bring it into your HTML document the result will be .nodeName === "data" -- which completely bucks the trend for "all HTML element's node names are always uppercase." I consider this to be a bug, considering that the DOM element is now in an HTML document, not in an XML document, and should behave as such.

Unknown HTML 5 Elements

The second bit of weirdness comes from people attempting to use the new elements from HTML 5 in browsers that don't support it. Most browsers behave perfectly well when using some of the new HTML 5 elements (in that they don't freak out and support some level of styling). For Internet Explorer you must use the HTML 5 Shim technique - this will give unknown HTML 5 elements the ability to be styled and hold contents (such as a <section> element).

However there is an additional gotcha: When Internet Explorer encounters an element that it doesn't recognize it leaves the .nodeName in its original case. Thus if you have a <section> element in your HTML page the result will be .nodeName === "section" -- which directly contradicts the normal case sensitivity of the .nodeName property in HTML documents.

To try and understand all of this I made a bunch of test cases using a number of doctypes and document styles.

• HTML 5 document - uses the HTML 5 Doctype.
• XHTML document served as text/html.
• HTML document served with no doctype.
• XHTML document served with correct mimetype.

The important part of the test page is quite simple:

and the test cases are as follows:

HTML

Accesses the HTML elements that were originally included the page (should be case insensitive).

HTML createElement

Creates new DOM elements using the same document as the page in which it was shipped (should be case insensitive).

innerHTML

Attempts to inject the elements using .innerHTML (should be case insensitive).

For the remaining tests I grab a simple XML document:

like so:

XML

Test the elements in the XML document directly (should be case sensitive).

XML createElement

Same as the HTML createElement but done using the XML document (should be case sensitive).

HTML via importNode

This clones the nodes from the XML document, using importNode, and places them into the HTML document (should be case sensitive).

HTML via adoptNode

This moves the nodes from the XML document, using adoptNode, and places them into the HTML document (should be case sensitive).

The Results

I ran the following tests in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4.0.3, Chrome 3.0.195, and Opera 10.10. Additionally I tested against .tagName in addition to .nodeName and found no discernible difference (you can run your own .tagName tests by appending a ?tagName to any test URL like so.)

Conclusion

What can we learn from all of this? Unfortunately it appears as if we can't really trust our "trusted" rules about .nodeName case sensitivity for HTML documents. XML documents are completely safe and work as expected. XHTML (served with the correct mimetype) documents are nearly safe, save for the one bizarre Opera bug.

How will this change the code that we write? In short we can no longer trust the case insensitive nature of HTML documents - we need to assume that BOTH HTML and XML documents will be serving their content in a case sensitive nature - especially as more people start to adopt HTML 5 elements in their pages and expect some level of support in older browsers. This means that a number of selectors and DOM methods will take a performance hit as we can no longer take a case insensitive shortcut in our codebases.

There are a few outstanding jQuery tickets that are the result of these issues cropping up and now that I know the reasoning behind why they're happening I can now strip out all the case-insensitive performance improvements from the codebase - which is really quite unfortunate but at least it'll behave more consistently. I continue to stand by thesis from my earlier talk about the DOM: The DOM is a mess and every DOM method and property is broken in some way, in some browser.

A rather funny (depending on your boss’ and wifey’s sense of humor) Clickjacking-based worm has been spreading on Facebook for the past few days.

Like mom said, you shouldn’t trust a nasty bikini miss and start clicking random buttons around… or just do what you want, who cares?
We’re all adult and NoScripters, aren’t we?

Thanks for all the feedback for Weave Sync beta 1. We’ve got a second beta for you to try out which incorporates a number of fixes to issues that people have been reporting. Check out the details of Weave Sync beta 2 on the Weave blog and install it if you haven’t yet!

Version 0.3 of the Bugzilla REST API has been released. New in this version:

• name=value search for arbitrary fields; e.g "&cf_mycustomfield=somevalue"
• All timestamps are now in UTC, ISO 8601 format
• Support for OPTIONS
• Access-Control-Allow-Origin header now on all responses (permits cross-site requests)
• Support for downloading bug data for multiple bugs, in full, in a single request (see docs for search to find out how)
• Text searches now default to "contains_all" (as substrings, space-sep)
• Initial support for decent error codes - however, don't rely on them not changing!

Compatibility Notes:

• Note that the timestamps format change is backwardly-incompatible.
• All API capabilities now work against bugzilla.mozilla.org, now that it's been upgraded and patched.
• An advance warning: in the next release, the Configuration object's "groups" hash will change to be keyed by ID rather than name (and so also the "id" field will disappear to be replaced by a "name" field).

File bugs | Feedback and discussion.

Thanks for all the feedback for Weave Sync beta 1. We’ve got a second beta for you to try out which incorporates a number of fixes to issues that people have been reporting. If you’re using Weave Sync, you should have already gotten an add-on update notification on each of your machines.

For those who are new the project, check out the main features of Weave and see what we’ve been preparing for these beta releases. To start syncing your data, just install Weave Sync on Firefox 3.5 or newer.

What’s changed in Beta 2?

• Improved password/secret phrase recovery flow: this should better guide users who have trouble setting up their second machine
• Better handling of same-named folders when partially syncing: some users were seeing bookmarks moved to the wrong folder of the same name
• Sync history deletions from one computer to another: deleting a page on one computer will make it disappear from other computers (just like bookmarks)
• Automatic naming of computers: when viewing tabs from other computers, you’ll see a name based on the computer’s name and user name

As always, please keep reporting bugs and leaving feedback on our forum.

– Edward Lee, on behalf of the Weave team

If you happen to have written an extension that deals with the new lightweight theming feature in Firefox 3.6, please note that the lightweight-theme-changed notification will no longer be used for previews and actual selections, but only for the latter. If you want the old behavior, you should observe lightweight-theme-styling-update instead. This change will be included in the upcoming release candidate.

In this issue…

• State of Mozilla report
• Mozilla Foundation: November update
• Facebook Mozilla Security quiz
• Thunderbird 3 and accessibility
• Component directory lockdown in Firefox 3.6
• Jetpack for Learning deadline
• Camino 2.0 released
• Help the Camino project
• Redesigning Firefox’s add-ons manager
• New localization metrics reports
• Optimized Firefox Support start page
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

State of Mozilla report
Last week Mozilla posted its audited financial statements and tax form for 2008, as well as a FAQ about these financial documents. Mitchell Baker has written about these on her blog, also discussing the state of the larger Mozilla project, its accomplishments throughout 2008 and 2009, and what the future looks like for Mozilla and the Internet as a whole. “The Internet remains an immense engine of social, civic and economic value. The potential is enormous. There is still an enormous amount to be done to build openness, participation and individual opportunity into the developing structure of the Internet. Hundreds of millions of people today trust Mozilla to do this. This is an accomplishment many thought was impossible. We should be proud. We should also be energized to do more and to try new things. It’s a big challenge. It’s important.”

Mozilla Foundation: November update
Mark Surman has posted a Mozilla Foundation status update, covering the current state of the Foundation’s programs, communications projects, community recruiting, and organizational development. Included is information and near-term plans for Mozilla Education, the Drumbeat project, and Mozilla Foundation 2010 planning. Mark has posted further about the Drumbeat project, where he discusses the “year one” plans in more detail.

Facebook Mozilla Security quiz
Mozilla released a brand new application on Facebook last week, a five question quiz designed to teach users some quick tips about how to stay safe online. “Facebook applications are notorious for capturing lots of data about the user. That’s simply not how we roll at Mozilla. We took the extra step of hashing the Facebook user ID to ensure that if you take the quiz all of your personal data will stay with you. The only thing we’ll know is how quiz-takers (in aggregate) scored on the quiz.” If you have a Facebook account, go take the quiz and find out if you’re a security ninja or a security newbie!

Thunderbird 3 and accessibility
Thunderbird 3 is going to be released soon, and Marco Zehe has posted an extensive article about the software’s much-improved accessibility. “Thunderbird 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which is the same version that Firefox 3.5 is based on. As such, Thunderbird 3 has learned all the great new features of the platform, many of which have a significant impact on users with disabilities.” Marco’s post goes over all of these new features in detail.

Component directory lockdown in Firefox 3.6
In an effort to reduce Firefox crashes, the development team is changing how some third party software works with Firefox. These changes “should eliminate a good chunk of crashes without sacrificing our extensibility in any way. In the process, we’ll also be giving users greater control over the code that runs in the browser.” For Firefox users, this won’t change anything — add-ons should simply continue to work properly. For Firefox component developers, however, there are some minor changes required. “If you’re already packaging your additions as an XPI, installed as an add-on, it’s business as usual. If you have been dropping components directly, though, you’ll need to change to an XPI-based approach.” A migration document is available on the Mozilla Developer Center that outlines the changes required. Further information is available on the Mozilla Security weblog.

Jetpack for Learning deadline
Just a reminder that the Jetpack for Learning design challenge deadline is November 27. “Help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment as part of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the MacArthur Foundation.” Get all the details at the Jetpack for Learning website.

Camino 2.0 released
Mike Pinkerton and the Camino project team have announced the release of Camino 2.0. “This release represents the culmination of over a year of hard work by our developers, testers, and localizers and easily surpasses the high quality bar we have set in past releases. I want to stress that this is a product of our community, including our users, who provided valuable bug reports and feedback along with way. I am constantly impressed with the community’s enthusiasm for the project and the care and thought they put into every feature.” Check out Mike’s blog post for more information.

Help the Camino project
Following up on the release of Camino 2.0, Smokey Ardisson has written a post that clears up some misconceptions about Camino, and tells you how you can help with the project. “The Camino Project is made up of a small, diverse group of volunteers who work on Camino on nights, weekends, and other bits of spare time. Our developers range from pilots to students and software developers. Because we’re a small team, everyone has a chance to make an impact, and having more people can make a noticeable difference in our progress.” See Smokey’s post for details about how you can get involved with the Camino project.

Redesigning Firefox’s add-ons manager
Jennifer Boriss is working on a new project to redesign the Firefox add-ons manager. “The add-ons manager has been largely unchanged since 2007, and it badly needs a redesign. One reason is that it has several usability problems that would provide significant benefit to users if fixed. However, a successful redesign must not only fix problems, but add functionality. This is because the scope and functionality of add-ons has increased dramatically and will continue to expand in future versions of Firefox.” Boriss’ post goes over the project in much more detail, and she’s looking for feedback and suggestions.

New localization metrics reports
The Mozilla Metrics team has developed new localizer metrics reports to show the growth and usage data for each Firefox locale. “For the first time, our community of l10n volunteers will have a more comprehensive set of data points to help measure the progress and spread of their work. By providing both locale and geographic location information, these reports illustrate the impact that each localization team is having.” More information, including links to sample reports, is available through Seth Bindernagel’s blog post.

Optimized Firefox Support start page
David Tenser and the Firefox Support team have launched a new optimized start page designed to improve users’ experience when using the Firefox Support website. “The preliminary site statistics indicate that the impact of the new start page is even bigger than we anticipated. So far, the start page shows a 3% decrease of bounce rate, which is pretty fantastic. This translates to an improved user experience for 400,000 Firefox users (annually)!” David’s blog post describes some of the major changes and provides links for further details and information.

Upcoming events
The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Nov 27 – Online – Jetpack for Learning deadline
* Dec 4 – Online – Testday: Weave
* Dec 13 – Online – Jetpack 50-line challenge deadline

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 or announcements 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.

I realized something yesterday. I thought about the add-ons that caused me trouble lately by breaking Adblock Plus (and often the browser as well) — .NET Framework Assistant, Skype Extension, Ask Toolbar (a.k.a. Zone Alarm Toolbar a.k.a. Foxit Toolbar). I noticed that they all have something in common: none of these extensions is being hosted on AMO, consequently none of them had to pass AMO’s review process. So while AMO’s review process still receives its fair amount of criticism and the AMO team continues to improve — apparently, it managed to achieve an important goal. The AMO editor team enforced good coding practices successfully enough to make conflicts between extensions hosted on AMO rare, it is mostly external extensions causing the trouble now. My congratulations to the editors and to the entire AMO team!

Wow…here’s the story…

I use Dreamhost to host ilias.ca. I have many ilias.ca email aliases. Most relay messages to a gmail account (for spam filtering, and a searchable web archive), which then forwards them to an IMAP account hosted on ilias.ca.

On Friday, Dreamhost decided to move some email accounts to new hardware. Here’s the blog post:

A small number of accounts had mail that was unable to be moved over to new hardware before we had to power down the last of our servers and move them out of the old data center. For now we are setting up those users (without the data) on the new system so they should still be functional and we’ll be working on restoring the data once we have moved the servers (the data is not lost, just not currently available). We apologize for this – we understand how important mail is and wanted to reassure those effected that we’re aware of the matter and are working to correct it.

So on Saturday morning, I woke up to find that all of my previous messages and user-created folders are missing – 0r other hosted ilias.ca addresses for that matter. In fact, I couldn’t even connect to my mail server until a DNS server update. It’s Monday now, and Dreamhost still has not fixed the issue.

Let’s add some extra weirdness to the matter. Today, my IMAP account stopped receiving messages, and started sending my Gmail account bounce messages. I contacted Dreamhost about this, and it appears the configuration was changed from being fully-hosted to a forward-only address with no destination. What this means: dataloss!

I put up with the occasional downtime because of the price, but dataloss? My previous messages being missing for over two days? Buh-bye.

Does anyone have suggestions for a hosting service?

If you’re a Google Calendar user like myself you might want to check out this really simple add-on for Thunderbird, which should be available as an official add-on for the coming Thunderbird 3 release.

The Google Calendar Tab

As simple as it sounds, this adds the Google Calendar web interface as a new tab directly into Thunderbird.  Creating and viewing events works just as it would in a browser like Firefox.

If your calendar is setup to show popup alerts you’ll continue to see them from the calendar tab while in other, mail, tabs.

Here’s my family Pinochle game reminder alert showing.

There is no official release of this extension yet, however you could grab the latest XPI, download and install it into the latest (at least rc1) Shredder release.

More Extensions

It’s easy to get started integrating a web application like Twitter, Remember the Milk, and other sites into Thunderbird.  Once you get the initial pieces you can start working on better integration into your email conversations.

If you’re interested in creating an extension similar to this one, here are a couple links you probably want to check out:

• Google Calendar Tab source code
• bug 516776 – Make it possible for browser elements to navigate through links/pages
• Thunderbird 3 for Developers – Content Browsing
• Thunderbird Content Tabs

Lightning

This calendar extension only handles a single url for Google Calendar.  If you’re looking for actual calendar integration with different calendars, including google calendar, you’ll want to check out the Lightning Calendar extension which also runs inside Thunderbird tabs.

When the AMO Statistics Dashboard was first released, it contained views for all of the data available from add-on update pings at the time. With the release of Firefox 3 in mid-2008, however, a locale parameter was added to indicate the user’s browser locale.

We recently added support for this to our stats dashboard, so you’ll now be able to see the breakdown of locale usage for each add-on by selecting “Locales” from the stats dashboard menu.

The top 25 locales for all add-ons hosted on AMO are listed below, along with the top locales for Firefox proper. This comparison shows which locales are disproportionately interested in add-ons, both positively and negatively.

We’ll be posting additional statistics based on locale data in the future, as it’s very interesting to see how the popularity of specific add-ons can change drastically between locales.

ShareThis

Over the years, the Mozilla Metrics team has been wanting to be more open with our data.  We have some key metrics related to Firefox downloads and daily usage and our idea has been to make this data open to the entire community (and more broadly, to the entire outside world, e.g., for university researchers to use).

As an early step in that process, we’ve come upon one specific area where being more open should prove helpful.  Working with Seth Bindernagel and the l10n team, we’ve created a set of custom reports that will be provided to Firefox localizers on a regular basis.  The reports were recently launched and Seth has a full write-up highlighting the key components (e.g., locale and geo interactions).  As an example, below is a portion of what pt-PT localizers receive.

Thanks to Pedro Alves and Seth, among many others, for their hard work.

Last week at PDC, as we were about to start talking to people about IE9, I saw the following notification from my Facebook account:

From: Facebook [mailto:notification+mwm5axbx@facebookmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:05 AM

Dina posted something on your Wall and wrote:

"funny vid of u, you see it? http://www.facebook.com/l/ca339;hTTP://www.N70.InFO/2d"

To see your Wall or to write on Dina's Wall, follow the link below:

<..>

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

The message was from someone I know pretty well, and I believed the message. The address itself (http://www.n70.info/2d) wasn’t that suspicious; there are a lot of URL shortening services, and the .info domain has many legitimate sites on it. So I clicked the it:

and thought – whew. 

IE8’s SmartScreen now blocks malware sites over two million times a day. IE8 offers a lot of protection from real-world attacks: phishing protection, a cross-site scripting filter, and Protected Mode (I may run as an administrator, but my browser doesn’t). With attacks on the rise, using (or upgrading to) a browser with this much protection is more important than ever. IE8 also offers great reliability because of process-isolation, and offers users the ability to manage add-ons that affect performance and stability. InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering are also quite handy.

I wrote back to my friend, and she was surprised. You can read Facebook’s guidance about what to do if this happens to you or a friend.

Dean Hachamovitch

I’ve been trying to cut down on the number of addons I run. Previously I blogged about my Bugzilla “assigntome” ubiquity command. Turns out it is really easy to turn it in to a bookmarklet. Just drag AssignToMe to your bookmarks toolbar.

Code:

javascript:(function() {
    var logout_re = /[\s\S]*Log.*out.*[\s]\s*(.*)\s/m;
    var links = document.getElementById('footer').getElementsByClassName('links')[0].getElementsByTagName('li');
    var user_name = links[links.length - 1].textContent.replace(logout_re, '$1');
    var evt = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
    evt.initMouseEvent('click', true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
    document.getElementById('bz_assignee_edit_action').dispatchEvent(evt);
    document.getElementById('assigned_to').value = user_name;
    document.getElementById('commit_top').click();
})();

Just a heads up -- I'll be using bsmedberg's Status Board to push updates about the Android porting work; as other people get involved, you should see their updates there as well.

Jennifer Boriss has posted on her blog about some ideas we’ve been working on with the Firefox and User Experience teams for redesigning the Firefox Add-ons Manager. If you’re interested in the future of the Add-ons Manager, be sure to check it out!

ShareThis

Given the quick review on AMO (many thanks to you guys that this happened under a week!) the Mozmill team can call out that Mozmill 1.3 has been released. It’s available for download on addons.mozilla.com.

This release is a big step forward by adding a couple of new features and fixing some important bugs which have been found by users and have been introduced by the last release. A complete list can be found on Bugzilla.

Let’s give a short overview and mention some of the fixes/features:

1. Bug 509912: We have updated the maxVersion for all applications. So Mozmill is not compatible up to Firefox 3.7a1pre, Thunderbird 3.1a1pre, and SeaMonkey 2.1a1
2. Bug 508643: From now on new profiles are created by Firefox itself. Before that fix we have used the files from within the default profile folder of the default application. That caused failures for localized builds because the profile has been initialized with wrong profile data.
3. Bug 516729: Tests failed by clicking on elements inside the content area if the window was too small. Now with this fix elements will be scrolled into view before clicking on them.
4. Bug 522990: Nested elements in the content or chrome document weren’t correctly reported by the inspector which didn’t let you get an element string.
5. Bug 512789: Both controller.check and controller.radio functions have been updated to work now.
6. Bug 515072: A second parameter has been added for controller.assertJS which let you specify an object which can be accessed via “subject” from within that function. It allows to show a more detailed information for a failing test.
7. Bug 500987: Restart tests can pass variables between test modules. There is a persisted property available by default which can be used to set/get user-defined values.
8. Bug 515209: Restart tests can have a callback handler written in Python which can be called asynchronously.

If something has been regressed since the last version please file a bug under Testing/Mozmill on Bugzilla.

If you are interested and want to know more about Mozmill then join us in #QA on IRC or subscribe to the Mozmill developer list.

My friend Diederik and I are starting to work more closely with some open source projects about how to help "open" communities (be they software projects or cities) become more efficient.

One of the claims of open source is that many eyes make all bugs shallow. However, this claim is only relevant if there is a mechanism for registering and tackling the bugs. If a thousand people point out a problem, one may find that one is overwhelmed with problems - some of which may be critical, some of which are duplicates and some of which are not problems at all, but mistakes, misunderstandings or feature requests. Indeed, in recent conversations with open source community leaders, one of the biggest challenges and time sinks in a project is sorting through bugs and identifying those that are both legitimate and "new." Cities, particularly those with 311 systems that act similar to "bug tracking" software in open source projects, have a similar challenge. They essentially have to ensure that each new complaint is both legitimate, and geuninely "new" (and not a duplicate complaint - eg. are there 2 potholes at Broadway and 8th vs. two people have called in to complain about the same pothole).

The other month Diederik published the graph below that used bug submission data for Mozilla Firefox tracked in Bugzilla to demonstrate how, over time, bug submitters on average do become more efficient (blue line). However, what is interesting is that despite the improved average quality the variability in the efficacy of individual bug submitters remained high (red line). The graph makes it appear as though the variability increases as submitters become more experienced but this is not the case, towards the left there were simply many more bug submitters and they averaged each other out creating the illusion of less variability. As you move to the right the number of bug submitters with these levels of experience are quite few, sometimes only 1-2 per data point, so the variability simply becomes more apparent.

Consequently, the group encircled by purple oval are very experienced and yet continue to submit bugs the community ultimately chooses to either ignore or deems not worth fixing. Sorting through, testing and evaluating these bugs suck up precious time and resource.

We are presently looking at more data to assess if we can come up with a profile for what makes for a bug submitter who falls into this group (as opposed to be "average" or exceedingly effective). If one could screen for such bug submitters, then a community might be able to better educate them and/or provide more effective tools and thus improve their performance. In more radical cases - if the net cost of their participation was too great - one could even screen them out of the bug submission process. If one could improve the performance of this purple oval group by even 25% there would be a significant improvement in the average (blue line). We are looking forward to talk and share more about this in the near future.

As a secondary point, I feel it is important to note that we are still in the early days of open source development model. My sense is there are still improvements - largely through more effective community management - that can yield dramatic (as opposed to incremental) boosts in productivity for open source projects. This separates them again from proprietary models which - as far as I can tell - can at the moment at best hope for incremental improvements in productivity. Thus, for those evaluating the costs of open versus closed processes, it might be worth considering the fact that the two approaches may be (and, in my estimation, are) evolving at very different rates.

(If someone from a city government is reading this and you have data regarding 311 reports - we would be interested in analyzing your data to see if similar results bear out - plus it may enable us to help you manage you call volume more effectively.)

<script src="http://js.goosegrade.com/grade.php?sid=2316560" type="text/javascript"></script><noscript></noscript>

http://eaves.ca/2009/11/23/making-open-source-communities-and-open-cities-more-efficient/ David Eaves http://eaves.ca if writing is a muscle, this is my gym 2009-11-24T23:45:15Z http://www.rumblingedge.com/?p=1432

Current Sunbird (0.9) | Last planned Sunbird (1.0 Beta 1) | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central) Common (excluding Website bugs): (12) Fixed: 350845 - Implement relevant parameter methods (enumerate, exists, set) Fixed: 392194 - Incorrect time and shadow is shown when draging an event in week/day view Fixed: 411540 - No dialog asking to save event if mouse is used to quit Calendar Fixed: [...]

Current Sunbird (0.9) | Last planned Sunbird (1.0 Beta 1) | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Common (excluding Website bugs): (12)

• Fixed: 350845 - Implement relevant parameter methods (enumerate, exists, set)
• Fixed: 392194 - Incorrect time and shadow is shown when draging an event in week/day view
• Fixed: 411540 - No dialog asking to save event if mouse is used to quit Calendar
• Fixed: 413847 - Timezone preference changes require restart to take effect
• Fixed: 494140 - Multiple reminders,relations,attachments created by modifying repeating event
• Fixed: 523987 - Dismissing alarms doesn’t work with Provider for Google Calendar
• Fixed: 526172 - Rename communicator-overlay-preferences.xul to suite-overlay-preferences.xul
• Fixed: 527057 - Port |Bug 519357 – Only load known binary components from app directory| to comm-central
• Fixed: 527065 - create Lightning build servers for comm-central/mozilla-central repository
• Fixed: 528506 - In the SeaMonkey Default Theme Account Central pane, the icon in the “create new calendar” row is misaligned.
• Fixed: 528540 - Adjust comm-central version numbers to distinguish builds from comm-1.9.1 and comm-central
• Fixed: 529945 - Build problems on Linux and W32

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-calendar1.0+) with [needed beta] in whiteboard: (2)

• Since 2009-11-17: 529326 - Create indexes for the local calendar cache
• Since 2009-11-20: 530096 - Tracking bug for Sunbird/Lightning 1.0[ab]1 release

One can get the latest Lightning .xpis here.

Sunbird builds:

Official Windows, Official Windows installer

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

2009-11-23T09:44:30Z 2009-11-23T09:44:30Z http://www.rumblingedge.com/2009/11/23/2009-11-22-sunbird-1-0-builds/ Gary Kwong http://www.rumblingedge.com/ http://www.rumblingedge.com/feed/atom/ Tracking developments in Mozilla Thunderbird builds 2009-11-23T09:44:30Z http://www.rumblingedge.com/?p=1430

Previous TB pre-release – Beta 3 | Current TB pre-release – Beta 4 | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central) Thunderbird 3 RC1 build candidates are being generated during this period for testing, see this page. The following lists include both bugs that are being fixed in TB3 final as well as bugs fixed in the next version of Thunderbird (3.0.x or [...]

Previous TB pre-release – Beta 3 | Current TB pre-release – Beta 4 | Previous releases | Mercurial source bundles (mozilla-central & comm-central)

Thunderbird 3 RC1 build candidates are being generated during this period for testing, see this page.

The following lists include both bugs that are being fixed in TB3 final as well as bugs fixed in the next version of Thunderbird (3.0.x or 3.1?).

Thunderbird-specific: (34)

• Fixed: 364376 - Not all Message header fields are focusable by <tab> (Keyboard accessability)
• Fixed: 381253 - icon for signed mail (Enigmail & S/MIME) is ugly, was much better in thunderbird 1.5
• Fixed: 489609 - Show whole subject – Wrap subject in message pane (long subjects not wrapped)
• Fixed: 493399 - Activity Manager: UI fails over with really long things in the activity list
• Fixed: 515499 - Aero smileys
• Fixed: 515650 - [faceted search]: clicking on the “None” value of a facet does nothing
• Fixed: 516776 - Make it possible for browser elements to navigate through links/pages
• Fixed: 516912 - faceted search/message/any tabs broken by bug 516237
• Fixed: 518337 - Recent changes broke accessibility labels for “from”, “subject” etc. fields when reading messages
• Fixed: 520408 - Junk virtual folder show full imap folder hierarchy
• Fixed: 520409 - superbad UI performance, fairly unresponsive while Compact Folders plus indexing
• Fixed: 520797 - In compose message, missing “Display Name” for accounts’ from-identities in Sender dropdown
• Fixed: 521603 - Indexing breaks when there is no idle service support – Remote X session
• Fixed: 524437 - Update files with locales to include in the Thunderbird 3.0 RC1 build
• Fixed: 524667 - “Close other tabs” only closes alternate tabs
• Fixed: 525302 - Workaround for bug 525225 / bug 492645
• Fixed: 525948 - Quick Search option “Subject, To, or Cc filter” inconsistent after restart
• Fixed: 526292 - View–>Headers–All overfill all message pane preview
• Fixed: 527018 - Attachment reminder does not works with Greek (and other non-latin)keywords
• Fixed: 527198 - No need to include dictionary in license packs
• Fixed: 527324 - [account autoconfig]When I create a new account tb stay in “checking password…” indefinitely
• Fixed: 527616 - message without a Date header leaves header pane in broken state
• Fixed: 527664 - Remote content is no longer blocked
• Fixed: 527783 - Thunderbird credits changes
• Fixed: 527888 - [faceted search] Make results page a little less painfully wrong in rtl
• Fixed: 527922 - Right-clicking in a content tab on a link opens the link in a browser
• Fixed: 528463 - nsIAbDirectory iid need to be changed
• Fixed: 528583 - Version number not placed in Windows Add/Remove system (non-en-US builds)
• Fixed: 528690 - Shouldn’t be possible to move message to virtual folder
• Fixed: 528758 - FIPS mode broken in RC1 on Windows
• Fixed: 529057 - Fix build bustage after bug 515051 land
• Fixed: 529071 - Message Menu -> Copy To and Move To don’t show sub-folders (Mac only)
• Fixed: 529235 - Unable to open additional dictionary download page from spell-checker dialog
• Fixed: 529995 - startup crash [@ columnName] in sqlite

MailNews Core: (25)

• Fixed: 168186 - “max_cached_connections” pref doesn’t stick
• Fixed: 383489 - IMAP code touches the pref service from off the main thread
• Fixed: 459693 - Eliminate nsFileSpec and nsIFileSpec (references) from MailNews
• Fixed: 505072 - If <meta … content=”text/html; charset=GB2312″> exists in HTML mail source, HTML mail of Content-Type:text/html;charset=UTF-8(HTML data is encoded in UTF-8, probably converted) is displayed using GB2312
• Fixed: 513249 - [SeaMonkey 2.1] Wrong text encoding for html mail in non-utf encoding (charset in <meta> tag is always used in HTML rendering, although decoder returns in UTF-8)
• Fixed: 518678 - archive crash [@ nsMsgLocalMailFolder::EndMessage(unsigned int)]
• Fixed: 520172 - gloda indexer stringifies MessagesByMessageIdCallback results for debug even when not in debug mode
• Fixed: 521618 - Port |Bug 520339 – Remove leftovers from MOZ_COMPONENTLIB| to comm-central
• Fixed: 522713 - Port |Bug 448602 – Have a way to enumerate event listeners| to comm-central (apps)
• Fixed: 524349 - Port |Bug 517417 – access violation: while compiling xulrunner tries to test for Mercurial repositories above its build dir| to comm-central
• Fixed: 525331 - use gcc-4.2 by default for Mac OS X trunk
• Fixed: 527235 - ^L characters in comm-central source cause parsing errors with DXR
• Fixed: 527315 - Unsolicited capabilities in tagged IMAP responses not correctly parsed, last token not recognized
• Fixed: 527405 - Post commit error
• Fixed: 527629 - Manual filters no longer are allowed on deferred-from servers
• Fixed: 527679 - gloda indexing does not properly handle undone message deletions
• Fixed: 527687 - msgsClassified event may fire multiple times for a single message
• Fixed: 527834 - gloda indexes junk in IMAP accounts even though it shouldn’t
• Fixed: 527836 - imap not setting public namespace from prefs correctly
• Fixed: 527950 - In filter list editor, Local Folders sometimes shows wrong filter list
• Fixed: 528169 - gloda.indexer error: “Unknown job type: undefined” when sending new mail
• Fixed: 528413 - sed used in non-portable way in configure-related — breaks on Solaris 10
• Fixed: 529668 - test_getNewsMessage.js fails after bug 515051 check in (Stream listener registered in a network request channel eats JS error messages)
• Fixed: 529684 - Gloda indexer hangs if it needs to initiate a local folder reparse [Error: this.callbackDriver is not a function]
• Fixed: 530063 - Interfaces changed without changing iid

Outstanding bugs (marked blocking-thunderbird3+ with Target Milestone of Thunderbird 3.0rc1): (1)

• Since 2009-10-26: 524432 - Tracking bug for build and release of Thunderbird 3.0 RC1 (3.0rc1)

Official Windows, Official Windows installer (discussion)

Official Linux (i686)

Official Mac (Universal binary)

2009-11-23T09:39:50Z 2009-11-23T09:39:50Z http://www.rumblingedge.com/2009/11/23/2009-11-22-thunderbird-trunk-builds/ Gary Kwong http://www.rumblingedge.com/ http://www.rumblingedge.com/feed/atom/ Tracking developments in Mozilla Thunderbird builds 2009-11-23T09:44:30Z http://jboriss.wordpress.com/?p=299

When I ask Firefox users why they love Firefox, the answer often isn’t because of Firefox. Rather, it’s a particular Firefox add-on that provides functionality that has become invaluable to users. From developer add-ons like Firebug to social add-ons like StumbleUpon, a single add-on can fundamentally change how users interact with the web. The [...]

When I ask Firefox users why they love Firefox, the answer often isn’t because of Firefox. Rather, it’s a particular Firefox add-on that provides functionality that has become invaluable to users. From developer add-ons like Firebug to social add-ons like StumbleUpon, a single add-on can fundamentally change how users interact with the web.

Firefox users get starry-eyed when describing their favorite add-ons

The reason add-ons are so important is because they are a fundamental way that users take control of their online life. Firefox touts its customizability as one of its main selling points, but users’ ability to customize their browsing experience is dependent on the talent and creativity of the add-on developer community. I’ve written in the past about the importance of Firefox providing a user experience ideal for as many people as possible right out of the box, without add-ons installed. But each user is truly unique and uses the web in increasingly different ways. That’s why it’s so important that add-ons be trivial to find, install, and begin using.

The Current Add-ons Manager

Add-ons are currently installed, maintained, and configured via the add-ons manager in Firefox. This window, found under the Tools menu, provides an inventory of installed add-ons and allows users to update, install, remove, enable, and disable them.

The current add-ons manager works, but could use some love

The add-ons manager has been largely unchanged since 2007, and it badly needs a redesign. One reason is that it has several usability problems that would provide significant benefit to users if fixed. For instance, the process of updating add-ons is currently characterized by interrupting important tasks such as startup. Locating a particular installed add-on currently involves navigating through categories such as extensions and plugins. Even experienced users I talked to find the distinction between these categories hazy. A redesign to address current issues should insure that installing and updating add-ons is trivial, notifications are non-disruptive, and the interface provides clear information about the state of a user’s add-ons.

However, a successful redesign of the add-ons manager must not only fix problems, but add functionality. This is because the scope and functionality of add-ons has increased dramatically and will continue to expand in future versions of Firefox. The current add-ons manager gives only the name of an add-on, an icon, a version number, and a one-sentence description. Users could benefit from more information, such as a description or a screenshot showing what UI the add-on will change. Added functionality is also needed because of new ways to modify Firefox, such as Jetpacks and Personas. These are similar to current add-ons in that users can choose items to download for added functionality, but they are installed, managed, and used differently. A redesigned add-ons manager must be able to incorporate emerging projects like these.

Redesign Priorities

From fixing current usability problems to adding needed functionality, there’s a lot that needs to be tackled in the add-ons manager redesign. To help focus the effort, the main areas to address can be described as five priorities:

1. Maintaining and Configuring

• Allowing users to quickly locate a particular add-on by name or by type
• Providing simple, usable controls for basic add-on operations
• Allowing new forms of add-ons, such as Jetpacks and Personas, to be maintained and configured easily alongside traditional add-ons

2. Updating

• Updating add-ons automatically by default. I’m increasingly convinced that most users, once they’ve decided an add-on is trusted, do not want to manually update it. They especially do not want to be reminded to update when they are starting the browser
• Allowing users the option to update add-ons manually, update only a particular add-on manually, and possibly to undo an update

3. Installing

• Streamlining the install process to as few steps as possible
• Providing the user with clear indications of what action is needed, especially when some add-ons require a restart and some do not

4. Discovering

• Providing a compelling first-run experience to new add-ons users, including clearly showing what functionality add-ons provide and what they will change
• Providing a usable, findable way on the add-ons manager to search all existing add-ons, only requiring a visit to AMO when greater community involvement or information is sought

5. Troubleshooting

• Providing ways to determine if a particular add-on may be causing performance problems, such as ranking by size, CPU, etc
• Giving clear communication and instructions if there is a security problem with an add-on

This is still very much a working list open to feedback and changes (especially via comments here or on the wiki).  Basically, what I’d like to focus on is making add-on usage less disruptive and more accessible. Experienced and especially technical users tend to be very aware of add-ons and the functionality they provide. These users may see add-ons mentioned in the tech press, may talk to their friends about their favorite add-ons, and might even get involved in the add-on developer community. These are the users who say “I can’t imagine a world without add-on X.” But the benefit of add-ons is felt almost soley by this group. There are thousands of add-ons available that can improve the online experience of just about any user.  Both users and developers deserve an add-ons manager that helps make customizing the browsing experience simple.

2009-11-23T09:21:28Z jboriss http://jboriss.wordpress.com http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/c1c1a5c722cc66967de6e632d05c87cf?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png Just another WordPress.com weblog 2009-11-23T09:30:18Z http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/4745361

No new 10.10 snapshots today, the final version is ready! :hat:

We'd like to thank everyone for testing the snapshots, and thereby helping to iron out the last issues. The latest snapshot (windows build 1893) is the final release. So if your running that build you do not need to upgrade.

Are you using Opera 10.10 with Unite? Please help us to spread the word about the new release!
Download Opera 10.10

Stay tuned for 10.2 alpha snapshots! :-)

2009-11-23T08:53:39Z Huib Kleinhout http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/ Opera Desktop Team 2009-11-23T08:53:39Z Henri Sivonen http://hsivonen.iki.fi/rdf-competition/

From the minutes of the TAG meeting on November 2^nd 2009.

From the minutes of the TAG meeting on November 2^nd 2009:

RESOLUTION: to request that the data-* section be removed from the HTML 5 spec

A bit later:

[Sam Ruby]: hmm... not sure I’d heard concerns around data-* before

[Paul Cotton]: right; don’t expect the WG to be familiar with that.

[Tim Berners-Lee]: data-* competes with URI-based designs such as RDFa

[Sam Ruby]: odd... data-* is local to a page... i.e. to be consumed by js on the page, not by crawlers

[Tim Berners-Lee]: but once there’s lots of useful data-* data somewhere, crawlers will want to crawl

[Sam Ruby]: hmm... yes, I can see the inevitability of that. hmm.

(Link to spec added and names expanded.)

2009-11-23T08:13:00Z http://hsivonen.iki.fi/feed/atom/ Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi Copyright Henri Sivonen Articles and blogish notes 2009-11-25T02:00:29Z http://www.pourmoezzi.com/?p=1

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

2009-11-23T07:56:45Z admin http://planet.mozinterns.net Planet Mozilla Interns - http://planet.mozinterns.net 2009-11-25T00:15:26Z http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/869 Today sees the final release of Opera 10.10, which includes our sharing and collaboration technology Opera Unite. In this article, Chris Mills walks you through how to install applications, share content and use Opera Unite. 2009-11-23T07:02:54Z 2009-11-23T07:02:54Z Chris Mills http://dev.opera.com/ - Opera Software ASA Dev Opera is a community resource site where developers can share tips, tricks, extensions and more. 2009-11-25T02:29:14Z http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/881 Opera Unite — это веб-сервер прямо внутри браузера Opera, который позволяет делиться файлами и приложениями с друзьями и коллегами прямо с вашего компьютера. И мы только что выпустили бета-версию Opera 10.10 с сервером Opera Unite! Эта статья поможет вам начать путь по дороге разработки сервисов для Opera Unite на примере написания сервиса, который будет работать как простой блог. 2009-11-23T06:56:18Z 2009-11-23T06:56:18Z Vadim Makeev http://dev.opera.com/ - Opera Software ASA Dev Opera is a community resource site where developers can share tips, tricks, extensions and more. 2009-11-25T02:29:14Z http://quality.mozilla.org/630 at http://quality.mozilla.org

Personally, I thought this was a nice comeback from the past two testdays as we constantly had people chattering about all sorts of Mozilla-related topics (crashes, fx3.6 features, l10n work, webdev qa) from a lot of different people who hadn't really spoken to each other. I'd like to really thank the l10n community for coming out to the testday. Also, I'd like to offer individual thanks to Axel Hecht (i.e. Pike) and Seth Bindernagel (i.e. Sethb) for helping mozQA get the message out about this testday before and during it. I'm glad this happened and that both communities were able to take part in this sort-of meet and greet. Here's to the hope we get a lot more interlacing between our very proud communities.
 
Without furth ado, below are the details:

• Top BugFinder: Aleksej and AaronMT
• Had a max of 31 in the testday channel at its peak
• Major contributors outside mozQA: AaronMT, Aleksej, Tobbi, reezer, kbrosnan, ogi, satdav, deimidis, nemo, TMZ, pucho, tmyoung, Pike, nikto, Jan, ani, gaby2300
• 11 Bugs Filed

2009-11-23T06:16:49Z aakashd http://quality.mozilla.org/home 2009-11-23T06:30:51Z http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2386428923794812423231098283

In the days since the release of Camino 2, we’ve been thrilled by the positive response it has received. We love making a great Mac web browser, and we’re very happy that you like to use it. One of the most common criticisms we’ve heard is one we often make of ourselves: we don’t move fast enough. Part of this is our reputation for the high bar of quality we set for releases, but most of this is due to available manpower. We’re a small, all-volunteer, open source project, not some skunkworks arm of a major corporation.

Clearing up persistent misconceptions about Camino

Contrary to what you may have read in some misinformed news coverage of the Camino 2 release, Camino is not a project of “the same people who make Firefox.” Camino is an all-volunteer project, and while the Mozilla Foundation generously serves as the legal organization representing the Camino Project and provides ancillary support services (build machines, version control and bug tracking systems, and release mirrors), as the Foundation does for other “community projects,” that’s where the connection begins and ends. No one is earning a salary to work on Camino, there are no Mozilla Foundation or Corporation employees whose job descriptions include caring for Camino, and, incidentally, Camino is in no way “draining resources from Firefox.” Camino does usually benefit from work Mozilla Corporation employees do on the Gecko rendering engine, but that’s only an added bonus all around; the Mozilla Corporation employees are doing that work to make Firefox better.

How you can help

The Camino Project is made up of a small, diverse group of volunteers who work on Camino on nights, weekends, and other bits of spare time. Our developers range from pilots to students and software developers. Unlike browsers produced by companies with dozens of full-time employes assigned to develop, test, and release the product, Camino has less than one full-time person worth of developer time, spread out over approximately five people. Because we’re a small team, everyone has a chance to make an impact, and having more people can make a noticeable difference in our progress. How can you help your favorite browser?

• If you know some Cocoa and Objective-C, there are plenty of opportunities to help out without having to go near C++ or Gecko/XPCOM. You don’t have to be an Objective-C rockstar, either; we can help take Objective-C beginners and turn them into developers with 100 bugfixes in a year. We have a development section on our wiki with overviews, build instructions, and other helpful information, and you can also talk with us on IRC.
• If you also know C++ and aren’t afraid to get your hands a bit dirty with Mozilla’s XPCOM, we have some bigger projects that require some plumbing in Gecko and our embedding layer. (If you like working at even lower levels, there are also some bugs in the Breakpad crash reporting library we’d like fixed.)
• If you’re bilingual or a polyglot, our localization teams are always looking for new members to help out existing teams and to localize Camino into new languages.
• Even if you just consider yourself a “normal user,” there are things you can do to help, too. Stop by the Camino forum on mozillaZine and see if you can help answer questions; maybe you’re a web developer and can look into why a website might be acting strangely for another user. Tell your friends about Camino; we also have a number of badges you can display on your website, blog, or profile page.
• If we didn’t mention your skillset and you want to help out, let us know; there’s likely something you can do, too.

In short, there are opportunities for just about everyone to contribute to help make Camino even better. You don’t have to produce 100 patches to make a difference, either; every bit of code contributed is one more feature for Camino users to enjoy (or one less bug to annoy them). Thank you again for being Camino users; we appreciate your support, and we hope some of you will consider helping make Camino an ever better Mac browser.

2009-11-22T23:15:00Z 2009-11-18T23:15:00Z Smokey Ardisson http://caminobrowser.org/blog/ 2009-11-22T23:15:00Z http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2386428923794812423231098282

Since Camino 2 was released on Wednesday afternoon, we’ve been analyzing the early crash reports, looking for patterns and filing bugs. Since this is the first time since the release of Camino 0.8 that all Camino users have been able to report crashes automatically, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. Besides the usual plug-in crashes (especially Flash Player), we’ve identified some common crashes that we can either help alleviate already or crashes where we’d like more information from those of you who are, unfortunately, experiencing them.

Crashes on startup

Most frustrating are the crashes that occur on startup because, if they are persistent crashes, they prevent you from using Camino at all (and they also prevent you from using the about:crashes feature to learn more about your crashes). Early indications are that there are three common startup crashes: one caused by corrupt fonts on Mac OS X 10.6, one caused by internet plug-ins, and one that seems related to color management.

Corrupt fonts

The good news is that the most common of these startup crashes, a crash in MacOSFontEntry::GetFontID caused by corrupt fonts on Mac OS X 10.6, is already fixed in Camino 2.0.1pre nightly builds. If you’re using Mac OS X 10.6 and crashing on startup, this is probably the crash you’re seeing, and using the nightly build of what will very soon become Camino 2.0.1 should fix the crashes. We also recommend that you use Font Book to validate your fonts and remove any corrupt ones (as well as to check for duplicate fonts), since corrupt and duplicate fonts can cause problems for other applications and the system.

Internet Plug-ins

A second common startup crash is a crash in dlopen related to detecting installed plug-ins. If you have plug-ins installed other than the common QuickTime Plugin.plugin, Flash Player.plugin, and the JavaPluginCocoa.bundle, try removing the other plug-ins from Internet Plug-Ins folder inside the Library folder in your user’s Home folder and in the Internet Plug-Ins folder inside the Library folder at the root of your hard disk. If Camino launches successfully, you can quit Camino, add plug-ins back one by one, and relaunch Camino until you find the plug-in that is triggering the crash. When you figure out which plug-in is causing the crash, please let us know, either by posting in the forum or by filing a bug, so that we can try to stop the crash in the future.

Color Management

The final common startup crash is in gfxPlatform::GetCMSOutputProfile, which is code related to the (off-by-default) color management feature. If you have enabled the color management hidden preference and are crashing on startup, try launching Camino with a fresh profile using the Troubleshoot Camino utility. If Camino launches successfully, you can remove the color management preference from the prefs.js (and possibly user.js, if it exists) file in your Camino profile (the Camino inside the Application Support folder inside the Library folder in your user’s Home folder). At this time we don’t know much about this crash, so if you are experiencing it, please let us know so that we can obtain more information and try to stop the crash in the future.

Crashes customizing the toolbar

If you crash when trying to customize the toolbar, make sure that you do not have the third-party 1Password software installed. 1Password does not currently support Camino 2, and all current versions of the 1Password software are incompatible with Camino 2. If you have 1Password installed and crash when customizing the toolbar, you should uninstall 1Password’s Camino integration and contact 1Password support.

Crashes with Google Desktop installed

Google Desktop’s Camino integration is a common way of triggering a crash in Gecko’s code for drawing form controls. If you have Google Desktop installed and frequently crash randomly while browsing, visit about:crashes to look up the crash reports you have sent. If the “signature” in one or more of your crash reports contains nsNativeThemeCocoa::DrawPushButton, you are experiencing this crash, and you should uncheck “Web History” in the “Indexing” tab of Google Desktop’s preferences.

If you’re having trouble figuring out why you are crashing (for instance, if you are crashing at startup and don’t know whether your crashes are the ones described above), stop by the Camino forum on mozillaZine and ask for help. In addition, if you are experiencing persistent crashes, please let us know, either by posting in the forum or by filing a bug. If we’ve already learned about your crash, there’s a good chance that we can point you to a version of Camino containing a fix for the crash or at least supply a work-around in the interim. If we haven’t heard of your crash before, letting us know about it is the first step to making it go away. As always, thank you for using Camino.

2009-11-22T23:15:00Z 2009-11-18T23:15:00Z Smokey Ardisson http://caminobrowser.org/blog/ 2009-11-22T23:15:00Z http://www.basschouten.com/3@http://www.basschouten.com/

A short while ago I wrote about my work on DirectWrite usage in Firefox. Next to DirectWrite, Microsoft also published another new API with Windows 7 (and the Vista Platform Update), called Direct2D. Direct2D is designed as a replacement for GDI and functions as a vector graphics rendering engine, using GPU acceleration to give large performance boosts to transformations and blending operations.

Why GPU acceleration?
First of all why is GPU acceleration important? Well, in modern day computers, it's pretty common to have a relatively powerful GPU. Since the GPU can specialize in very specific operations (namely vertex transformations and pixel operations), it is much faster than the CPU for those specific operations. Where the fastest desktop CPUs clock in the hundreds of GFLOPS(billion floating point operations per second), the fastest GPUs clock in the TFLOPS(trillion floating point operations per second). Currently the GPU is mainly used in video games, and its usage in desktop rendering is limited. Direct2D signifies an important step towards a future where more and more desktop software will use the GPU where available to provide better quality and better performance rendering.

Direct2D usage in Firefox
A while ago I started my investigation into Direct2D usage in firefox (see bug 527707). Since then we've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU (this includes the UI, menu bars, etc.). I won't be showing any screenshots, since it is not supposed to look much different. But I will be sharing some technical details, first performance indications and a test build for those of you running Windows 7 or an updated version of Vista!

Implementation
Direct2D has been implemented as a Cairo backend, meaning our work can eventually be used to facilitate Direct2D usage by all Cairo based software. We use Direct3D textures as backing store for all surfaces. This allows us to implement operations not supported by Direct2D using Direct3D, this will prevent software fallbacks being needed, which will require readbacks. Since a readback forces the GPU to transfer memory to the CPU before the CPU can read it, readbacks have significant performance penalties because of GPU-CPU synchronization being required. On Direct3D10+ hardware this should not negatively impact performance, it does mean it is harder to implement effective D2D software fallback. Although in that scenario we could continue using Cairo with GDI as our vector graphics rendering system.

Internally here's a rough mapping of cairo concepts to D2D concepts:

cairo_surface_t - ID2D1RenderTarget
cairo_pattern_t - ID2D1Brush
cairo clip path - ID2D1Layer with GeometryMask
cairo_path_t - ID2D1PathGeometry
cairo_stroke_style_t - ID2D1StrokeStyle

More about the implementation can be learned by looking at the patches included on the bug! Now to look at how well it works.

Website Benchmarks
First of all let's look at the page rendering times. I've graphed the rendering time for several common websites together with the error margin of my measurements. The used testing hardware was a Core i7 920 with a Radeon HD4850 Graphics card:

There's some interesting conclusions to be drawn from this graph. First of all it can be seen that Direct2D, on this hardware, performance significantly better or similarly on all tested website. What can also be seen is that on complexly structured websites the performance advantages are significantly less, and the error margin in the measurements can be seen to be larger (i.e. different rendering runs of the same site deviated more strongly). The exact reasons for this I am still unsure of. One reason could be is that the websites contain significant amounts of text or complex polygons as well, for those scenarios with few transformations and blending operations the GPU will show smaller advantages over the CPU. Additionally the CPU will be spending more time processing the actual items to be displayed, which might decrease the significance of the actual drawing operations somewhat.

Other Performance Considerations
Although the static website rendering is an interesting benchmarks. There are other, atleast as important considerations to the performance. As websites become more graphically intense dynamic graphics will start playing a larger role. Especially in user interfaces. If we look at some interesting sites using fancy opacity and transformation effects(take for example photos.svg), we can see that D2D provides a much better experience on the test system. Where on sizing up photos GDI will quickly drop in framerate to a jittery experience, Direct2D will remain completely smooth.

Another interesting consideration is scrolling. Since on scrolling only small parts of the website need to be re-drawn, it has the potential of creating a much smoother scrolling experience when using Direct2D. This is also the feedback we've received from people utilizing the test builds.

Conclusions
Although the investigation and implementation are still in an early stage, we can conclude that things are looking very promising for Direct2D. Though older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements, going into the future most PCs will support DirectX 10+. PCs in the future could allow providing extremely smooth graphical experiences for web-content like SVG or transformed CSS. Interestingly, Microsoft has also announced IE9 will feature Direct2D support as well only shortly ago. Feel free to download and try a build of Firefox with Direct2D support here. There are several known issues and in some cases some rendering artifacts may appear. In general it should be quite usable on D3D10 graphics cards. It may or may not work on D3D9 graphic cards, depending on exact graphics card specifications.

Well, that's it for now, I hope I've given you an interesting first glance into the future of desktop graphics.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

A short while ago I wrote about my work on DirectWrite usage in Firefox. Next to DirectWrite, Microsoft also published another new API with Windows 7 (and the Vista Platform Update), called Direct2D. Direct2D is designed as a replacement for GDI and functions as a vector graphics rendering engine, using GPU acceleration to give large performance boosts to transformations and blending operations.

Why GPU acceleration?
First of all why is GPU acceleration important? Well, in modern day computers, it's pretty common to have a relatively powerful GPU. Since the GPU can specialize in very specific operations (namely vertex transformations and pixel operations), it is much faster than the CPU for those specific operations. Where the fastest desktop CPUs clock in the hundreds of GFLOPS(billion floating point operations per second), the fastest GPUs clock in the TFLOPS(trillion floating point operations per second). Currently the GPU is mainly used in video games, and its usage in desktop rendering is limited. Direct2D signifies an important step towards a future where more and more desktop software will use the GPU where available to provide better quality and better performance rendering.

Direct2D usage in Firefox
A while ago I started my investigation into Direct2D usage in firefox (see bug 527707). Since then we've made significant progress and are now able to present a Firefox browser completely rendered using Direct2D, making intensive usage of the GPU (this includes the UI, menu bars, etc.). I won't be showing any screenshots, since it is not supposed to look much different. But I will be sharing some technical details, first performance indications and a test build for those of you running Windows 7 or an updated version of Vista!

Implementation
Direct2D has been implemented as a Cairo backend, meaning our work can eventually be used to facilitate Direct2D usage by all Cairo based software. We use Direct3D textures as backing store for all surfaces. This allows us to implement operations not supported by Direct2D using Direct3D, this will prevent software fallbacks being needed, which will require readbacks. Since a readback forces the GPU to transfer memory to the CPU before the CPU can read it, readbacks have significant performance penalties because of GPU-CPU synchronization being required. On Direct3D10+ hardware this should not negatively impact performance, it does mean it is harder to implement effective D2D software fallback. Although in that scenario we could continue using Cairo with GDI as our vector graphics rendering system.

Internally here's a rough mapping of cairo concepts to D2D concepts:

cairo_surface_t - ID2D1RenderTarget
cairo_pattern_t - ID2D1Brush
cairo clip path - ID2D1Layer with GeometryMask
cairo_path_t - ID2D1PathGeometry
cairo_stroke_style_t - ID2D1StrokeStyle

More about the implementation can be learned by looking at the patches included on the bug! Now to look at how well it works.

Website Benchmarks
First of all let's look at the page rendering times. I've graphed the rendering time for several common websites together with the error margin of my measurements. The used testing hardware was a Core i7 920 with a Radeon HD4850 Graphics card:

There's some interesting conclusions to be drawn from this graph. First of all it can be seen that Direct2D, on this hardware, performance significantly better or similarly on all tested website. What can also be seen is that on complexly structured websites the performance advantages are significantly less, and the error margin in the measurements can be seen to be larger (i.e. different rendering runs of the same site deviated more strongly). The exact reasons for this I am still unsure of. One reason could be is that the websites contain significant amounts of text or complex polygons as well, for those scenarios with few transformations and blending operations the GPU will show smaller advantages over the CPU. Additionally the CPU will be spending more time processing the actual items to be displayed, which might decrease the significance of the actual drawing operations somewhat.

Other Performance Considerations
Although the static website rendering is an interesting benchmarks. There are other, atleast as important considerations to the performance. As websites become more graphically intense dynamic graphics will start playing a larger role. Especially in user interfaces. If we look at some interesting sites using fancy opacity and transformation effects(take for example photos.svg), we can see that D2D provides a much better experience on the test system. Where on sizing up photos GDI will quickly drop in framerate to a jittery experience, Direct2D will remain completely smooth.

Another interesting consideration is scrolling. Since on scrolling only small parts of the website need to be re-drawn, it has the potential of creating a much smoother scrolling experience when using Direct2D. This is also the feedback we've received from people utilizing the test builds.

Conclusions
Although the investigation and implementation are still in an early stage, we can conclude that things are looking very promising for Direct2D. Though older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements, going into the future most PCs will support DirectX 10+. PCs in the future could allow providing extremely smooth graphical experiences for web-content like SVG or transformed CSS. Interestingly, Microsoft has also announced IE9 will feature Direct2D support as well only shortly ago. Feel free to download and try a build of Firefox with Direct2D support here. There are several known issues and in some cases some rendering artifacts may appear. In general it should be quite usable on D3D10 graphics cards. It may or may not work on D3D9 graphic cards, depending on exact graphics card specifications.

Well, that's it for now, I hope I've given you an interesting first glance into the future of desktop graphics.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

2009-11-22T21:49:49Z Bas http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php 2009-11-24T16:30:52Z http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/?p=622

From the hard work by Mozilla’s Metrics team comes localizer metric reports that will show growth and usage data for each of our Firefox locales.  The l10n-drivers team has been asking in meetings if we could show the impact that our volunteers are having with reports like the one sampled below.  If you click the [...]<script type="text/javascript">SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "New Reports Furnish Metrics to Our Localization Community", url: "http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2009/11/19/new-reports-furnish-metrics-to-our-localization-community/" });</script>

From the hard work by Mozilla’s Metrics team comes localizer metric reports that will show growth and usage data for each of our Firefox locales.  The l10n-drivers team has been asking in meetings if we could show the impact that our volunteers are having with reports like the one sampled below.  If you click the following link you will download a sample report.

Initially, I sketched out what I thought would be valuable information for the report, ran it by the l10n-drivers, and sent it to the metrics team to start implementation.  In my opinion, an effective report provides both download and active daily user information to our localizers about their locales AND the geos in which their locales are being used.  Let’s review the contents for those who might need a guide.  Feel free to reference the attached screen shots as you read.

Locale-specific information

We are presenting both the download and active daily user (ADU) information (usages statistics and pie charts) for versions of Firefox.  ADUs are based on the blocklist pings we track.  (More on blocklist can be found at Morgamic’s post.)

Geographic-specific information

Each report will show both the download and blocklist for the top five locales inside a country where the localizer’s translated Firefox is most prominently used.  In many cases, this is easy to map.  Locale code “fr” is probably most prominently used in France.  “de” in Germany.  “es-ES” in Spain.  In some cases, we’ll have to make guesses, like for our Kurdish localizers.   Finally, we will provide a list of the top ten countries (by average blocklist pings) where the localizer’s Firefox is being used.

For the first time, our community of l10n volunteers will have a more comprehensive set of data points to help measure the progress and spread of their work.  By providing both locale and geographic information, these reports illustrate the impact that each localization team is providing.

Below are two images of a sample two page report.

and

ShareThis

2009-11-22T17:37:43Z 2009-11-20T01:47:50Z seth bindernagel http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/ http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/feed/atom/ localization and community at mozilla 2009-11-22T17:37:43Z http://www.visophyte.org/blog/?p=399

jetpack.future.import("thunderbird.compose"); jetpack.thunderbird.compose.appendComposePanel({ onReady: function (panel, composeContext) { let doc = panel.contentDocument; let msgNode = $("<span />", doc.body).appendTo(doc.body);   let started = Date.now(); setInterval(function() { let words = composeContext.getPlaintextContents().split(/\s+/); let secs = Math.ceil((Date.now() - started) [...]

jetpack.future.import("thunderbird.compose");
jetpack.thunderbird.compose.appendComposePanel({
  onReady: function (panel, composeContext) {
    let doc = panel.contentDocument;
    let msgNode = $("<span />", doc.body).appendTo(doc.body);
 
    let started = Date.now();
    setInterval(function() {
      let words = composeContext.getPlaintextContents().split(/\s+/);
      let secs = Math.ceil((Date.now() - started) / 1000);
      let wordsPerMinute = Math.floor((words.length * 60) / secs);
      msgNode.text(wordsPerMinute + " words per minute.");
    }, 1000);
 
    panel.show();
  },
  html: <><body style="overflow: hidden"></body></>
});

2009-11-22T15:50:51Z Andrew Sutherland http://www.visophyte.org/blog tool-building and visualization run amok 2009-11-22T16:00:12Z http://oduinn.com/2009/11/21/the-crow-road-by-iain-banks/

&#8220;It was the day my grandmother exploded.&#8221; A great opening line, and it made me stop my browsing in the bookshop to read on, a little curious. By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked and needed to buy the book. This coming-of-age story in rural Scotland is interwoven with social commentary and a [...]

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

A great opening line, and it made me stop my browsing in the bookshop to read on, a little curious. By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked and needed to buy the book. This coming-of-age story in rural Scotland is interwoven with social commentary and a family murder mystery. There were surprisingly lots of similarities with growing up in rural Ireland, and I found this book a really good read. Even if you did not grow up in rural Scotland (or Ireland), I think you’d still enjoy the book; you just might not get all the inside jokes or cultural references.

While I had heard of the author before, I always thought he wrote science fiction books that just didn’t work for me. This was my first time discovering that he wrote non-science fiction also, and I liked this book.

2009-11-22T04:02:06Z 2009-11-22T04:02:06Z John http://oduinn.com Copyright 2009 ...my CyberSoapBox! 2009-11-22T04:02:06Z http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/?p=799

Fixes: Fixed: 407875 - Unprivileged users are not notified of security updates. Fixed: 260264 - Popups from a site that is in the "Allowed List" (whitelist) are blocked, starting with the n-th popup (dom.popup_maximum). Fixed: 521905 - Make extensions.checkCompatibility be per-application-version. (Mossop's blog post) Fixed: 396392 - Support for getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect in DOM Range. Fixed: 503481 - Implement async [...]

Fixes:

• Fixed: 407875 - Unprivileged users are not notified of security updates.
• Fixed: 260264 - Popups from a site that is in the "Allowed List" (whitelist) are blocked, starting with the n-th popup (dom.popup_maximum).
• Fixed: 521905 - Make extensions.checkCompatibility be per-application-version. (Mossop's blog post)
• Fixed: 396392 - Support for getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect in DOM Range.
• Fixed: 503481 - Implement async attribute of script element.
• Fixed: 517804 - Try to avoid reflows and new invalidations during painting. (On Mac, this makes warm startup 13% faster.)
• Fixed: 452319 - border-collapse rewrite.
• Fixed: 519357 - Only load known components from app directory. (DevNews post)
• Fixed: 524904 - [Windows] Add support for generic DLL blocklist.
• Fixed: 525103 - [Windows] Block npffaddon.dll (malware) and old versions of avgrsstx.dll (AVG SafeSearch).
• Fixed: 497665 - Images are downloaded multiple times if defined multiple times, on Shift-Reload / Ctrl+F5.
• Fixed: 517224 - Firefox downloads CSS background images that it doesn't need (from overridden CSS rules).
• Fixed: 77882 - getComputedStyle returns incorrect font-weight value if |font-weight:bolder| or |font-weight:lighter|.
• Fixed: 512645 - Only clamp nested timeouts.
• Fixed: 510082 - Silverlight 3 plugin elements don't repaint correctly.
• Fixed: 520178 - [Windows] Minimized windows appear offscreen when restoring from session store.
• Fixed: 499816 - [Windows] Minimizing Firefox does not release window focus.
• Fixed: 440486 - [Windows] The FAX dialog disappear and Fax cannot be done from Firefox, but works otherwise.

mozilla-central pushlog for 2009-11-03 04:00 to 2009-11-21 04:00

Windows nightly (discussion)

Mac nightly

Linux nightly

2009-11-22T00:43:01Z Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge Developments in nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 2009-11-22T00:45:06Z http://blog.vlad1.com/?p=222

I purchased a Droid when they came out.  It's my first Android device, and it's been an interesting experience.  I am not a fan of the iPhone, and I've been using a Blackberry for the past few years (an 8700 first, then the original Curve, then the updated 8900).   The Droid is a [...]

I purchased a Droid when they came out.  It's my first Android device, and it's been an interesting experience.  I am not a fan of the iPhone, and I've been using a Blackberry for the past few years (an 8700 first, then the original Curve, then the updated 8900).   The Droid is a great looking device; I like the industrial look, with my only complaint being that the big gold-coloured area on the D-pad is way too garish; it would also have been nice had that area been a trackpad-like virtual trackball.  The keyboard leaves a lot to be desired, though.  It's a physical keyboard, which is nice, but it's no match for a Blackberry keyboard.  Typing on it is slow and cumbersome, given the very wide layout, and some keys are very oddly placed.  (I found it amusing that while the Blackberry has a dedicated unshifted key for "$", the Droid has a dedicated key for "?"...)

The feel of the OS is pretty nice, although some things are more sluggish than they really should be on an OMAP3 device.  Stuart keeps telling me that Fennec has smoother panning in the browser, and I think he's right.  It's not a deal breaker though; I find myself using the browser a lot to do all sorts of things that I never would have considered on my Blackberry (because, wow, the web browser situation there is awful), but that was a frustrating experience on my iPod Touch as well.  I've spent a while "browsing the web" on my phone, which I've never been able to say I've done before.

But, it's still a phone, and while the voice portion isn't all that important to me, the overall communication package is.  Coming from a Blackberry, the overall messaging situation on the Droid is simply horrible.  Email, whether Exchange or IMAP, is a disaster.  The email client seems designed for simple "lol r u there" type of messages, and even the message lists don't seem intended for people who get more than 5 messages a day -- turning a message list into landscape mode is worthless as you only get to see about 3-4 messages in the list (same view as in portrait mode, just along the much smaller axis of the display), no IMAP IDLE support etc. are all very strange on a top-end phone.  Exchange support works ok for Calendar sync, but for email sync it would only download the first 1000 bytes or so of a message, including headers; this meant that I often only got to see the first sentence or two of an email.  I don't know whether this is a problem with the Droid or our Zimbra Exchange connector, but switching to IMAP for work mail fixed that problem.

An recently-released version of the open-source K9 Email Client that works on the Droid resolves many of these issues, though it needs some polish.  I might write some code there, since it's close to becoming a pretty good email solution.

The Gtalk client is probably in worse shape than email.  It's almost as if Google entirely ignored Gtalk on this device (and I can't believe that would be Verizon's fault, since things like Google Voice work just fine).  First, it's in general buggy -- it's crashed on me multiple times, often freezes when returning to it from another app (after clicking a link to the browser, for example), and often shows contacts as offline with a big red message despite the contact clearly having a green dot next to their name and responding to my messages.

In the browser and in other apps, you can share a web page with someone using a "Share with" button.  The list you're presented is conspicuously missing Gtalk, despite having Facebook, Email, Messaging (SMS) and a random Twitter client I installed on there.  What gives?  All of these features are available on the Blackberry; I'm not sure if it was RIM that did the Gtalk app there, but can we get whoever it was to rewrite the Android one?

One of the best things about the Blackberry is the unified messaging; there's a single view where I can go to see all my emails, my gtalk conversations, my SMS messages, app updates, and whatever else.  No such thing exists on Android.  The closest thing is the notification bar, which requires a swipe down to use, and then only shows things that have come in since the last time you looked.  I'd prefer a more time-based list that contains both old and unread items.  Sounds like the Sony-Ericsson X10 might be doing some interesting things there, and I hope that someone figures out how to create an app like this.  What it comes down to is that anything to do with communication is faster and simpler on my Blackberry, which is really strange; you'd think Google would have spent some time working this out, as everything else about the device is far superior to my 8900.  I understand that more "enterprise oriented" customers (which apparently means those that like to use email a lot?) aren't necessarily the target market here, but they could've really attacked that market with some simple work that wouldn't have affected anything else.

The good news is that all of these are fairly straightforward software issues.  The hardware is solid, and Google has shown that they'll do frequent upgrades of the OS.  Given that the Droid is a "Google Experience" device, those updates should find their way to the device quickly.  Some fixes, combined with getting Firefox Mobile on the Droid and other Android devices, will make this a great phone.

2009-11-22T00:36:46Z vladimir http://blog.vlad1.com Words 2009-11-23T19:30:37Z http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/chofmann/archives/2009/11/open_source_edu.html

Last Summer I got the chance to visit several Universities while traveling around Brasil. One of the stops was to meet up with Prof. Fabio Kon and students at the University of Sao Paulo and the FLOSS Competence Center. For...

2009-11-21T22:32:53Z chofmann http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/chofmann/ 2009-11-21T22:32:53Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3416807.post-2454250499734923300

I've recently started enjoying Windows 7 at the office, and I must say I am very pleased. There is a huge difference in performance (at least running under VMWare) when compared to Vista. In fact, I'm now fairly spoiled and find working in Vista to be absolutely horrible! :-)

I was lucky enough to have someone donate a brand new copy of Windows Vista to me in July, which I've been using for WebKit hacking on the weekends. It's been a huge help, allowing me to finish up the recent -webkit-box-shadow coding and tests. Alas, now that I've been exposed to Windows 7, I'm a bit ruined! I'd love to upgrade to Windows 7, but the current upgrade options are price prohibitive ($119 for an upgrade).

I had hoped that a new Vista box purchased in July would make me eligible for some kind of low price upgrade, but apparently not.

If anyone has an inside scoop on whether there might be cheaper upgrade options, I'd love to hear them. Maybe there's a great deal I'm missing somewhere? Also, since I have a 64-bit machine I'd really like to start using Windows 7 64-bit, as that is where most new development will now be focused.

I run Vista inside a virtual machine (since I also do Mac development). I was curious if anyone has any experience with the VMWare Fusion 3 software, specifically if the performance is noticeably improved on Snow Leopard?

2009-11-21T19:12:55Z Brent bfulgham@gmail.com http://whtconstruct.blogspot.com/ tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3416807 Rantings and Ravings about WebKit, Graphics, and functional programming. 2009-11-25T00:53:05Z http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/4692231

Isn't it nice getting builds? So nice in fact we thought you might want one for the weekend! ;)

The main fix here is to DSK-271546 (After signing up for a new account, Opera isn't automatically logged in after restart), so please make sure this is working for you.

Thanks in advance for the testing!

Download

• Windows MSI / Windows Classic
  
• Macintosh (Universal) / Macintosh (Intel-only)
  
• UNIX/Linux

2009-11-21T09:55:47Z Ruari Ødegaard http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/ Opera Desktop Team 2009-11-23T08:53:39Z http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/?p=789

Are you up for the challenge? This week Mozilla launched the security quiz on Facebook. We encourage you to take the quiz and see how much you know about web security! Similar to our plugin checker, the security quiz is a part of our larger effort to raise awareness about web security. Help us spread the word [...]

Are you up for the challenge?

This week Mozilla launched the security quiz on Facebook. We encourage you to take the quiz and see how much you know about web security!

Similar to our plugin checker, the security quiz is a part of our larger effort to raise awareness about web security.

Help us spread the word and make the web safer for everyone. And don’t forget to check your plugins!

2009-11-21T05:50:58Z morgamic http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev Everybody Likes Ninjas 2009-11-21T06:00:23Z http://theunfocused.net/?p=334

Was stubbornly fighting the flu for part of the week, so I didn’t get as much done this week as I had hoped. Tab matches in Awesomebar Status Finished nsPlacesAutocomplete integration – works wonderfully well Filed bugto change the preferences UI to allow adding tab matches Tryserver builds at http://people.mozilla.org/~bmcbride/tabmatches/latest/ Loose ends Waiting on feedback Next steps Unit tests Respond to feedback Target for next week Unit [...]

Was stubbornly fighting the flu for part of the week, so I didn’t get as much done this week as I had hoped.

Tab matches in Awesomebar

Status

• Finished nsPlacesAutocomplete integration – works wonderfully well
• Filed bug 530209 to change the preferences UI to allow adding tab matches
• Tryserver builds at http://people.mozilla.org/~bmcbride/tabmatches/latest/

Loose ends

• Waiting on feedback

Next steps

• Unit tests
• Respond to feedback

Target for next week

• Unit tests

Binding for untrusted text in security dialogs

No change.

Miscellaneous

• Helped with some lightweight theme bugs for 3.6

Reflections

• Sometimes, there is no good solution. But there is a best solution.

Related posts:

1. Status update
2. Status update
3. Status update

2009-11-21T02:57:22Z Blair McBride http://theunfocused.net And Other Unfocused Things 2009-11-21T03:00:54Z http://clarkbw.net/blog/?p=706

The other day I did a quick hack using Raindrop & Jetpack to get new mail notifications from Raindrop.  In total it took me less than an hour.  It’s no Joe Shaw hack, so I don’t expect to get in the paper for this but I figured I’d share anyway. This Jetpack checks Raindrop [...]

The other day I did a quick hack using Raindrop & Jetpack to get new mail notifications from Raindrop.  In total it took me less than an hour.  It’s no Joe Shaw hack, so I don’t expect to get in the paper for this but I figured I’d share anyway.

This Jetpack checks Raindrop to see if there are new messages and bubbles them up as notifications if there are.  Here’s the source code:

var messages = {}; 

function checkMail() {
 var api="http://localhost:5984/raindrop/_api/inflow/conversations/home?limit=10";
 jQuery.getJSON(api,
               function(data, textStatus){
                 jQuery.each(data, function(i,item){
                   if (item.unread) {
                     if (!messages[item.id] || messages[item.id] != item.messages.length) {
                       var n={title: item.subject,
                              body : item.messages[0].schemas["rd.msg.body"]["body_preview"],
                              icon : 'http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/i/logo.png'};
                       jetpack.notifications.show(n);
                     }
                     messages[item.id] = item.messages.length;
                   }
               });
 });
}
setInterval(checkMail, 10000);

To try this out you’ll need Raindrop installed and running and Jetpack installed in Firefox.

Go to about:jetpack and copy the above code into the Develop tab, then click the try out this code link just below the Bespin editor.

If you don’t want to do all that you can just watch the video below (no sound, so you might want to play some music)

<object height="304px" width="650px"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="304px" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="650px"></embed></object>
View on Vimeo.

2009-11-21T01:25:32Z Bryan Clark http://clarkbw.net/blog Change thrives on me 2009-11-25T02:15:40Z tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8079863.post-2071251526679606212

Version 2.0 of my Force-TLS add-on for Firefox was released by the AMO editors on Tuesday, and in incorporates a few important changes: It supports the Strict-Transport-Security header introduced by PayPal, and also has an improved UI that lets you add/remove sites from the forced list. For more information see my Force-TLS web site.

On a similar topic, I've been working to actually implement Strict-Transport-Security in Firefox. The core functionality is in there, and if you want to play with some demo builds, grab a custom built Firefox and play. These builds don't yet enforce certificate integrity as the spec requires, but aside from that, they implement STS properly.

The built-in version performs an internal redirect to upgrade channels -- before any request hits the wire. This is an improvement over the way the HTTP protocol handler was hacked up by version 1 of Force-TLS, and doesn't suffer from any subtle bugs that may pop up due to mutating a channel's URI through an nsIContentPolicy. I'm not sure that add-ons can completely trigger the proper internal redirect, since not all of the HTTP channel code is exposed to scripts, and add-ons would need to replicate some of the functions compiled into the nsHttpChannel, opening up a possibility of obscure side-effects if the add-on gets out of sync with the binary's version of those functions.

Edit: The newest version of NoScript does channel redirecting through setting up a replacement channel in a really clever way -- pretty much the same as my patch. It replicates some of the internal-only code in nsHttpChannel, though, and it would need to get updated in NoScript if for some reason we change it in Firefox.

2009-11-21T01:08:35Z 2009-11-20T22:11:00Z Sid Stamm noreply@blogger.com http://www.blogger.com/profile/08788622306405563565 tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8079863 Sid Stamm noreply@blogger.com http://www.blogger.com/profile/08788622306405563565 [ drivel spewing forth from a computer nerd ] 2009-11-21T01:08:35Z http://chickswhoclick.wordpress.com/?p=344

Are you a Firefox fan?  Or even better, a Personas fan?  If so, we’d like you to star in a video we’re creating to showcase Personas.  Here are the details: Date:  Monday, November 23, 2009 Time:  12:00 p.m Location:  Mozilla HQ, 650 Castro Street, Suite 300, Mountain View, CA 94041 Sign up sheet (create an account to add your [...]

Are you a Firefox fan?  Or even better, a Personas fan?  If so, we’d like you to star in a video we’re creating to showcase Personas.  Here are the details:

• Date:  Monday, November 23, 2009
• Time:  12:00 p.m
• Location:  Mozilla HQ, 650 Castro Street, Suite 300, Mountain View, CA 94041
• Sign up sheet (create an account to add your name to the wiki or comment below to sign up)

Come as yourself – no fancy costumes needed – and meet other Firefox fans.  We’ll treat you to lunch and make it worth your while!  And, we promise none of these antics…

Jump up and Dance by Gary Pauck (Firefox Flicks)

2009-11-21T00:47:10Z Mary Colvig http://chickswhoclick.wordpress.com http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/6e396e215dcbdc125e1cde45fb419ee8?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png Mary Colvig's musings... 2009-11-21T01:00:41Z http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/?p=209

I spent couple of days fixing the remaining test-suite failures on GCC 4.5 trunk for Dehydra. Since the last time I looked into this, GCC went from crashing all over the place to only crashing if I did something bad. It was nice to discover that as a result of switching to 4.5 Dehydra users [...]

I spent couple of days fixing the remaining test-suite failures on GCC 4.5 trunk for Dehydra. Since the last time I looked into this, GCC went from crashing all over the place to only crashing if I did something bad. It was nice to discover that as a result of switching to 4.5 Dehydra users will get saner .isExplicit behavior and more precise location info.

Treehydra will take more work due to me misunderstanding GTY annotations.

By the way, I am really grateful for all of the people who contributed GCC 4.5 fixes so far. You guys have been a big help in getting Dehydra testsuite to 100% on 4.5. Looks like I will meet my goals to finish De+Treehydra by the end of the year in time for GCC 4.5 release and my “Introducing Dehydra to the Developer World”-type talk at LinuxConf.au.nz 2010.

Startup
I reduced my focus on startup speed at the moment to catch up on Dehydra. I plan to work on reducing xpconnect overhead during startup next, ie more of this bug.

2009-11-21T00:24:04Z tglek http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek Just another Blog.mozilla.com weblog 2009-11-21T00:30:09Z http://autonome.wordpress.com/?p=499

Current numbers are available on the Performance Snapshot page. Summary, relative to Firefox 3.5: Warm startup: For Mac, 36% better on 3.6 and 35% better on 3.7. For Windows, 5% and 5%. Flat on Linux. Also, Warm startup for Mac on 3.6 is a whopping 13% better than last week, due to the landing of [...]

Current numbers are available on the Performance Snapshot page.

Summary, relative to Firefox 3.5:

• Warm startup: For Mac, 36% better on 3.6 and 35% better on 3.7. For Windows, 5% and 5%. Flat on Linux. Also, Warm startup for Mac on 3.6 is a whopping 13% better than last week, due to the landing of bug 517804.
• Cold startup:  For Mac, 20% better on both 3.6 and 3.7. For Windows, not measuring yet. For Linux, we’re seeing a regression of ~9% across branch and trunk in the snapshot but not on the graphs, so I need to figure out where the discrepancy is.

This week’s activity:

• Dirty-cold-Ts went live this week, thanks to Alice and Lukas. Example: cold startup with a large places.sqlite on Mac.
• Joel is making progress on making a super-static Firefox in bug 525013.
• Ben is making progress on the fastload replacement in bug 520309.
• No updates on Windows cold-startup testing for Talos on bug 522807. I need to test on Vista, and turn off Pre/Superfetch.
• Taras has patches up for service caching (bug 516085) and super-fast-path-ing of Components.* (bug 512584), however the latter he’s hit a wall, passing on to Blake or someone else who knows that code.
• Ted landed rebasing on Windows in bug 484799.
• Jonathan Kew has a new patch in bug 519445 for further reductions in Mac startup time spent in font system initialization, just about there…
• Ryan Flint put a patch to minify JS on bug 524858, not working yet, but significantly reduced the size of shipped JavaScript files.

Projects in a holding pattern:

• JARification: David abandoned moving JS modules into a JAR file, since those files are fastloaded. However, since we want things like post-extension-install restarts to be fast, and those cause fastload cache invalidation, we might want to do things like this anyways. I filed a bug for the same treatment for components. These are lower priority, since they’re not the normal startup case. Follow along with all JAR-ification via the tracker bug.
• Startup Timeline: No updates, still not landed. Add [ft] in the whiteboard of your bug w/ the function names you want timed and David will generate it and update the bug.
• Static Analysis: No progress on bug 506128. David needs to file a bug with the final log of named-yet-uncalled functions.
• Dirty Profile Testing: No progress. Need to list scenarios, file bugs for each, generate Talos config patches and profile data, and then move it into Rel-Eng territory. Also, need to get a separate Tinderbox tree, since it’s going to cause a bazillion new columns.
• Joel Reymont noted in bug 513076 that there are serious drawbacks to getting our libraries in the dyld shared cache on Mac, so has deprioritized that work.
• No updates on Zack’s CSS parser changes in bug 513149.

As usual, more details and links are available on the project wiki, and we’re available to answer questions in #startup on irc.mozilla.org.

2009-11-21T00:07:02Z Dietrich Ayala http://autonome.wordpress.com http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/6a4bc4887894aaa9fff704de2b72e0cb?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png 2009-11-23T22:30:21Z