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Madhava Enros: bookmarks(desktop + mobile)

Posted 1 day ago by madhava

Thanks to some hard work from the Weave and Mobile teams, it's getting to be much easier to make sense of and navigate through the bookmarks that you sync between Firefox on your computer and your mobile device. Many of us usually just use the ... [More] awesomebar to get at all of our synced bookmarks, but this is very useful for those times when a browse strategy is better than a search one.

You'll need a nightly build of Maemo Firefox and the most recent beta of Weave Sync to see much of this, for the moment, but now, when you open your bookmarks on your mobile, you'll see this:

Your mobile bookmarks are still at the top level of the bookmarks list, so they're close at hand, but your bookmarks from Firefox on your desktop system are in a folder at the top. When you pop it open, you get the following:

Which is the top level of your bookmarks hierarchy on the desktop. All your bookmarks, in whatever folders you've set up, are all in there!

There's more, though. When you go over to Firefox on your desktop machine, your mobile bookmarks will show up in a new top-level bucket, as seen here:

Which means that you can do more complex bookmark management, if you need to, where you have a larger screen and better keyboard.

One interesting side-effect of this better organization that I've found — I use my bookmarks toolbar on desktop Firefox mostly just for bookmarklets. With Weave Sync and this organization, they're pretty easy to find while mobile, and they work there too: [Less]

about:mozilla: Thunderbird, Mobile, Bespin, AMO, Firefox, SUMO, WebGL, Identity, Test Pilot, and more…

Posted 2 days ago by deb

In this issue…

Thunderbird 3 released!
Mobile add-on challenge winners
Five Years of Firefox: vote now!
New features on AMO
Three new Firefox 3.6 demos
Canvas + SVG on mobile
SVG game demo
SUMO 1.5 ... [More] launch
WebGL draft goes public
Identity design lunch video
Test Pilot: new study
Updated Bespin roadmap
Software releases
Upcoming events
Developer calendar
About about:mozilla

Thunderbird 3 released!
Mozilla Messaging, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla dedicated to developing products that encourage choice, innovation, and opportunity in messaging on the Internet, has announced the launch of Thunderbird 3, the latest version of its free and open source email application. Available in over 49 languages on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Thunderbird 3 has more than 2,000 improvements including new tabbed email, a radical new search engine, built-in message archiving and smart folders. Get started with Thunderbird 3 at GetThunderbird.com.

Mobile add-on challenge winners
The Firefox Mobile team has wrapped up their first add-on challenge, announcing the winners yesterday. The judges from the AMO and Mobile teams have chosen the ten best, the authors of which will each receive a brand new Nokia N900 device. The winning entries are: AutoPager by Wind Li, Flux by Marcio Galli, Geoguide by Fabice Desre, Hold4Tab by Almog B, Lazy Click by Tamas Marki, Mobilize by Attila Csipa, NearMe by Richard Klein, Fastest Scroll in the West by Enrico Previdi, TwitterBar by Chris Finke, and Yummy by Nicolas Martin. Descriptions and links for each of these add-ons are available in Caitlin Looney’s blog post.

Five Years of Firefox: vote now!
The Five Years of Firefox poster design challenge is now closed to submissions, so now it’s time to vote for your favourites. Sarah Doherty and John Slater have both blogged about how to vote, so check out their posts to get started. But vote soon! Voting ends tomorrow, Wednesday December 16th.

New features on AMO
As an early holiday present, the Add-ons team has added a a trio of new features to the AMO website. Beta Channels give add-on developers a way to release beta or prerelease versions of their add-ons without pushing updates to their entire user base. Get Satisfaction integration allows developers to integrate their support communities directly in AMO. Finally, Localized Browse is a first step towards making add-ons more accessible to the non English speaking world. For further details and screenshots, see Nick Nguyen’s blog post.

Three new Firefox 3.6 demos
Paul Rouget, part of the Mozilla Hacks team, has a trio of demos for new features available in Firefox 3.6. The first demo is for multiple file input. “This new capability allows you to get several files as input at once, using standard technologies. This is a big improvement since you used to be constrained to one file at a time, or needed to use a third party (proprietary) application.”

The second demo is for the new W3C File API, “which specifies the ability to asynchronously read the selected file into memory, and perform operations on the file data within the web application. This is a new API, and replaces the file API that was introduced in Firefox 3.”

Finally, Paul has built a file drag and drop demo using the Drag and Drop API and the File API. “In Firefox 3.6, you can let your users drag and drop files directly into your web page, without going through the file picker.”

Canvas + SVG on mobile
Arun Ranganathan has put together a video in which he demos SVG and canvas on Firefox Mobile on a Nokia N900 device. Check it out on Caitlin’s weblog.

SVG game demo
Daniel Holbert writes, “Marek Raida has come up with another beautiful demo that shows off the power of SVG. This one’s called SVG Cavern Fighter, and it’s a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up type game, with enemies and items that pulse and wiggle. The game logic is written in Javascript, and the enemy/item animations are all done with SMIL.” The demo requires the most recent mozilla-central nightly builds for full animations and features, but will still mostly work in earlier Firefox versions without SMIL support.

SUMO 1.5 launch
The Firefox Support team recently launched version 1.5 of the SUMO website. “In addition to having a much more powerful back-end search where we can now index the full database every 15 minutes rather than once a day, we’ve added a bunch of new search options and features available through an advanced search interface.” Additionally, over 70 reported bugs have been fixed since the previous version. Read all about this new release at the Firefox Support Blog.

WebGL draft goes public
Vlad Vukićević has posted that the WebGL draft specification is now available. “I’m pretty excited to have the WebGL draft spec available for review and comments. There’s still plenty of time for feedback, but we’re far enough along to be able to solicit meaningful feedback. There are multiple implementations, which is a much better state than the early Canvas 3D work. We’re actively working through remaining warts and edge cases. Take a look at the official Khronos WebGL landing page and Arun’s blog post for more information, including where to go to sign up for the public mailing list and for a set of resources about WebGL.”

Identity design lunch video
Every so often the Mozilla Labs team hosts a “design lunch”, where they get a group of people together to discuss design ideas and strategies for various things — browser features, Labs projects, add-ons, and so forth. The most recent design lunch was about Identity management in the browser, and the team has posted a video of that discussion. “The video is almost an hour long, so I don’t know if you have the patience to watch the whole thing…but it does open with [Jono] wearing a funny hat and narrating an imaginary legal drama. Then it proceeds to the showing off of screen mockups, followed by vigorous discussion of what the right thing is for Firefox to do in various tricky situations.” If you’re interested in this discussion, you should also see Aza Raskin’s blog post and the Mozilla wiki page on the Identity project.

Test Pilot: new study
The Test Pilot team is launching a second study called “A Week in the Life of a Browser”. This test is designed to run periodically and collect a wide range of basic data about browser performance: session lifetimes, crashes, bookmarks, downloads, searches, and so on. A detailed list of the data to be collected has been posted along with some of the questions the team hopes to answer through this study. More information about Test Pilot is available at Jono’s weblog.

Updated Bespin roadmap
The Bespin team has released an update to the Bespin Embedded preview along with a revised roadmap for the project. “Bespin Embedded 0.5.1 is the second preview release of our new embedded package which makes it easy to incorporate Bespin into your own sites and applications. Take a look at the blog post for the first preview release for more background. We’ve been working on big changes to Bespin over the past few weeks, and these will be rolling out in the coming weeks. You can take a look at the newly updated roadmap to get an idea of what’s up next for Bespin.”

Software releases
* Thunderbird 3
* Weave 1.0 beta 3
* Bespin Embedded 0.5.1
* Add-ons website
* SUMO website

Upcoming events
* Dec 18 – Destroy Firefox 3.6 (testday)

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

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

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

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

BlueGriffon: Rulers

Posted 2 days ago by BlueGriffon

I have almost entirely revamped the rulers in BlueGriffon. The original code came from Nvu and used a few big hacks. That original code is totally gone and the rulers are now based on SVG. So if you have enhancement proposals with nice UI ideas for these rulers, please leave a comment, thanks.

Luis Villa: google is your butler- the tension between utility and privacy

Posted 2 days ago by Luis Villa

I’ve often defended Google’s thirst to know things about people with a butler analogy. Good software should, like a butler, try hard to understand your preferences and act on them for you without you even realizing they are there. That means ... [More] learning and remembering things you’ve done in the past, and using that to base recommendations on. When you tell your butler ‘bring me desert, please’, he should remember that you usually like chocolate, and that all this week you’ve been experimenting with different cakes, and therefore bring you another variant on chocolate cake. If he suddenly forgot you liked chocolate and you’ve been having cake all week, you’d be irritated when he asked you those things again, or if he just brought you a canoli out of the blue.

Ideally you want your butler to know at least something about what your friends and co-workers are doing too- if I say ‘bring me a shirt’, and the butler knows I’m going out with the cool kids tonight, then I want my trendiest shirt based on what my friends think is trendy. But if I am going to the office and say ‘bring me a shirt’, I want the butler to know that my workplace is casual, but not too casual, and so on. I could of course tell him all these things every time he brought me a shirt, but it is easier for everyone if he just remembers, and perhaps does some outside research on his own.

Like a butler, you want your tools to work intelligently based on context and history, and Google is without doubt one of those tools- for many of us, the most important single tool in our computing lives. The problem, of course, is that your butler has a lot of incentives to keep your private information private. Surely the butler can be bribed, but therefore you pay him well and treat him like a human being, and you try to avoid these sorts of problems. Google’s incentives run at least partially the other way- they have strong incentives to mine that data extensively, to share it with others, and to collect well more than most people might think is useful, in the name of being the ultimate butler. And these incentives lead to risks- incentives to share with third parties that you might not trust; risks that things might be subpoenaed; risks that they might leak to Google employees or even outside Google; risks that effective advertising might use such information to manipulate your political views. On balance, most of us are going to look at these issues and decide that we’re OK with Google knowing these things, because the risks are remote and the benefits tangible. So we acknowledge there is a tension between privacy and functionality, and move on.

I wish that at this point I could announce some deep new insight about the balance between these two competing forces. I can’t; most of what there is to be said has been said already. The thing that makes me write about it right now is, of course, Eric Schmidt’s recent comment. The thing that bugs me about it is that he doesn’t seem to realize there is a tension. These words don’t speak of ‘we’re wrestling hard with this question every day’ (a reasonable compromise position) or ‘we’re doing everything we can to collect as little data as possible’ (the pragmatic civil libertarian perspective). They speak of a company (or at least a CEO) which doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that there are balances and compromises to be struck and continuously re-considered. And that, to me, is very, very troubling; more troubling than any particular policy position could be.

So I’m experimenting this week with other search engines, and once I finish moving I’ll be looking again at other mail and rss readers. I really don’t ask much of Google in return for trusting them; I’m not an absolutist, I just need to know that they are continuing to treat privacy as a difficult, multi-faceted issue that constantly has to be evaluated and considered. And if Schmidt is any indication, that isn’t what Google is doing right now. [Less]

William Quiviger: FOSDEM 2010

Posted 2 days ago by William

Yes ! It's that time of the year again where Mozillians across Europe begin preparing mentally, physically and spiritually(!) for a weekend of sumptuous fried potatos, mouth-watering mussels, hot dripping chocolate, fruit-scented beer and of course ... [More] , thousands of lines of code.

More than 5,000 FLOSS enthusiasts will converge in Brussels on February 6 and 7, 2010, for FOSDEM and I'm very happy to announce that Mozilla has already secured its DevRoom. YAY!

I just set up the official Mozilla FOSDEM wiki and I invite anyone interested to give a talk this year to submit a proposal. Veteran Mozillian and add-ons guru Brian King is lead schedule architect this year so please submit your talk proposal to him by Friday, 15th January 2010 at: brian at mozdev dot org.

As always, if you have any questions, please ask away ! :) [Less]

Mark Surman: Hackerspaces, internets and cities

Posted 2 days ago by msurman

Name dropping Jane Jacobs at a tech conference is a good way to get my attention. And that’s exactly what Meng Weng Wong did on the hackerspaces panel at  #nsc1 in Singapore the other day. His point: those of us trying to build a vibrant, healthy ... [More] digital world can learn from people like Jacobs who know how to build vibrant, healthy cities.

A native New Yorker who lived most of her life in Toronto, Jacobs was amongst the wisest people to ever write about cities. Some of the things she encouraged us to do included:

Embrace density as form of connection. It creates serendipity and dynamism.
Also encourage diversity. Different ideas banging together drive entrepreneurial discovery.
Build — or at least look for — ways for cities to evolve and reconfigure overtime.

Jacob’s argument was that cities built on these principles are engines of economic expansion, growing the pie by fostering innovation that creates new industries. Sound a bit like the open internet? Indeed.

Of course, this healthy city <–> healthy cyberspace link shouldn’t be surprising coming from someone who founded a hackerspace (Meng just opened one in Singapore). Hackerspaces tangibly embody the essence of both a good city and the open internet. Chaotic. Malleable. Evolving. Resilient. Filled with all of your closest friends. These are wonderful places born of internet culture. Which makes me smile, and gives me hope.

PS. Another cool internet <–> city link at #nsc1: Pio Stark’s talk on how 19th century growth of cities into teaming masses of unfamiliar faces led to the need for new systems to track identity. New identity systems to deal with so many unfamiliar faces? Very much something we need to be thinking about now on the internet.

Posted in mozilla [Less]

Brian King: Jetpack for Learning Taking Off

Posted 2 days ago by brian

Image via Wikipedia

I’m privileged to be be one half of the technical mentoring team for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge, along with the prolific Andy Edmonds. We’re well under way to getting the participants going with ... [More] implementing their ideas in Phase 2. You can read about some of them on the Mozilla wiki. I’m looking forward to seeing the ideas turn into great browser add-ons.

A huge hat-tip to Frank Hecker for getting the project going, and I wish him much success and happiness in his new pursuits. Philipp Schmidt has done amazing things pulling things together, and he writes about Phase 2:

The selected teams are eligible to participate in a set of online seminars covering Jetpack development and user interface design. They will also get support and mentorship from the Mozilla community to help them turn their ideas into Jetpack prototypes. At the end of phase II up to 10 participants will be invited to a hands-on Design Camp at SXSW Interactive 2010.

Read Philipp’s full post. [Less]

Frederic Wenzel: Mac Superdrive Noise-B-Gone Update?

Posted 2 days ago by Fred

When skimming through my pending Mac OS X upgrades this morning I noticed one saying:

This update eliminates the noise made by the optical disk drive during system startup and wake from sleep on MacBook computers.

Wow. As long as ... [More] I’ve been using a Mac, the sweep-sweep noise has been characteristical for a Mac startup sound, reminiscent of the floppy drive seek sound computers made when they still came with floppy drives (yes, dear children, I am that old).

I wonder what this was for in the first place. Maybe to find out reliably if there is a disc in the drive already? <crystal ball>Possibly, the operating system did not check again and just relied on the hardware status flag being set correctly on startup, and if it was wrong, evil things could happen?</crystal ball> And now, almost suddenly, the Mac engineers found out that it is unnecessary altogether? The wonders of Snow Leopard.

What comes next? Removing the gong on boot to avoid Mac-obsessed college kids from making fools of themselves during lectures? [Less]

Sarah Doherty: Reminiscing Last Week: Mozilla Q4-2009 All-Hands and Add-on-Con

Posted 2 days ago by sarah

As I reunited myself with 8-hour nights, finished up holiday festivities and and caught up with loved ones, many people asked me, “So how was last week”?  My response was, “If I can survive this past week I am prepared for anything in ... [More] life.”

Last week was a time of full throttle, non-stop action week of all Mozilla all the time.  I would trade the experiences for anything in the world.  Monday – Wednesday marked my first all-hands as part of Mozilla.  I had always heard of these events through my husband, Ryan Doherty, but to experience it is a completely different thing.  Monday – Wednesday colleagues from all over the world descended on Mountain View as we caught up, discussed future objectives and socialize.

One of the most important things for me is to have face-time with co-workers – it completely will change a working relationship.  Many people I work with I simply know by their IRC handle, e-mail address or a small picture on our internal phonebook.  We were lucky in August to have a company marketing on-site but to have almost every_single_person employed by Mozilla on premise was amazing.  Every day driving into work I would park in the P1 garage and my hands would start to shake as I badged in and rode the elevator up 3 stories – it wasn’t nerves, but more, “OMG I can’t wait for this day to get started!”

In addition to many days of meetings and brainstorming, it was so nice to learn about what other people within Mozilla do.  We are heads down in our work so many months throughout the year it is refreshing to spend some time diving into other departments work and  realize just how very smart and talented my colleagues are.

I also really enjoyed being able to spend some social time with my co-workers at dinner on Tuesday night and at the California Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.  Sleep?  Not so much!

After 3 rigorous days of All-Hands, it was time to jump directly into Add-on-Con.  I had been helping to organize Mozilla’s participation in this event since late August, so I was looking forward to seeing this event in action.  On Thursday night we held a pre event workshop at Mozilla to let add-on developers socialize, enjoy some good tacos and drinks and, learn about 3.6 compatibility and mobile porting.  We had approximately 60 people join us and it was a great precursor to Add-on-Con the next day.

Getting an early start on Friday, I was at the Computer History Museum to setup our booth at Add-on-Con at 7:30 in the morning.

We had a great presence at Add-on-Con with many different Mozilla employees participating in sessions and keynotes:

Keynote:

Opening Keynote: Do Add-ons Need a Market Place (Justin Scott)
Closing Keynote: Future of the Web Browser with Mike Shaver

Business Marketing Track:

The Future of the Firefox Add-on Ecosystem (Aza Raskin, Justin Scott, Chris Finke)

Technical Track:

Taking Flight with Jetpack: Next Gen Add-ons for Firefox (Aza Raskin)
Mobile Firefox Add-on Development (Mark Finkle)

A special thanks to Robert Reich, for organizing yet another wonderful conference as well as Justin Scott, Mike Shaver, Chris Finke, Aza Raskin and Mark Finkle for their participation on our numerous panels and talks throughout the day.

After a week of such amazing activities, I’m looking forward to our next all-hands and Add-on-Con in 2010. [Less]

Dietrich Ayala: Firefox Startup Performance – Dec 14

Posted 2 days ago by Dietrich Ayala

I’m going to be changing the format of these posts a bit, to put focus on the most important issues currently blocking a super-fast startup of Firefox. Hopefully it’ll bring attention on the longest-running, hardest-to-fix, but highest-impact ... [More] bugs. Right now I’m defining high-impact as changes that bring a 10% or greater improvement. Some of these bugs we don’t yet have solid data on how much of an impact, but expect it to be filled in soon as we narrow the focus onto these. As always, the current numbers for startup and all other tests are available on the Performance Snapshot Page.

Top Startup Bugs

Estimated win
Bug #
Summary
Owner
Status
Notes

>10%
512584
Super fast paths for Components.classes and Components.interfaces
Taras Glek
in progress
Got consultation from mrbkap, needs new patch.

>10%
525013
Investigate a more static build configuration of Firefox
Joel Reymont
Mac and Linux in progress
Only measured on Mac so far, need Linux numbers and someone to figure out the Windows story.

up to 25%
514083
Per-file HFS+ compression on Mac OSX 10.6
Joel Reymont
in progress
Snow Leopard only.

TBD
520309
Startup cache: replacement for fastload cache
Ben Hsieh
review
More efficient than current fastload, and key to enabling fastloading of XBL, CSS, manifests and various other data. Need to push to Places branch to figure out base perf difference from current fastload.

TBD
503483
Turn on –enable-faststart for Firefox by default
Dietrich
needs testing
Loads Firefox core libraries at boot time. Need to test on all OSes, publish the numbers, and get discussion going.

TBD
513149
Speed up CSS parsing by using a machine generated lexer
Zack Weinberg
Zack’s blocked on other work
Taras says it’s high, but no figures, so need better data here.

Other activity this week:

Jonathan Kew landed bug 519445 on trunk, which improves font loading on Mac. The patch didn’t dent the Ts graph, as the test loads a basically empty page. This patch has the largest effect when pages load various fonts, and have a large font collection. For instance, here John Dagget comments that on a system with 2000+ fonts, the loading time of the font system went from 6 seconds down to 0.33 seconds.
Rob Strong blogged about time spent executing JS in the front-end, and put up a table of the worst offenders.
The measurements Rob made above are from an instrumentation effort that’s happening in bug 507012, that will give us great visibility into where time is spent in JS. You can do similar profiling using DTrace, but that’s Mac only, and requires separate tools and scripts to be installed. This instrumentation will eventually be available across platforms in release builds of Firefox. It’ll default to off, but be togglable via an environmental variable or some other method. Providing tools like this makes it *easy* for anyone working on Firefox to diagnose performance problems.

Projects in a holding pattern:

Ryan Flint has a WIP patch to minify JS on bug 524858 that significantly reduces the size of shipped JavaScript files.
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. We have a list of test scenarios, still need to 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.

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.

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