Aaron Thornburgh: A Few Good Foxes |
When I joined the Content Services team 18 months ago, I knew we’d be working on big, experimental things. After all, our mandate was to create a new revenue stream for Mozilla while advancing content discovery and user privacy on Firefox New Tab. Over time, I would learn that big, experimental things are made possible only by a few, wickedly smart, and hugely-dedicated people.
We had a lot to prove from the very beginning – both internally, and externally. Nevertheless, a team of roughly 30 people managed to achieve tremendous success in spite of immense challenges. We developed an Add-On that allows users to analyze their interests on the Web, built an entire advertising technology stack, landed a commercially-viable product in Firefox New Tab, raised millions in revenue for the Mozilla organization, and signed contracts with several major content partners. Meanwhile, users were always provided direct control over their experience – including the choice to opt-out at any time from content suggestions. Simply put, Content Services either met or exceeded every goal we were given.
I was therefore deeply saddened by Mozilla’s decision to dissolve the Content Services team and wind-down all advertising activities in its Firefox products.
+++++
Hearing that all your projects are being cancelled is one thing. Learning that your team will cease to exist is quite another. Naturally, emotions are strong and abundant at first. But after letting the news sink in for a bit, I now find myself feeling mostly one thing:
Gratitude.
Even if our collective work is ultimately forgotten, this team certainly won’t be. Over the 15 years I’ve been a creative professional, never have I worked with a group of people who were more willing, able, and committed to one another. Truly, they all demonstrated the qualities anyone could hope for in their teammates…
The Marketing & Communications Team fought to advance our message through collaboration and transparency – not meaningless “messaging”. They sough everyone’s input, allowed for widespread contribution, and demanded that the user’s voice was heard clearest. Above all, they helped us all see the bigger picture, and what was at stake for the industry.
The Business Development, Client Success, and Business Operations Teams were world class. Content Services started with literally nothing. No product. No partners. No research. But somehow they brokered relationships with publishers like Cond'e Nast, and advertisers like TOMS – amassing an inventory of suggested content that could all be delivered to interested users, while respecting their privacy, and without the tracking. (If you’ve never been in the “ad industry”, that’s crazy talk.) These gals and guys killed it, each and every day – and by doing so won the trust of their teammates and partners alike.
The Product Team approached everything with users foremost in mind. They wanted our products to deliver actual value, not just support a mission or business goals. To this end, research and usability testing were central to their thinking. And no matter what, they were always down to experiment.
The Engineering Team was capable of anything. They didn’t just build an ad stack, they built one that actively protects individual data. Privacy, in other words, was “baked in” from the beginning. As a result, Content Services was able to partner with top-tier partners, while delivering on our promise to respect user identity (instead of collecting and/or selling it). More importantly, their commitment was extraordinary – going so far as manually publishing suggested content late into the night.
Of course, none of this would have happened without The Leadership and CS Operational Support Teams. Their contribution to our progressive success cannot be understated. In two years, a team of 12 grew to over 30… without a single person quitting. The ship held and the crew pulled together, regardless of the storms we faced – and that’s straight-up amazing.
So thanks, everyone, for letting me ride this crazy ride with you. Wherever each of us lands in the coming months, the Content Services Team will forever be without equal at Mozilla. The technology we built, the users we impacted, and the mission we advanced were well worth the fight – and fighting alongside you has been a pleasure.
The Open Web is better off today because of your contributions.
-A
http://autodidacticdesigner.com/2015/12/14/a-few-good-foxes/
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About:Community: Firefox 43 new contributors |
With the release of Firefox 43, we are pleased to welcome the 46 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 35 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/12/13/firefox-43-new-contributors/
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Cameron Kaiser: 38.5.0 available, and maybe 45 as the swan song, in not too long |
This version also enables MP3 audio support by default (we use the minimp3 decoder, which I hacked for our purposes since AudioToolbox in 10.4 does not understand MP3). There are already some known files that don't play in it that do play in QuickTime, so this appears to be a bug in minimp3. If you report MP3 files that don't work, please include the encoder so we have at least a chance at something analysable. If you don't, I'll still accept the report, but I may not do much with it unless it's glaringly obvious what about the file it doesn't like.
With 38.5, Firefox 45, the next ESR, moves out of nightly into aurora. Since Mozilla is only up to the point of doing A/B testing for multi-process Electrolysis in Fx44 beta, it seems unlikely that 45ESR will make Electrolysis mandatory, so that means I would be foolish to not make at least an attempt at porting it. This will require another toolchain upgrade like we did for TenFourFox 19. Fortunately, we do have a working gcc 4.8 in MacPorts and it does build and run 38 successfully without our current gcc 4.6 shim, and I'm working with Sevan Janiyan to get the Tiger pkgsrc gcc 4.9 functional (it seems to need updates to as and ld, since it will parse the source, but currently builds a defective XUL). I'm also looking into using Misty DeMeo's Tigerbrew gcc as an alternative. Either way, after the update for TenFourFoxBox and its official release I'll probably start working on trying to adapt 45ESR, which should give us plenty of time to have a functional beta out by 45.1, assuming it doesn't blow up in my face.
I am, however, going to call 45 the end of source parity, and this time I mean it. I know I've said "the end" lots of times in the past, but besides the fact Electrolysis won't compile as-is on 10.4 (and quite possibly will be a net negative even if it works), and Electrolysis will almost certainly be mandatory by 52ESR now, Mozilla is now importing code written in Rust into Gecko, not just C/C++. Although Rust allegedly supports PowerPC, it is only known to work on Linux (and there isn't a snapshot, rustc or cargo for it even there); it is not known to work, or have a snapshot available, for OS X/ppc, and then there's the matter of llvm on our same platform. Mercifully it does not appear any of the existing Rust code (which is already in the tree) will be required for 45ESR, but it does appear that new Rust code will replace a number of older C/C++ modules by 52ESR once Mozilla works out the build system kinks, making Rust a build requirement. This would be a showstopper for us and any other Tier-3 platform that lacks a Rust compiler (Solaris on SPARC? the remnants of OS/2?). It would also probably signal the end of 10.6 support in the near future, since by default the Rust standard library requires features Snow Leopard doesn't have (though there are ways around it).
Frankly, I'm not going to maintain a completely new compiler for a language I'm not fluent in and its runtime platform on top of a browser and debugger I'm already maintaining singlehandedly when we're already facing two other portkillers (loss of 10.6 support, whenever that comes, and E10S). Assuming this trajectory continues unchanged we will drop source parity after 45ESR, but there will of course still be updates; besides new features we can now release since we're not worried about maintainability against Mozilla source anymore, we'd still get a fair chance to import later updates to the core that were still in C/C++, and we'd be still a very advanced browser for at least a couple years. We'd be better off than Goanna in Pale Moon, anyway, which is still 24.x-era with various patches.
It had to happen for real sooner or later.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/12/3850-available-and-maybe-45-as-swan.html
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Daniel Pocock: TADHack Paris - 12-13 December 2015 |
I'm currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors.
This has been a great opportunity to raise awareness of the RTC Quick Start Guide, introduce people to DruCall and JSCommunicator and identify other opportunities for business and technical collaboration.
If you are in Paris, it is not too late to register and participate, please see the TADHack web site for details.
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Arky: Free SSL Certificate from Mozilla Let's Encrypt project |
Last week Mozilla Let's Encrypt project announced the launch of its free, automated and open certificate authority. I had been waiting for this news for a long time. I quickly deployed Let's Encrypt on my staging server to learn how this technology works. The deployment process is painless and very straight forward. The certificates needs to renewed every 3 months, the Let's Encrypt client does this automatically. Thank you Jerome and Ryan for all your help!.
At the time of writing this blog post, Let's Encrypt client was not available for Ngnix server. So I am using the manual method to obtain the SSL certificate here. Please read the latest docs for additional information.
# Check out the let's encrypt source code
$ git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt
# Stop the Nginx server, we need the client to bind to port 80.
$ sudo service nginx stop
# Start the let's encrypt client and follow the instructions on screen. You need to provide an email address.
$ sudo ./letsencrypt-auto --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory certonly --domains staging.example.org
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
/etc/letsencrypt/live/staging.example.org/fullchain.pem. Your
cert will expire on 2016-01-02. To obtain a new version of the
certificate in the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.
- If like Let's Encrypt, please consider supporting our work by:
Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
# Edit the Nginix config to point to generated certificates.
$ sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/staging.example.org
listen 443 ssl;
server_name staging.example.org;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/staging.example.org/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/staging.example.org/privkey.pem;
# Restart the Nginx server
$ sudo service nginx start
Please don't forget to test your server using an comprehensive SSL server test such as SSLLabs.
http://playingwithsid.blogspot.com/2015/12/free-ssl-certificates-with-lets-encrypt-project.html
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Blake Kaplan: Converting a test to be e10s compatible |
I was working on another bug the other day when I came across a disabled test. The comment for why it was disabled seemed like it might be low-hanging fruit for conversion to be e10s-compatible, so I took a look.
A couple of things leapt out to me immediately: the test isn’t using BrowserTestUtils and it isn’t using promises. So, the first step is to convert it to use BrowserTestUtils and Promise. Here’s the diff.
Now that we’re using promises and the nice helpers, let’s see why the test isn’t compatible. The first load is of a chrome:// URL. This is guaranteed to load in the parent, meaning that our first test, testXFOFrameInChrome can remain untouched. We can use its contentWindow with impunity.
The second test, testXFOFrameInContent is the reason this blog post exists. It loads a content document, meaning that its browser will be a remote browser and the contentWindow would be a CPOW. Instead of using it directly, we can use another helper: ContentTask. This will let us perform an operation in a given browser‘s associated child process and fulfill a Promise when it finishes. Here’s that change.
We’re almost done! However, if we run this version, we’ll still fail due to a small difference between the function is in browser-chrome tests and in ContentTask.jsm. The version in ContentTask.jsm is stricter than that of the normal tests, so when we check the return value of document.getElementById against undefined we get a test failure. We fix that by checking against the correct value (null). Another thing to note is that ContentTask decompiles and recompiles the callback function in the child process. That means that you can’t use any global variables or functions. You can pass a single parameter to the function, though, as long as it can be structured cloned. The content window is available through the content global in frame scripts.
One last note about this test. When I was writing it, I used BrowserTestUtils.loadURI function which returns a Promise. However, that promise doesn’t resolve when the URI is loaded, only when the load starts. So I ended up wasting a bunch of time before realizing that I needed to use BrowserTestUtils.browserLoaded after it to ensure the second test runs at the right time.
Now, our test passes and we can get it reviewed and checked in!
https://blog.mozilla.org/mrbkap/2015/12/10/converting-a-test-to-be-e10s-compatible/
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Chris Finke: Reenact for iOS |
Reenact, the world’s most popular app for reenacting photos,* is now available for iOS. It is free and ad-free.
Reenact for iOS was written in Swift in about three days. It’s compatible with any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad running iOS 8 or newer. It’s open-source, just like the Android version.
Take a few minutes during the holidays this month while you’re visiting your family, and reenact a photo from your childhood. Wouldn’t your mom and/or dad and/or sister and/or brother just love that? It won’t cost you anything, and you might even have fun!
You can find Reenact on the App Store. Try it out and let me know what you think!
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Nick Thomas: Updates for Nightly on Windows |
You may have noticed that Windows has had no updates for Nightly for the last week or so. We’ve had a few issues with signing the binaries as part of moving from a SHA-1 certificate to SHA-2. This needs to be done because Windows won’t accept SHA-1 signed binaries from January 1 2016 (this is tracked in bug 1079858).
Updates are now re-enabled, and the update path looks like this
older builds -> 20151209095500 -> latest Nightly
Some people may have been seeing UAC prompts to run the updater, and there could be one more of those when updating to the 20151209095500 build (which is also the last SHA-1 signed build). Updates from that build should not cause any UAC prompts.
https://ftangftang.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/updates-for-nightly-on-windows/
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Mitchell Baker: Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made |
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/
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The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made |
We are delighted to announce the first set of awards in the Mozilla Open Source Support program’s “Foundational Technology” track, which supports projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon.
We have been greatly helped in evaluating applications and making awards by the MOSS “Foundational Technology” Committee – many thanks to them.
The first seven awardees are:
Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
CodeMirror: $20,000. CodeMirror is a powerful source code editor built with Web technologies, used in the Developer Tools and in Mozilla Thimble. Their award will be used to improve support for both right-to-left languages and complex script input.
Discourse: $25,000. Discourse is online discussion forum software, used by several Mozilla communities. Their award will be used to make email a first-class interaction mechanism for Discourse, allowing Discourse instances to replace and improve upon mailing lists.
Read The Docs: $48,000. Read The Docs is a website for building and hosting documentation, used by many of Mozilla’s Web projects. Their award will be used to add the ability to generate documentation from code without needing to install it, thereby making it easier to build the documentation for complex projects.
Mercurial: $75,000. Mercurial is a distributed source code management system, used heavily by Mozilla for core repositories such as mozilla-central. Their award will be used to implement better support for ‘blame’ (showing who last changed some code) and a better web UI.
Django: $150,000. Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets.
Bro: $200,000. Bro is network monitoring software, which is at the heart of Mozilla’s intrusion detection system for our network. Their award will be used to build the Comprehensive Bro Archive Network, a public repository of modules and plugins for Bro.
MOSS is an ongoing program, with an initial allocation of $1 million. The above awards allocate just over half of that money ($503,000), and applications are open for the “Foundational Technology” track on an ongoing basis. We look forward to supporting more of the excellent projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon in the future. Thank you to you all – we couldn’t do what we do, without you.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/
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Daniel Stenberg: Hosting RMS again! |
I’m thrilled to once again have to honor to organize a lecture and talk in Stockholm by the legendary RMS himself. (Remember the last time?)
On January 25 2016, RMS will talk about “For a Free Digital Society” in the large Aula Magna room at Stockholm University that seats almost 1200 persons.
See http://www.foss-sthlm.se/rms2016.html for the full invitation and sign-up. Registration is voluntary, but it helps us understand the interest and size of the audience.
Photo by Kjell Ericson, taken just before the event started the last time.
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The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.5 |
Today we’re releasing Rust 1.5 stable. This post gives the highlights, and you can find the full details in the release notes.
The biggest news with Rust 1.5 is the introduction of cargo install,
a new subcommand that installs Cargo application packages on the local
system. This tool offers a painless way to distribute Rust applications.
The community is already taking advantage of cargo install to
install applications like
rustfmt, the
work-in-progress code formatting tool for Rust. Moreover, cargo install
can also be used to install new subcommands for Cargo itself:
cargo-check: statically check a project, but don’t build a binary.cargo-edit: add or remove dependencies for a project through the command line.cargo-graph: build dependency graphs for a project using GraphViz.cargo-watch: automatically re-run a Cargo command when the project changes.(You can find more with a crates.io search.)
In addition to these tooling changes, Rust 1.5 sees a large number of library API stabilizations, especially around the interaction of paths and the file system.
Finally, there were a few improvements to compile times, and crate metadata shrunk by about 20%.
The Rust community continues to do incredible work, and we’d like to thank the 152 contributors to this release:
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Daniel Pocock: Is WebRTC one of your goals for 2016? |
WebRTC continues to gather momentum around the world. Over the next week, Paris will host a TADHack event on WebRTC (12-13 December) followed by Europe's most well known meeting of the WebRTC community, the annual WebRTC Conference and Expo, 16-18 December.
2015 has been a busy year for WebRTC developers, in the browser, on the server-side and even in documentation, with the online publication of The RTC Quick Start Guide. These efforts have all come together to create a stable foundation for many implementations in 2016.
The JSCommunicator demo video shows just how convenient WebRTC can be, looking at the first customer-facing WebRTC deployment on Wall Street, a project I put together back in 2014:
This solution was implemented entirely with free, open source software integrated with a traditional corporate PBX. The project involved significant innovation to bring together a new technology like WebRTC with a very established corporate telephony infrastructure. For example, the solution makes use of the reSIProcate Python scripting to add the Avaya UUI headers to the SIP signaling, so it can integrate seamlessly with all existing Avaya customizations and desktop CRM software.
Is this something you can imagine on your organization's web site or as part of your web-based product or service?
If you run a Drupal CMS or if you would like to, the DruCall module provides a very quick way to get started with WebRTC.
On a Debian or Ubuntu server, you can automatically deploy the entire Drupal stack, Apache, MySQL and all module dependencies with
$ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports drupal7-mod-drucall
If you don't want to do any JavaScript development, JSCommunicator may be the way to go.
JSCommunicator is a completely generic solution that can be completely re-branded just by tweaking the HTML and CSS. All phone features can be enabled and disabled using the configuration file.
As part of Google Summer of Code 2014, Juliana Louback created a WebRTC plugin for the xTuple enterprise CRM and ERP suite.
The source code of the DruCall and xTuple plugins provide an excellent point of reference for developing similar plugins for other web applications. Both of them are based on JSCommunicator which is designed to embed easily into any existing HTML page or templating system.
To find out more and discuss RTC using free software and open standards, please join us on the Free-RTC mailing list.
http://danielpocock.com/is-webrtc-one-of-your-goals-for-2016
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Emma Humphries: Like Ghostery, But for the Real World |
Me complaining to coworker at Mozlando that I'm easily spotted by my purple hair: "I need a tracking blocker for me."
Coworker: "I think that's called a hat, Emma."
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The Mozilla Blog: Firefox OS Pivot to Connected Devices |
Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.
We will prototype this future starting right now using technologies developed as part of the Firefox OS project to give us a kick start.
We will make space for this exploration by stopping our work to build and ship smartphones through carrier partners.
We will explore and prototype new use cases in the world of connected devices as an open source project with a clear focus on the user benefit and experience.
We will focus on products and technologies that allow people to access and manage their world of connected devices, helping to ensure people are empowered, safe and independent.
We are excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead of us. We believe that the Web can be the right platform for this future of connected devices and we can’t wait to share more with everyone soon.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/09/firefox-os-pivot-to-connected-devices/
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Mozilla WebDev Community: Extravaganza – December 2015 |
Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to prepare free SSL tickets to hand out at the Let’s Encrypt SSL Kitchen. While we train volunteers to serve hot SSL tickets to needy websites, we find time to talk about the work that we’ve shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by!
You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, or view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla. Or just read on for a summary!
The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library.
First off was jbuck with the exciting news that the rebuilt donate.mozilla.org is live and processing donations! Previously hosted by vendor Blue State Digital, the new page uses PayPal and Stripe to handle payments. Since launching, the new page has already processed over $1 million in donations!
Next was ErikRose, who shared the news that pip 8 will support hash verification, nearly obsoleting the need for peep! Exciting new features:
Pip 8 is expected to be released sometime in January.
Shobson stopped by to mention that a new design for compatibility tables on MDN has been enabled for beta users on select pages. The new design is inspired by CanIUse and, in addition to being easier to read, are also mobile-friendly. The new design is the first public feature using MDN’s in-development compatibility API.
Back to ErikRose, with news of performance improvements on DXR for pages that have many links on them. After profiling, Erik found that pages that generate many URLs spend a majority of their time building and escaping URLs due to Werkzeug‘s custom URL escaping. By switching to his own hard-coded URL generation functions, the load time on the affect pages improved 4x from 17 seconds down to 3 seconds. Hooray!
The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else.
ErikRose shared an interesting story about trying to understand logs from Firefox Hello. The logs available to him showed anonymous sessions with join and leave events, and dots to represent time segments where nothing happened. After sorting these logs by length and zooming out his text editor, Erik was able to notice patterns in the data thanks to his editor’s anti-aliasing of the zoomed-out text. Hooray for poor-man’s data analysis!
Next was shobson again, with a neat little fix for colorblind people using Sched, the scheduling service Mozilla uses for its workweeks. She created a Stylish userstyle that adds colored stripes to the sides of event boxes on Sched using colors that are visually differentiable to the most common forms of colorblindness. If you’re colorblind and are having trouble using Sched, install Stylish and try the stylesheet out!
For Mozillians planning to attend the Mozlando workweek, several people brought up recommended sessions to attend:
Along with the SSL Kitchen, we also volunteer at the MDN job training school to help websites get the skills they need to follow web standards and break the cycle of -webkit-ness for good!
If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you!
See you next month!
https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2015/12/09/extravaganza-december-2015/
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Chris H-C: Mozlando Diaries |
I was randomly selected for diminished security. They funnelled me to the Nexus line. I get to keep my shoes on? “Put anything with metal in the bin, sir. No, not your wallet.” What?
“Take out your laptop, put it separately in the bin. But not any tablets, ereaders, raspberry pi… Sir, we only want the computers.”
Shoes off, but only if you’re older than 13. Or was that 18. You yes, you no. Oh, not you, sir, you are in the Nexus line.
Apparently those X-ray machines can distinguish between full and empty water bottles. Whoops.
Coming from Pearson T3, land of construction, the three-story Christmas tree was a shock. It was also an annoyance as it blocked the signs directing me to the main terminal tramway.
No signs indicating which baggage carousel you need to visit… or maybe there was a display, but it was hidden by a 100-foot-long garland?
No worries, manners get you answers (“Are you Canadian?” ..Yes. “Ah, that’s why you’re so polite.” …you don’t have to be Canadian to be polite, I thought…) and then there are lots of people with purple shirts and mozlando signage to point the way.
“Machine Gun America” reads the billboard on the highway. I hope that’s a wordmark and not a suggestion.
A blimp in the sky! Advertising the Peanuts Movie. I wonder why we don’t see blimps further north. You wouldn’t have to heat the lifting gas nearly as much.
Two registered guests in the shuttle, not Mozillians though they talk a good game using the words “bug” “wiki” “yammer (ugh)”, trying to figure out how to get to Universal Studios. I take a wild stab “Wizarding World?” “Well, yeah!”
Excitement on the hotel shuttle is high, fueled by jet lag, jet fuel, Disney, Harry Potter, and more sunshine than December ought to have in the northern hemisphere. “So, you must be eleven now. When do you turn twelve?” “Ha. ha.”
The hotel is a behemoth of striking architecture. Well-maintained, though it is starting to show its age. Also, the lobby level is a rabbit warren. It does give a thrill of discovery to find a new shortcut to breakfast, though.
…and I thought the airport liked Christmas. I don’t even know how tall that Christmas tree is. And the garlands by the escalator to the fountain are neon-green. Mrs. Claus lights the tree at 6pm, and you can visit with the big man himself from 6:15-8 (there is a whole schedule of happenings. And this is just the hotel.)
And of course the palm trees are lit. And of course the lights change based on the music. And of course the music is Wizards of Winter.
At least the hotel Wi-Fi reaches the hammocks on the beach. (whut.)
The opening welcome reception has live music, food stations, open bars… and Donald, Goofy, and Lilo and Stitch? Why yes, I would like you to take my picture with them. No, of course, I’ll make sure my beer is set down out of view. I understand.
It seems as though the purpose of these receptions is for everyone to catch up with people they haven’t seen since the last one. I’m stuck in an induction proof’s base case. How do I bootstrap my way into knowing people, when I can’t say “I haven’t seen you since…”
Simple: introduce yourself. What would be unthinkable to me mere years ago only requires a little mental effort to smile and make eye contact and say “Hi, I’m chutten”.
Plus I eventually found Kats, whom I haven’t seen since I was blaming him for ecmascript failures in BB5. Though I’ve talked to him since, as evidenced by him referring me to this position.
Fresh Florida orange juice served at breakfast. How could they afford the expense of importing it all the way from… oh.
The all-hands started with multipart vocal harmony and beatboxing. I now have a high standard for future all-hands meetings.
Firefox plushies adorned every seat. And they’re so soft! I grabbed a few extra just in time for them to announce that there’s going to be an Adoption Centre. Because of course there will be.
Finally met up with the Toronto contingent. Apparently they were all on a later flight on Monday. Stood in the sun complaining about the unseasonably-warm December we’ve been having in Southern Ontario. Canadiana at its best.
Three free t-shirts! But they’re all the same design. But you can get different sizes so you can give them away! But I don’t know anyone who wears graphic t-shirts anymore… or their t-shirt sizes, off-hand. Ah well, wear one out, sub in a new one.
The Firefox All-hands is in a smaller room and opens with a choice: want us to go through the Planning slides, or want us to just take questions? The consensus was: go through the slides, but don’t take forever about it, I mean, geez.
This company, people. This company.
:chutten
https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/mozlando-diaries/
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Mozilla Thunderbird: Thunderbird Active Daily Inquiries Surpass 10 Million! |
We are pleased to report that Thunderbird usage, as reported though the standard Mozilla metric of Active Daily Inquiries (ADI), has surpassed 10 million users per day on Monday November 30 2015 for the first time ever.
ADI is a raw measurement of active users, and is taken by counting the daily requests from Thunderbird users for updates to the plugin blocklist. This measure under-counts active users for a variety of reasons (such as firewalls, or users that do not use Thunderbird everyday). Based on more detailed studies with other applications, a typical multiplier applied to ADI to estimate total active users is 2.5. So the best estimate of current active users is 25,000,000.
Eleven years ago, on December 7 2004, Mozilla announced in a blog post the birth of Thunderbird. Happy Birthday, Thunderbird!
The Thunderbird development team is working hard on the next major release of Thunderbird, version 45, which is due for release in March of 2016. String freeze for new features is this weekend. Over 1000 code commits have been done to the main Thunderbird code repository in preparation for this release (in addition to the tens of thousands of commits to the Mozilla platform repository that Thunderbird uses as its base).
Coincidentally on the same date as the new ADI record, in a post to a public Mozilla discussion forum, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker outlined some upcoming changes in the relationship of Mozilla to Thunderbird.
In the administrative part of that post, Mitchell announced that the Mozilla Foundation under Mark Surman has been working with Thunderbird to provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project (which we have been sorely lacking for several years). At the same time, a formal process will be undertaken to determine what is the best long-term home for Thunderbird, which might be Mozilla or might be some other entity.
Practically what this means is that in 2016, Thunderbird will finally be able to accept donations from users directed toward the update and maintenance of Thunderbird. In the long run, Thunderbird needs to rely on our users for support, and not expect to be subsidized by revenue from Firefox. We welcome this help from the Mozilla Foundation in moving toward our goal of developing independent sources of income for Thunderbird.
In the technical part of that post, Mitchell reiterated that Mozilla needs to be laser-focused on Firefox, and that the burden this places on Thunderbird (as well as the burden that Thunderbird places on Firefox) is leading to unacceptable outcomes for both projects. The most immediate need is for the Thunderbird release infrastructure to be independent of that used by Firefox, and Mozilla has offered to help. In the long-term, there will be additional technical separation between Firefox and Thunderbird as a continuation of a process that has been ongoing for the last three years.
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-active-daily-inquiries-surpass-10-million/
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Cameron Kaiser: So long, Firefox phones |
I can't say I'm surprised. I liked FxOS as a user, but its application support was dismal (so I could not ditch my Nexus 5, nor could I truly dogfood any Firefox device), and FxOS seemed to only be offered as an option on truly awful hardware. In my case, it was the so-bad-it's-terrible Geeksphone Revulsion Revolution, branded as their developer unit after the whimpering fail of the Peak. True to form, when I actually finally got one, it turned out to be an unmitigated steaming heap and essentially ensured I would never buy a Geeksphone device ever again. Yes, it was that bad. And this was supposed to be their developer device, to get people actually excited about the platform!
That said, I'm sad to see this development (even if I'm not at all shocked), because even though FxOS will live on in some form as an open source project I predict it'll eventually go the benignly neglected way of things like Firefox for webOS (which, having recently acquired an HP Veer for snickers and fighting with endian problems in novacomd, would be really handy about now). That's bad for us in Power Mac land because the improvements to boost Firefox performance on constrained mobile devices also help with our now decade-plus computers. Time will tell if Mozilla decides to kill the entire project as well, not just shipping Firefox phones.
TenFourFoxBox so far has been a huge success. I should publicly mention Mike Hommey's comment in the last blog entry: yes, the true successor to WebRunner is the webapp runtime that Firefox presently comes with, but the webapp runtime doesn't work on 10.4 and needs quite a bit of hacking to do so, and since we weren't using it anyway I could just implement an even lighter chrome and make it even faster. There will be some adjustments to allow people with differently-named executables to work (as well as an override version in case you want to use a specific version of the browser to run your foxboxes), and we need to implement a component for certain sites that try to enumerate navigator.* properties (Chase was the main offender), but otherwise it's been very well received. 1.0 will appear after 38.5.0 and will receive its own website at that time.
Speaking of, I haven't had a lot of time to do much else with 38.5 or the occasional test complaints about the MP3 decoder due to time constraints and finishing my Master's degree, but the MP3 decoder will be enabled and we'll gather some data points to figure out which encoders minimp3 doesn't like (after all, the fact it can play most MP3 files is better than none). There will also be a patch for bug 1181977 to fix the empty Application menu in foxboxes (remember to quit any running foxboxes before you upgrade the browser), and a custodial cleanup after issue 308. Watch for it this weekend for release next week.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/12/so-long-firefox-phones.html
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The Mozilla Blog: The Power of Mozilla |
Today I would like to talk about the power of Mozilla. We are more than just our consumer products. We measure our success not only by the adoption of our products, but also by our ability to increase the control people have in their online lives, our impact on the Web through our Web technologies, our contribution to standards and how we work to protect the Web that users want.
Web Technology
Mozilla builds technologies that benefit the entire Web ecosystem. We believe that the Web benefits when every browser supports great, open technologies:
More details on our ongoing Web platform work are available in this recent post from our VP of platform engineering and interim CTO, David Bryant.
Security and Privacy
Mozilla believes that individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. Over the last year, we have made major contributions to building a more secure online experience:
In the post-Snowden era, we believe these are the sorts of technology advancements that the Internet needs to continue to be free and open.
Policy
Our policy team and the Mozilla community tackle global issues, including through legislative and regulatory advocacy, in support of our mission, the open Internet, and individuals’ security, privacy, and control over their Web experience:
Developers
The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is a key resource for Web developers online. For more than 10 years, Mozilla has provided this resource free of charge to everyone with the aim that anyone should be able to build on the Web. Last year we launched Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser dedicated solely to developers and have improved that edition throughout the year.
Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla is also developing our educational programs and tools like Hive Learning Networks, which empowers the next generation to develop and use digital literacy skills that will keep the Web open. We bring together talented and diverse leaders through the Mozilla Festival, Mozilla Developer Network, Mozilla Science Lab, and the OpenNews journalism initiative. We launched the Cyber Security Delphi, a comprehensive research project to better understand security threats on the Internet. And we partner with the Ford Foundation on the Open Web Fellows program, a global initiative to develop technical leaders capable of defending the Web.
Last year 10,000-plus Mozillians taught critical 21st-century skills to individuals of all ages and backgrounds; they translated open source products into a range of new languages; they defended the free and open nature of the Web; and much more.
Search Partner Strategy
Last year, as our search contract with Google came up for renewal, we began discussions with Google and other providers. All provided attractive terms, but we decided that one global default search partner was no longer the right choice for our users or the Web. Instead, we adopted a more local and flexible approach by country to increase choice and innovation on the Web, with new expanded search partnerships. These gave us more opportunities to build connections between the browser, websites and services and the treatment of data that advance our mission and values. As a result, Yahoo is the default search option in the US, Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia, Turkey, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The Future
Our mission is to enable the Internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. The world needs Mozilla to lead the fight for openness more than ever. We hope reading this gives you full insight into the power of Mozilla to deliver on our mission. We invite you to download Firefox or volunteer to be part of Mozilla. Learn more at mozilla.org.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/08/the-power-of-mozilla/
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