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Caitlin Looney: Go Add-ons…It’s Your Birthday…Go Add-ons

Posted 5 days ago by missmobile

Some useful newbies
So I’m jazzed about some recent mobile add-ons going through the AMO funnel. The first experimental add-on is called Lazy Click. It’s purpose is to fix potential missed clicks by searching the adjacent area and applying ... [More] the click to the closest object that can accept clicks, for instance, a link or a button. So simple, yet so helpful! This browser extension will potentially help me avoid using my stylus or zooming in just to click a link.  My fat fingers thank you!

Firefound is another mobile,as well as desktop add-on that may help me avoid some unnecessary heart burn. This add-on helps you find your computer or mobile phone if it is lost or stolen. Every time your computer’s location changes, FireFound sends a secure message to a central server with its current location. You can then log into the server and see your computer’s current location. All of the location data is encrypted, so no one can find out where your computer or mobile is without your password. If you lose your computer or mobile, you can tell FireFound to clear your personal data (saved passwords, browsing history, etc.) if anyone starts your browser before you can retrieve it. Very cool.

Pre Add-on-Con Workshop
Add-on-Con takes place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on December 11, 2009. This conference is designed specifically for people who build and market browser add-ons. In honor of this, a couple of us are hosting a fun workshop on the eve of this conference to help answer questions, provide ideas and have some fun. Folks from the AMO and the mobile team will be to help walk through developing add-ons for mobile or desktop and show how to port your existing add-on to mobile. Food and drinks will be in abundance, so bring your appetite. All  the workshop details can be found here. Hope to see you there.

Less than two weeks left to take the Mobile Add-on Challenge
Develop or port your existing add-on to mobile on or before December 7, 2009 for your chance to win 1 of 10 shiny, new Nokia N900s.  We’re looking for innovative add-ons that are compatible with mobile. Judging will commence the week of the 7th and winners will be announced on or before December 14. Good luck. Check out the complete contest details.

[Less]

Chris Jones: Helping ld link libxul more quickly

Posted 5 days ago by cjones

I used to do most of my development in a Linux virtual machine with 1.5GB of RAM. There, –enable-libxul builds were … painful: linking libxul itself took about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Ideally, ld or gold would know how to re-link ... [More] incrementally, and the problem would vanish. But until then, you can help ld out by adding a flag in your mozconfig

...
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,--no-keep-memory"

This tells ld to optimize for memory usage rather than speed. On my 1.5GB VM, this made a big difference because it kept ld from hitting swap as much; the link time went from ~2:30 to ~1:30. Also see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494068.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: if you have a machine with “lots of RAM”, this flag might actually hurt link times. Also, it’s worth pointing out that the best way to speed up libxul link times is to add more RAM to your build machine, if possible. (My bright shiny new build machine can link libxul in about 5 seconds, so I don’t use –no-keep-memory anymore.) [Less]

Bas Schouten: Firefox and Direct2D: Performance Analysis

Posted 5 days ago by Bas

So, it seems my little demo of a pre-alpha firefox build with Direct2D support has generated quite some attention! This is good, in many ways. Already users trying out the builds have helped us fix many bugs in it. So I'm already raking in some of ... [More] the benefits. It has also, understandably, led to a lot of people running their own tests, some more useful than others, some perhaps wrong, or inaccurate. In any case, first of all I wanted to discuss a little on how to analyze D2D performance with a simple firefox build.

Use the same build
Don't compare a random nightly to this build in performance. The nightly builds contain updates, no two nightly builds will be the same, and therefor perform the same. I don't continuously keep my D2D builds up with the latest repository head. Additionally the build flags used may very well not be the same, for example some builds(like the nightlies) may be built with something called Profile Guided Optimization, which means the compiler analyzes hotspots, and optimizes them. This significantly improves their JavaScript performance. My test build is not build with PGO, although I might release a build using PGO as it gets more stable. This is probably causing some of the differences some people testing have been seeing. Please keep in mind that because this is not a final, complete build, it should probably not be compared too enthusiastically to other browsers either.

If you want to properly compare performance, use my build, and switch on the forcegdi pref. Go to 'about:config' and look for the font.engine.forcegdi pref, and set that to true. After that, you will have a build using GDI only.

Obviously I should have mentioned this in my previous post, so people would not have wasted their time on inaccurate performance analysis. I apologize for that, it is partially because I had not expected so much publicity.

Focus on what (should be) different
When you do run tests, it is of course always valuable to get measurements on the overall performance of the browser. If there's some other part of the browser than rendering showing performance decreases, I'm doing something wrong and please do let me know! There is however, a lot of more involved with displaying and parsing a webpage than just the rendering. If you want to get a really good idea on what it does to your rendering speed, you'll want to measure solely the time it takes to do the actual drawing. We have a non-cross-browser tool in Mozilla in my build that will allow you to do this. You can add a 'bookmarklet' that runs this test, just add a bookmark, and make it point to 'javascript:var r = window.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIInterfaceRequestor).getInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIDOMWindowUtils).redraw(500); alert(r + " ms"); where the number inside 'redraw' is the number of rendering runs you want to time. It will then pop up an alert box which will tell you the time in milliseconds it took to execute the redraws. Keep in mind this still only analyzes static rendering performance.

Know what you're measuring, and how you're doing it
If you are using an independent measurement benchmark. Be sure you understand well exactly what it measures, and how it does it. This is a very important step. Something spewing out a number and then listing 'higher is better' for a certain part of functionality is great, but it only becomes useful information when you know how the measurement is executed, what it's margin of error is, and what the overhead is it adds to the whatever it is testing. For a lot of all-round browser benchmarks, rendering is only a small part of what's tested. And the total test result differences between D2D enabled and disabled, may not reflect the actual difference in user experience.

Considerations on static page-loading measurements
Since obviously just a rendering improvement if it doesn't actually function better for the end user is practically useless, keep in mind that when you're timing how long it takes to load a page, you're timing all the aforementioned overhead. When interacting with the page without switching to another page, a lot of this overhead does not occur, and a large part of time might be spent in actual rendering. This means that during dynamic interaction (like scrolling), improvements may be more noticeable, although harder to measure.

And finally, thanks!
It's been great to see how many people are trying this, and as I mentioned earlier in this post, it has already greatly assisted us. It's also great that people are working on their own tests of performance and such things, it is always a good thing to have independent performance tests ran. And this too, will help us improve on the build in areas where our own testing may have been lacking. So, thanks, to everyone who is directly or indirectly helping to hopefully provide a great new feature!

Original post blogged on b2evolution. [Less]

Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: Fennec's en-US single-locale binaries being uploaded to a different location

Posted 5 days ago by nor...@blogger.com (Armen Zambrano)

Up until now, Fennec's en-US deb file (566K) was being overwritten every time by the multi-locale's deb file (1.2MB) due to that the name of the files cannot be different. To avoid this we upload now the single-locale under an "en-US" sub-directory. ... [More] under "latest" directories on ftp.

For more details:
* Bug 529140 - upload Fennec single-locale tar and deb files under "en-US" sub-directory

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. [Less]

Calendar: Getting a Database Error in your Nightly?

Posted 6 days ago

This post is directed towards those of you who are regularly using nightly builds.

Due to some problems in the upgrader code for the local storage calendar, some of you might be getting an error like:

Error updating timezones: ... [More] Error: mozIStorageStatement::step() returned
an error
DB Error no such column: recurrence_id_tz

To be more specific, this should affect all nightly users that have used a build after 2009-11-07. Fortunately, we have fixed this issue in bug 529853, but this won't save nightly users that already have a broken profile. Luckily, its quite easy to fix the problem manually.

I have created an extension that can be used detect if your profile is broken and also to repair it. For more information, please see bug 529853. [Less]

Mark Finkle: Fennec – Nightly Maemo Updates

Posted 6 days ago by Mark Finkle

Desktop versions of Firefox have nightly update channels. New versions are automatically downloaded and available for install as they become available. Each morning, a Firefox user can quickly and easily update to the newest nightly ... [More] version.

Thanks to the release engineering team, the same easy nightly updates are available for Firefox on Maemo.

Aki Sasaki has provided some simple instructions for getting nightly updates installed on your Maemo device:

Go to the nightly repository. The repository is basically a large file server with folders for each combination of source code branch and language localization.
Choose the branch you want (trunk == mozilla-central / 1.9.2 == mozilla-1.9.2). Fennec 1.0 is being released from the Mozilla 1.9.2 source code branch, so you probably want to use “1.9.2_*” branch.
Choose the locale you want. You probably want the multi-locale bundle (”*_multi”), but you can choose a different one.
Click on the “*_nightly.install” file in the appropriate repository. This should automatically start the Application Manager on your Maemo device and Firefox for Maemo will be installed.

Once installed, the Application Manager should notify you when a new version of the nightly is available and allow you to update Firefox. This process is a little different than desktop Firefox, where the update mechanism is built into the application. However, it fits in better with the Maemo platform.

When we have release packages in those repositories, there will be a second .install file (with no “_nightly” in the name) that points to the release section rather than the extras section. But if you install that, you won’t get nightly updates for those.

We also have plans for a simple web page front-end to the repository. The web page will have nice human-readable descriptions instead of cryptic filenames [Less]

Frederic Wenzel: “Assign to me” Jetpack

Posted 6 days ago by Fred

Just recently, my colleague oremj published a bookmarklet making “assign this bug to me” a one-click operation in bugzilla.

Obviously, bookmarklets are fun and games, but Jetpacks are even more awesome, so I went ahead and wrote one that ... [More] adds an “assign to me” button next to the assignee field:

You can find and install the jetpack through my jetpacks page on github. [Less]

Robert Strong: App update status – week of 11/27

Posted 6 days ago by rstrong

Posting early since I’ll be out the remainder of this week.

Progress:

Received r+ on a 1.9.1 patch for Bug 529401 [Firefox] – Remove files on downgrade to prevent breaking Firefox [Windows]. We really need a better way to deal ... [More] with this… perhaps, Bug 367539 [Toolkit] – When upgrading an existing install use the uninstall.log to uninstall the previous version before install. [Windows]
Submitted a patch for Bug 529942 [Toolkit] – Remove nsIApplicationUpdateService2 on trunk [All]. I’d like to get this fixed before other toolkit applications port Bug 407875 [Toolkit] – Unprivileged users are not notified of security updates [All].
Submitted a patch for Bug 526333 [Toolkit:Build Config] – Having to create patches for each app’s package manifest and removed-files and then get reviews from each app is a PITA [All]. This has been an annoyance when creating / removing toolkit components since forever.

Future targets:

Bug 336267 [Toolkit] – If software update is disabled or “ask” after an update has been downloaded, the update should be disabled or asked [All]
Investigate Bug 526441 [Toolkit] – Unable to use FileUtils.jsm in nsExtensionManager.js.in on 1.9.2 due to reftest failures.
Yes, I still need to blog about the lessons I’ve learned while trying to improve startup time for app update but the Firefox 3.6 took precedence… maybe during the holiday.
Investigate Bug 529948 [Toolkit] – Cannot check for updates on trunk when the download server is down – along with its friends
Bug 313681 [Toolkit] – Corrupt update.mar causes broken UI to be shown [All]. This should fix several update ui bugs.

Some of the significant bugs I am looking at fixing for Firefox 3.7

Bug 466778 [Toolkit] – [Win] Unable to update when files to be patched are in use on Windows (this is a Windows specific bug) [Windows]
Accomplishing this will be rather tricky and if it fails it will likely fail really badly so I’d like to get this done sooner rather than later in the 3.7 cycle.
Bug 529746 [Toolkit] – App update should request elevation when the user doesn’t have privileges to update [Windows]
This won’t provide completely silenet updates… to get completely silent updates we will either need to create a service (this won’t be available to us if the user is not able to elevate on install so we would have to have a fallback to the old updater mechanism) or use MSI patching which will likely be too big to get for 3.7. There are also several significant bugs that this bug depends on that I haven’t listed.
btw: the Mac bug for this is Bug 394984 [Toolkit] – software update disabled on the mac if admin user is not the same admin user as the person who installed firefox [Mac OS X] and I asked dolske to take a look at doing this for 3.7 since he has a Mac.
Bug 476501 [Toolkit] – Application update ui rewrite [All]
I’d like to make this a dynamically resizing ui with a fixed width. This would negate the requirement of removing the browser element in that the height would automatically adjust for the content in the billboard. I’ll come up with mockups and work with user experience to get this flushed out.
Bug 366846 [Toolkit] – Apply changes to updater.exe before launching it [All]
Vlad asked for this… this will require updating the updater and then launching the updated copy… might be a tad tricky.
Bug 410639 [Toolkit] – Provide ability to change update channel within the application [All]
The wiki has most of the details. [Less]

Mark Finkle: Fennec is Now Optified

Posted 6 days ago by Mark Finkle

The Nokia N900 has about 100MB of free space in the root file system partition. It doesn’t take installing many applications before it fills up. Nokia recommends installing applications to the /opt folder, which has about 1GB of ... [More] space.

Fennec installs itself to the root file system in the /usr folder. Although this is fine for the N810, it would never work for the N900. We had originally planned to move the install location for Beta 4, but we found a bug that kept Fennec from launching from the /opt folder. The bug has been fixed and Fennec now installs to /opt in nightly versions.

A nice side effect of /opt installation: startup time is ~1 second faster! [Less]

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Thunderbird Meeting Minutes: 2009-11-24

Posted 6 days ago by bsmedberg

Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-11-24
From MozillaWiki
< Thunderbird | StatusMeetings
last meeting | index | next meeting »

Thunderbird Meeting Details :

Tuesday, November 24th, 17:30 UTC (9:30am Pacific, 12:30pm ... [More] Eastern)

How to dial-in

Who’s taking minutes? –> Ludovic

Minute taking Schedule. Talk to davida for schedule changes/additions.

Planning for a dry-run security firedrill build

Fire drill itself expected to happen after code freeze

Build 3 has been produced following a couple of blockers.

Expecting to publicly release RC 1 Today.

Blockers are mainly web site updates.

Remaining blockers are either trackers, or test-only/build changes to support the security & stability releases.

Tree Rules for Thunderbird & 1.9.1 has been updated

TB 3 Security and Stability page created. Intentions:

Let patch submitters know about process of getting bugs into the security & stability branch.

Aid tracking of bug fixes into the security & stability releases.

Blockers

blocking-thunderbird3+: 12 (+4)

TB 3 Needs: 1 (0)

Proposed Blocking

Proposed Blockers (all): 0 (+0)

Fixed RC1

TB 3.0rc1 – blocking: 155 (+1)

Post 3.0 Roadmap

Post 3.1 Roadmap
Tb 3.1 cycle specifics
More branches and work on branches
Feedback on schedule for 3.next is wanted.

Testing Build2

Testing Build3

Getting ready for the bugs that will be reported against RC1

3.0rc1 topcrashes (not representative of what we should expect from 3.0 “release”)

status

bug

summary

rank

fixed 11-20

bug 529995

columnName

1

Enigmail?

bug 528843

nsRefPtr<nsSpeculativeScriptThread>::assign_assuming_AddRef
(nsSpeculativeScriptThread*)

2

qawanted

bug

nsRefPtr<nsCSSFontFaceRule>::assign_assuming_AddRef(nsCSSFontFaceRule*)

3

-

bug 00000

arena_malloc_small

4

possibly fixed by bug 505221 10-14

bug 513543

MimeInlineTextHTML_parse_eof

5

3.0b4 topcrashes – slight update, see previous meeting

PR and web site prep for RC 1.

Coordinating w/ Firefox 3.6 launch.
Top articles for the week Nov 16 – 20

Thunderbird 3.0 RC1 Builds

Done / Cleared

accounts for (devnews blog

finalize Activity Manager docs (examples interfaces overview)
Mozmill as extension dev tool
blog Activity Manager docs
Contribution: Gloda examples
Contribution (Standard8): Content Tabs in TB3

In Progress / TODO

Edit Content Tabs in TB3

support doc locations (521665)
folders (bug 414038)
Mission control / autoconfig: MDC
problem with automatically generated mxr links
msg headers (466025, 480623)
new bug for debugging issues? (and close 420317?)

Top 5 GS Thunderbird 2 Support Topics (code in progress: http://gist.github.com/190923 ) basically the same as last week

Cannot send email

Cannot receive email (AT&T POP server outage on November 20th)
migration to Vista and Windows 7 from XP including email and address books and from Outlook and Outlook Express
attachments not working
F-Prot false positive as of November 20 – Carsten is looking at it – bug 530582

Thunderbird 3 Beta Top Support Issues (starting to monitor to see what we can improve for post 3.0)

Lots of folks want Thunderbird 3 RC 1 which is great!

SUMO for MoMo tracker ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520628

Gary Cunningham Lee now has full sftp/scp access so theming work should complete next week. Gary also has access for Get Satisfaction MoMo Branding, should be done this week.

Initial SuMoMo content complete with bugs for P1 and P2 – help us out! assign yourself a KB bug and write some KB articles

Key Support stats from the following graphic:

approximately 25/ day (172/7, slightly lower than last week if we subtract the Raindrop topics)

total new topics:172 total replies: 64 (Ruby Code)

date:20091117 #new support topics:20 resolved:16

date:20091118 #new support topics:27 resolved:9
date:20091119 #new support topics:22 resolved:9
date:20091120 #new support topics:26 resolved:12
date:20091121 #new support topics:16 resolved:3
date:20091122 #new support topics:12 resolved:2
date:20091123 #new support topics:11 resolved:3

#replies from non MoMo folks: 38 from pasa (thanks), 1 from gyurrika (thanks!) MoMo folks: 1 from Wayne Mery (thanks) 78 from Roland, Bienvenu 23 (thanks!), 1 from Tom (thanks!) 1 from Kent James (thanks) 5 from Lighning team (thanks!)
happiness metric: API doesn’t have happiness emotitags, asked GS staff about that, code in progress: http://gist.github.com/190094, manual happiness metric = 108 – 78 = 30 (26 last week), 49 Hendrix messages (generally Hendrix messages are unhappy but this week we had 1 happy messages) – bug to track down Hendrix for Thunderbird 3 and get rid of it as much as possible

Last week:

Drafted longer-term roadmap pages

3.0 driving
Patch for “Write” with no configured accounts (bug 524863)
A few short reviews; not as many as hoped

This week:

Roadmap iteration, including feature & component roadmap driving

3.1 planning
Review catchup

Reviews (trying to do a few a day to slowly catch up).

Triage, RC1 bug fixes and respins etc
bug 529668 Fixed broken test on trunk
bug 520797 In compose message, missing “Display Name” for accounts’ from-identities in Sender dropdown

Reviews and Driving

Fixed bug 521867 IMAP internal date not maintained when detaching attachments
Made comm central trunk build with moz 1.9.2 after fix for bug 515051 landed bug 529057
Fix tabs on trunk by faking out nsIBoxObject along with the tree box object, bug 516912
Started working on bugs that missed 3.0 for 3.1

ui-reviews and driving

blogged — google calendar in thunderbird tabs

audited and cleaned up numerous crash bugs

triage
3.0 litmus test results vetting
rediscovered junquilla
filed crash & hang bugs:

bug 529429 crash [@ morkTable::CutRow(nsIMdbEnv*, nsIMdbRow*)

bug 530291 crash objc_msgSend | nsBaseAppShell::Release()
bug 528345 startup crash [@ columnName] in sqlite
bug 530447 (moved to core) startup crash [@ nsWindowWatcher::OpenWindowJSInternal(nsIDOMWindow*, char const*, char const*, char const*, int, nsIArray*, int, nsIDOMWindow**)

bugzilla whine broke in bmo upgrade to v3.4.4, so unable to monitor new crash bugs with <1 day resolution
bug 530403 filter age in days should default to “is less than” found missing in TB … SM has it, but we don’t!

Dale has the gloda integration with the Search Messages window mostly working now.

I’ve been working on a variety of FUMLUB issues, and just general bug fixing/stability.
Hopefully getting the Eudora 8 beta 8 out next week.

RC1 web site/pr prep.

Reviewing Web site localization here’s the checklist

Testing

Testing
Testing

Last week:

Looked up more ISP data and filed some bugs on the isp page

Icon bugs on Vista and OSX bug 530520 bug 529933
Lightning icons bug 494598
Uploaded sources

This week:

Look into 3 magnifying glasses on 1.9.3 bug 530757

More Lightning icons bug 494598
More ISP data

Last week:

Actually closed bug 493399.

Reviewed bug 526918, bug 522250, bug 522251, bug 522253, bug 530239, bug 530503, and bug 526650.
Posted patches for bug 522249 and bug 527550.
Post a lot of experimental patches for bug 530047.

This week:

Review more bugs.

Write some more code, and tests.
Continue to help students with ISPDB.

Fixed (or in-progress) MailNews Core bugs:

bug 459693 Eliminate nsFileSpec and nsIFileSpec (references) from MailNews

bug 456860 Improve msgCompSMIMEOverlay.js and msgReadSMIMEOverlay.js
bug 523820 Remove old MOZILLA_1_9_1_BRANCH ifdefs from comm-central code

Lightning 1.0b1rc1 currently planned for Wednesday

Held beta release for bug 529326 since it drastically improves performance and is an easy fix.

Patch checked in, will be contained in tomorrow’s nightly

Simon blogged about this today.

Possible regression bug 529853 needs to be debugged, might further hold up release.

Patch pending review, will hopefully make it into the tree today

If so, we can continue with the plan to spin rc1 on Wednesday.
Nightly users with builds after 2009-11-07 might need to do some manual steps to avoid the error message in the mentioned bug. Will blog about this after the patch is checked in and the nightly is ready.

standard8, Davida, dmose , rebron, gozer, roland, jenZ, asuth, davidb, clarkwb, Beckley,andreasn, wsmwk (too lame to unmute)

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2009-11-24“ [Less]