Jim Chen: Now you can debug Fennec on x86

Konstantinos Antonakoglou: YouTube HTML5 Switch v0.1.7 & News

Hello!

Long time no see! I’ve been busy outside the blog-sphere and I’ve got some news to share. First of all, I upgraded my Firefox Add-on to version 0.1.7. So here is the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-html5-switch/

All in all, the important addition is that you can now use the hotkey Control+Y instead of pushing the button on the toolbar. Plus, I think it now has no other issues for most new versions of Firefox. I need to point out that I get most of the help from the SDK’s documentation which is great, but, to anyone interested, don’t hesitate to contribute to its content! Restartless add-ons rule!

You may use it and see if it works on YouTube (yeah it works, at least for Firefox 21.0 w/ Fedora Linux) using this video:

Yes! It’s the first video of the band I play with, directed by Kostas Gounaris. Cool huh?

I hope you’ll like it as we put a lot of effort to complete it and guess what? There’s also going to be a short film based on the song. I’ll let you know!

Doug Belshaw: Privacy, the NSA and Web Literacies [DMLcentral]

My latest post for DMLcentral is now up. Entitled Privacy, the NSA and Web Literacies I focus on what we can actually do in the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations. And no, I didn’t choose the accompanying photo.

Read it here: http://dmlcentral.net/blog/doug-belshaw/privacy-nsa-and-web-literacies

(in other news, you might like prism-break.org and Mozilla’s work around the Web Literacy Standard)

Irving Reid: Add-on Manager progress: Almost done!

Felipe has a full suite of r+ for his work on AddonRepository.jsm in Bug 853389, and I’m in the middle of handling review comments for the XPI Database changes in Bug 853388. I need to update based on the review comments, implement asynchronous loading of the JSON database, and add some telemetry so we can track performance and correctness of the new version. Once that is done, we’ll be ready to land on Nightly.

I’ve implemented a DeferredSave module based in the discussion in my previous blog post; I suspect it’s something that will be useful to others trying to convert to asynchronous saving of data blobs. Check it out at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=762461.

Jason Smith: WebRTC Test Day on June 21st

WebRTC Test Day on June 21st

Come help test WebRTC in Desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android this Friday on June 21st!

Seif Lotfy: GNOME Music: Phase Two and more…

Before I start blogging about the progress of GNOME Music, I would like to announce my happiness (as well as the whole gnome music team) that we now have 3 students sponsored to hack on GNOME Music. Eslam Mostafa (SoC), Shivani Podar (OWP) and Sai Suman Prayaga (SoC) all three of them deserved they internships, showing dedication and patching like crazy before SoC, keeping Vadim, Guillaume and me very busy.

Also I would like to welcome Arnel Borja and Fabiano Fidêncio to the team with their immense contributions, and ofcourse the allmighty Giovanni Campagna (who hacks everything in GNOME by now)

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic here, nevertheless we triumphed over phase of one of developing GNOME Music:

• Set basic infrastructure
• Implement Grilo Querying
• Implement Albums View
• Implement Songs View
• Implement Artist View
• Implement Playback support
• Clean up and port to Glade

Now phase 2 is shaping up nicely:

• Implement Playlist View
• Implement Selection functionality on all views
• Implement Repeat/Shuffle
• Implement Actions
• Clean up

So if you are interested in joining us with the development please feel free to hang out with us on #gnome-music on irc.gnome.org

Currently its only usable via JHbuild. Anyhow for more info like code and bugzilla check out https://live.gnome.org/Music

Here are some screenshots for tempting

Jared Wein: Picking Up The Crumbs

A few days ago a new feature landed in Firefox Nightly that makes closing multiple tabs easier than it was before.

I often find myself in situations where I have multiple tabs that I opened only to look at for short periods of time. Sometimes I reach this state while reading articles on Hacker News or looking at funny pictures on Reddit. At the end of looking at the tabs, it would be nice if Firefox had a way to close these ephemeral tabs so you can get back to your previous work quicker.

Well, Firefox now does! If you open lots of tabs from Reddit and then want to close all of the tabs to the right of Reddit, just right-click on the Reddit tab and choose “Close Tabs to the Right”. It’s easy and quick!

Why “close tabs to the right” and not “close tabs to the left”? When we open new tabs they appear on the end, and so naturally tabs that have a longer lifetime end up being promoted to the start-side of the bar. This leads us towards the situation where closing tabs “to the right” is a simple way of closing the ephemeral tabs.

Users who are using Firefox with a right-to-left locale such as Hebrew or Arabic should see the equivalent “Close Tabs to the Left” feature.

Huge thanks go out to Michael Brennan who contributed the patches and automated tests for this feature! Unless something drastic happens, this feature will find its way to Firefox Release in just over 12 weeks in Firefox 24.

Aaron Train: Discover and Help Test WebRTC in Firefox for Android and Firefox on Desktop on Friday June 21st, 2013

This upcoming Friday, we would love for you to solicit your support towards testing and contributing to the process of qualifying a new developer-release version of Firefox for Android and Firefox on Desktop both on the Nightly channel as part of our rapid release testing cycle. We will be focusing on the process of discovering, using and testing WebRTC.

WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose. The WebRTC mission is to enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5. The WebRTC initiative is a project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera.

This QA event, this Friday, is open to all those interested: newcomers, experienced testers, developers, and anyone interested in testing early builds of Firefox on the Nightly channel.

We would like for you to use the new version of Firefox on your Android phone and desktop or laptop machine, and take a close look at the latest Nightly builds in order to assist us in identifying any noticeably major issues found with our WebRTC implementation, and ensure that all feature functionality that is included in this upcoming release is on its way to a feature and testing complete state.

To cover the work throughout the whole day we have created an EtherPad test-plan. Please feel free to read and use it as a companion during the day’s event. There will be moderators at hand in the IRC channel: #testday, to answer any questions you have.

Together with your help we want to make this event a success and ensure the high quality of WebRTC support in Firefox for all of our users world-wide. If you have time on Friday June 21st, 2013, please join us on IRC, we will have Mozilla community and testers on hand to help answer any of your questions.

Your testing and feedback is highly valuable, and we hope to see you attend our test day event.

Kim Moir: Resources for learning Python When I started working at Mozilla, I didn't know Python very well.  All of the code that drives our continuous integration is written in it so I've had a spent a lot of time becoming more proficient.  I've taken a number of free self-study classes/tutorials that others might find useful getting up to speed with Python.

Google Python class  - Two day class that describes how to manipulate strings, dictionaries, lists. File I/O, regular expressions and sorting algorithms.  Class lectures that were recorded at a Google training event are available on youtube, and the exercises are pretty straightforward with a solution key to check your work.  All the exercises are done using the Python installation on your local machine.

Code academy has a Python class.  I did the exercises for the topics that weren't covered in the Google class, including list comprehensions, lambda expressions and OO in Python.  The exercises are completed and validated on the website.

The best course I've taken so far has been the nine week Interactive Programming in Python class offered by Coursera. Coursera is a company that offers university courses for free.  You receive a grade and certification of completion,  but not an actual credit at the institution. The Python course I took is in conjunction with Rice University.  For this course, you have to register for the course when it's run and complete the work each week.   There are an hour or so of video lectures, a quiz or two and an assignment to complete for around 8-10 hours of work each week.  After you submit your assignment, you're asked to review the work of five other students.  This is how to scale marking assignments for the thousands of students enrolled in the class :-).  The code for your assignments is written in the browser,  on the CodeSkulptor website.

Syllabus for coursera course

Screenshot of final asteroids game

Kim Moir: Lessons learned organizing a technical event I was on the organizing committee for Releng 2013.  This was the first time I've been involved in organizing a technical event.  I thought my experiences might be useful to others in the same situation thus this blog entry:-)

Reaching out to potential speakers
Three of the people on our organizing committee were researchers.  I was the only release engineer.  My goal was to get as many release engineers as possible to submit talks and attend the workshop.  I asked for suggestions from my coworkers and LinkedIn contacts to try to reach people that might be interested in submitting a talk.  I also wrote to multiple release engineering oriented mailing lists and Google+ groups.  I had a query for #relengcon and @relengcon mentions on Twitter.  If people mentioned that the relengcon sounded interesting, I replied to them and suggested that they submit a talk.  I also posted information about the workshop on several release engineering LinkedIn and meetup.com groups.  It's often a good idea to contact the organizer of a group and ask them to send text crafted by the organizers to their members.  Receiving a message from someone they already know lends some validity to the message, versus just another person adding to their inbox noise.

Carl and Gareth from Netflix talk about self-service build and delivery

Image ©photographus, http://www.flickr.com/photos/misspixels/8480711076/in/photostream/ under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

Francesco Lodolo: Summit 2013 planning assembly: a wonderful begin

Note: this is a guest post from Iacopo Benesperi, a fellow Mozillian from the Italian community.

This week-end took place in Mozilla’s Paris office the Summit 2013 planning assembly: a gathering of about 65 people from all around the world and representing all areas of the Mozilla project, with both paid staff and volunteers, aimed to plan and shape the next Summit, that will take place the first week-end of October in Bruxelles, Toronto and Santa Clara.

TL;DR: it’s been a great assembly. If we manage to accomplish at the next Summit half of the things we’ve discussed in this week-end, it will have been the best Mozilla event ever.

The aim of the assembly was not to define a schedule for the event and fix everything but to talk about which are the important topics that animate the Mozilla project these days, start to discuss them and shape them in a way so that we can come out with a good format for the Summit to address them and try to give and propose solutions for them. To do this, all the planning committee has taken interviews to fellow Mozillians in the last month to have a wider view of which is the temperature of the project in these days and act as a representative for the comments expressed.

I went to Paris without a clear idea of what we would have accomplished there, but I’m impressed with the result we had.
First of all, this assembly was facilitated by people of unconference.net, who proposed a peculiar way to proceed with it. I was a bit skeptic with the method proposed, but it turned out that some of their methods are really great (like unpanel) and we will definitely adopt them for the next Summit, while some others still look like rubbish (I may still be proved wrong).
The second important fact is that we talked little about technology and a lot about Mozilla, its community, its communication (internal and external) and the interactions between its components and people. On one hand, as Gandalf pointed out, this is a sign that we trust implicitly our technology and the fact that it will be discussed at the Summit, because this is a big portion of what Mozilla is about. On the other hand, it’s a sign that there’s a general awareness, not only among community members but also (finally) among employees and paid staff and board of directors that we have communication problems between the different parts of the projects and especially between paid staff and volunteers, and the time is now mature to address and try to solve them. What I’m talking about is not only communication to get things done but also communication related to the decision-making process.

So, it will be interesting to experiment discussions around different time-zones and locations. I will probably post more about the assembly and the planning for the Summit in the next days, when ideas and thoughts will have settled down a bit and I’ll have had the time to read all the ideas and documentation we produced during this two days. What I felt important to communicate immediately is the fact that the next Summit will be a wonderful occasion to talk not only about our technologies but also about who we are, what we want to do and where we want to go. It will be an occasion for the community to teach and mentor the newest community members and more importantly all the new employees to let them understand and feel the power and importance of our community and it will be, in general, an occasion to have our voice finally be heard and taken into consideration not only in the tasks at hand, but in building the new policies and guidelines that will drive all the project in the future.

I’m sure we’ll try, in the next months, to provide some initial information and documentation about what have been discussed and decided so far so that you can arrive at the Summit prepared to give your contribution to the conversation, so that we can take the most out of the Summit and make it really matter in our future.

As I said at the beginning: if we manage to discuss and propose solutions to half of the problems and concerns raised during this two days, we will have had the best Mozilla event ever; one that will have strengthened and made our project more mature.

Michael Verdi: Getting people to the right place is half the work

A while back I wrote about how much better some of our articles perform when they are linked to from some external place (in context of course). Here’s another example. Back on May 14th, we released Firefox 21 with a new feature called the Firefox Health Report. The FHR includes a graph of startup times. If you have some particularly long startup times we display a tip that suggests you reset Firefox and links to the help article on how to do that.

Before Firefox 21 and the health report, the reset article was getting rated helpful 60% – 65% of the time. Now that we’re showing the article to thousands of people each day who have a Firefox issue that the reset might be able to fix, the article is being rated helpful upwards of 82%. That’s huge — about a 25% improvement.

Frederic Wenzel: Add-on Notifications Are Hard

Over the years, I have written a handful of Firefox add-ons, and I need notifications quite frequently. Why? Most of my add-ons do something in the background at the user's request, and when it's done, the user wants to know. Alternatively, if my add-on attempts to do something and fails, the user would see nothing happen at all, unless I somehow tell them.

In real life, this is supposed to look something like this example, from "Copy URL":

The Mozilla Add-ons SDK even has a convenient API for it. Easy, right?

Sadly, not so fast: While the SDK is supposed to abstract all of this neatly away from me and "just work" on Linux, Windows, and OS X, the behavior is inconsistent, owed -- on OS X, anyway -- to the wonky state of notification support on the operating system level.

To Growl or not to Growl

I've ran into issues with notifications repeatedly over time, and employed a number of solutions so far. Spoiler alert: I am happy with none of them.

OS X 10.7 and below relied on a third-party tool called Growl to support notifications. If you had it installed, the SDK's API would work just great. Sadly, if you didn't have it installed, notifications would silently be swallowed. Worse yet, I was unable to detect if this happened, so I had no way to implement a fallback mechanism.

The OS X 10.8 "notification center" was supposed to fix this, but apparently, it will only display our notifications if the browser does not have the focus. In other words, it's completely useless for in-context notifications.

I considered all that a very poor user experience and instead of using the SDK's API, I implemented my own notifications module called "simple-notify" that would detect the availability of the notifications service (i.e., Growl or any other platform-specific service) first, and if none was found would employ a fallback mechanism.

The ugly but reliable notifications bar

The fallback mechanism I use is the once-ubiquitous, gray, Firefox notification bar:

It is shown in context, grabs the user's attention (perhaps a little too much) and, most importantly, it is reliably available on all platforms.

This notification bar has its downsides: For example, it's fairly intrusive and not easily ignored. My add-ons usually auto-close it after a few seconds. If I didn't do that, the bar would persist until closed by the user. This solution also can't handle more than one notification at a time: A second notification will overlay the previous one.

HTML5 Notifications API

Luckily, there's hope. The W3C Notifications API landed in Firefox 22, which (at the time of writing) is the next upcoming release version. If the Add-ons SDK is updated to use this API, this should finally allow me to use one line of code for notifications, not a few dozen.

In the context of a page, I can even use it already (without Add-ons SDK support), with two caveats:

• To remain backwards compatible (for a while, anyway) I'd still have to implement a fallback mechanism. Once Firefox 22 is the current release version, however, I could relax that rule and just live with the fact that users of previous versions may or may not receive notifications.
• The W3C standard (rightly) requires to ask for permission before a website can issue notifications. Add-ons should be able to use notifications without explicit permission step.

I'm looking forward to the time when all this will smoothly work as expected!

I'm blogging about once a week in 2013, on various topics. This is my fifteenth post of the year.

Doug Belshaw: Weeknote 24/2013

This week I’ve been:

• Presenting and running workshops on Open Badges at a CRA seminar (Monday, Birmingham).
• Meeting lots of people/organisations at the Mozilla London office to explore ways they can use badges. People like Creative Skillset, OCR, Livity and Inspir.ed.
• Booking travel for the coming weeks.
• Running a webinar on Open Badges for Learning Pool (slides here)
• Ordering more business cards. The other ones didn’t turn up and, as 20th-century as they feel, I’m often in a position where I need to give them out.
• Catching up with the audio from the Web Literacy Standard community call, hosted by Carla.
• Hosting the Open Badges community call for the first time for a while.
• Talking some more and reaching out to various people within Mozilla about Firecloud.
• Writing a post for DMLcentral about the NSA, Mozilla and privacy that I hope will go live on Monday.
• Claiming back expenses for speaking at recent events.
• Meeting with my newest colleague Meg Cole via Skype.
• Getting some training on interviews with the media from Erica Sackin.
• Participating in a great day of networking, sharing and planning for a new city-wide learning co-operative (potentially powered by badges!) hosted by the University of Salford.

This week I’ve done loads of stuff myself, but my colleagues have been even busier. This week Mozilla has, well done pretty much everything:

• Launched a global activism campaign at the head of a large coalition: StopWatching.Us
• Launched the 2M Better Futures badge commitment with President Clinton
• Launched Make Things Do Stuff at the G8 Summit in London with the Prime Minister
• Launched new versions of webmaker.org, popcorn maker, thimble and events apps
• Launched the Maker Party campaign
• Launched the Chicago Summer of Learning badge program
• Launched the 2014 Knight-Mozilla Fellowship search
• Partnered on the launch of Code Club World with Google and Code Academy
• Launched the Mozilla Science Lab at the White House
• Opened our new(ly refurbished) offices in Paris and San Francisco

Next week I’m presenting at the Learning and Skills Group (London, Tuesday) and moderating a session on ‘Digital Skills for Work and Learning’ at the EC Digital Agenda Assembly 2013 (Dublin, Wednesday). I’m also looking forward to working with the Mozilla comms team on next month’s beta release of the Web Literacy Standard.

Christian Heilmann: Image masking with HTML5 Canvas

I just added a small demo to my GitHub showing how you can do image masking by using the canvas element.

All you need to do is add the canvasmask.js script and add a class of mask to each image you want to mask. You also need to provide a PNG file as the mask using the data-mask attribute. For example:

<img src="red-panda.jpg" 
     alt="Red panda" 
     class="mask" 
     data-mask="centerblur.png">

This will take the centerblur.png file and apply it as a mask to red-panda.jpg – in effect taking the alpha of each pixel and change the alpha of the original pixel to that.

You can see it in action here and get the code on GitHub.

Under the hood, all I do is loop through all the pixels of the images (after copying them to two canvas elements) and apply the alpha values (every 4th value in the pixeldata array) of the PNG to the image. Simple, really :)

As mentioned by Jake Archibald on Twitter there is no need to loop over the pixels of the images, all you need is to copy the mask first, then change the canvas compositing to source-atop and add the image. Done. The script does that now, and thus is much faster.

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