Archive for June, 2009
June 27th, 2009
Is your non-profit or community organization in need of technology help? Do you need help with your website, setting up WiFi at your office, or learning how to use Twitter? If so, Mozilla would love to hear from you!
This September, the Mozilla community is helping fellow public benefit organizations. During Mozilla Service Week (Sept 14-21), people all over the world will conduct public acts of technology-related service. Our community is looking for volunteer opportunities. By utilizing our community’s talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web — and the world — a better place for everyone. Here are just a few ideas of how we can help:
- Help build or upgrade a website.
- Teach you how social networks and Twitter can help you find new members and supporters.
- Set up a wireless network at your office or meeting place.
- Translate your offering into another language.
- Show you how to use VoIP (Internet telephony) to help reduce your costs.
There are countless ways technology could help improve the great work you do, and the Mozilla community wants to help make that difference.
How can your non-profit or community group get help?
We are working with the volunteer organization Idealist, so if you already have a need in mind, you can register your organization at Idealist and describe the technical help you are looking for. Mozilla’s volunteers are searching Idealist and will locate your organization.
You can also find out more on how to list your needs and find volunteers on the Mozilla Service Week website. Furthermore, if you need additional guidance you can contact us.
Mozilla Service Week Volunteers
You can already start helping by contacting and checking in with organizations. Please talk them through what they need to do, and even help them post.
The Mozilla community has a history of changing the the Web in all kinds of amazing ways.
Join us for Mozilla Service Week, as we help you change the world.
June 27th, 2009
So that you end your week with something really amusing, I had to share this story I found at CyberNet as it concerns Microsoft’s new browser comparison or “fact” sheet.
So we are to believe that Firefox and Chrome are both insecure, difficult to use, and unreliable? The Internet Explorer team might want to check their calendars, because last time I checked – it is June 26th, not April 1st.
If that isn’t enough – they also have a MythBusting page. What is your favorite “fact” they are claiming?
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
June 26th, 2009
Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the Firefox 3.5 release candidate on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9:13 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.
Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.
A new version of the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download, containing fixes based on the feedback obtained from the previous release candidate. This updated milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Firefox 3.5. A video highlighting some of these new features is also available. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.
Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Users already running a Firefox 3.5 Beta or Release Candidate can obtain an update to this latest Release Candidate version by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Help” menu.
Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.
June 26th, 2009
Persona-of-Doom
And the source image:
The persona is made from a photo of a page of a quilted book. (The colors in the persona are much closer to the original than the source photo here. Viewing the source photo in a full page gets more accurate colors.) I finally finished the book and gave it away a week or so ago. I miss seeing the book so I thought it’s a good excuse to make a few personas. Still need to work my way through the details of scaling and sizing and color matching and so on to get a persona where one actually sees the notes. Am about halfway there. If anyone has an easy system would love to have a pointer 
June 26th, 2009
The role of Firefox:
Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.
That’s the last paragraph of my last post. A bunch of people said I should have put made it the first paragraph, so here it is.
June 25th, 2009
Snowl 0.3pre2, the second preview release of the next version of Snowl (the messaging-in-the-browser experiment), is now available. This version includes a number of bug fixes and spruces up the river view with two improvements.
First, the view once again groups messages into time periods, although it uses a different approach. Version 0.2 grouped messages into four time periods: Today, Yesterday, Last Seven Days, and Last Four Weeks. That made it hard to browse older messages, and in the case of the latter two periods, it didn’t map well to the weekly and monthly groupings by which people typically structure their time.
This version groups messages by day (with plans to support grouping by week and month in the future) and lets you traverse them using buttons on the toolbar:
Second, you can once again view all your subscriptions at once. To do so, select the Subscriptions item from the list of collections:
Try out Snowl 0.3pre2 and let us know what you think! But don’t forget that this is a preview release of a labs experiment, not a stable release of a finished product, and there are bound to be bugs and other issues.
Post your thoughts on Snowl to the discussion group, and file bug reports on the problems you encounter. Or join us for discussion in the #labs IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. And if you’re interesting in hacking on Snowl, check out the source code.
- Myk Melez on behalf of the Snowl team
June 25th, 2009
Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.
A new version of the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download, containing fixes based on the feedback obtained from the previous release candidate. This updated milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Firefox 3.5. A video highlighting some of these new features is also available. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.
Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Users already running a Firefox 3.5 Beta or Release Candidate can obtain an update to this latest Release Candidate version by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the “Help” menu.
Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.
June 25th, 2009
Mozilla’s mission is to build choice, innovation, participation and opportunity into the ways people interact with the Internet. The centerpiece is Firefox, because the browser is the lens through which people see and touch the Internet. Over time, people are doing an ever broader set of activities with the Internet. What does this mean for how we think about Firefox? Here’s what I see.
1. Firefox continues to be an exceptional platform for delivering web applications to people. Firefox should help each web applications be the best it can be. That means features such as web compatibility, performance, and security remain central to our work. It means continuing to make the entire web platform richer, as we are doing with video and our standards work in general; Firefox 3.5 shows our leadership in these areas. It means effective and innovative user experience and features that help people get the most from their interaction with a website.
2. Firefox helps people manage information across multiple web applications. We all visit a variety of sites. The combination of those activities makes up a set of information that isn’t well managed by any particular site. A good example of how Firefox helps with this is the Awesome Bar, which makes it easy to revisit, group, label and manage information from multiple websites. It updates automatically and creates a set of information that reflects an individual person. An earlier example is the password manager, which helps people manage their identity across multiple sites. These features are broader than any one website and reflects a much fuller picture of me than a single website can.
3. Firefox incorporates web capabilities into its feature set. We’ve been doing this for a while, and I believe we’ll be doing more of this. An early example was building search into the browser as a feature. We’ve also done this with anti-phishing and malware features, where Firefox uses constantly updated aggregated information to protect people. Another example are the search suggestions that are generated as one types a search query in the Search Box. These browser features all make use of data provided in real-time, not built into the bits of Firefox.
Another way of incorporating web capabilities into Firefox is the real-time updating of a feature itself. The Firefox Add-ons system is one step, allowing people to add new features to their browser as those features are developed. A new, experimental example is “Ubiquity” which allows people to control the browser by typing commands such as “map 650 Castro Street” ” into a browser text entry field and seeing the results. Ubiquity commands are provided to the user as one starts to type a command; they are not determined at the time Ubiquity is installed on your machine. This means new commands can be added at any time, and are instantly available to the user.
We’re already thinking about data, services and their relation to online life. Our 2010 goals explicitly call out data and its management. But this may suggest that these things are distinct rather than interwoven. Data and services may be separate from the product we call Firefox in an architectural or technical or intellectual property sense. But they are not separate in how people experience the web. And so I believe we must think of all of these things — software bits, “services,” “data” — as facets of the Firefox product itself.
In summary, I’d describe the ongoing role of Firefox as follows.
Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.
June 25th, 2009
If your looking for a mostly 2D, grayscale and compact theme for your Firefox browsing ways – look no further than the Two Dimensions theme. As you can see with the screenshot I included, it is a very slick skin for your Firefox browsing ways that will not disappoint those of you who like to keep things simple.
It would fit nicely, I think, in my list of lightest popular themes for Firefox. Who knows, it might earn its spot soon enough.
Thus far a five-star theme, that is rising in the ranks, you can pick up Two Dimensions and add it to your own Firefox installation at the Firefox Add-ons web site.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
June 25th, 2009
The twittersphere is abuzz with the current twitterstorm about Microsoft’s plan to use the “Word HTML engine” in the next version of Outlook. It’s a campaign that’s an organization which represents people whose living depends on their ability to make compelling HTML pages in email, so it’s not surprising that they have a beautiful site which is getting a lot of people to retweet.
There are lots of campaigns that sweep the social networks on a regular basis, and this one is somewhat noteworthy because it’s about plans for a very commonly used piece of software, coordinated by marketers, and because the twittersphere is very receptive to anti-Microsoft sentiments. None of that is what I want to talk about.
What I want to dig into a bit is how Microsoft got there, and the implications for the Open Web. I’m not an expert on Microsoft’s history, or Outlook. But I can make a few guesses, based on how I’ve seen similar things evolve.
Outlook became the dominant enterprise email client during a phase of Microsoft’s life where embracing the web sometimes meant making stuff up and pretending it was a standard, or equivalent shenanigans. This was clear in Internet Explorer’s explorations outside of the normative specs, but it seems that some of the same “we can just do our own version of HTML” affected the Word team. This makes sense — if you’re a company with market dominance and the web is not central to your value proposition, but office productivity software is, then you’re going to do what you can to make the best user experience possible for your users, even if it means that messages sent to non-customers can’t be read with as much fidelity as those sent to customers. In fact, in a very basic way, that’s standard marketing — make using your product look better, so people want to use it.
Microsoft, again logically, invested lots and lots of millions of dollars into making design tools for Word, and HTML was thought of as an export format, where low-fidelity was almost a commercial virtue (”you don’t really want that”). The poor folks in charge of Outlook, who are mail experts, not HTML rendering wizards, had to deal with the use case of: “I want to send rich documents by email”, which blended office concepts (rich documents) and network concepts (email). They had to choose between a moribund IE6 engine, and the maintained, evolving HTML engine designed for use in Word. Given that most emails read in Outlook probably are written in Outlook and that Outlook users know the Word authoring tools, it was a rational choice. It made life hard for email marketers, and for a few people who like to use HTML to express their creative side and who do care that all their correspondents can see what they intended to send. But compromises are inevitable in a gigantic, complicated company like Microsoft. Had I been the manager in charge, given their constraints, I may well have made the same choice.
Now, it’s 2010 (or almost). Outlook is due for a new revision (gotta get the upgrade revenue). The choice is stark: adopting a more standards-compliant engine like IE8’s makes sense in the framing of “html email messages going out on the net”, but to deploy it in the reality of Outlook (mostly internal emails, lots of document ping-pong, etc.) it would require that Microsoft have a stack of design tools to offer that could realistically replace their existing stacks. There’s the rub — good HTML engines aren’t useful in a user context like Outlook’s if the authoring tools weren’t built with real HTML/CSS in mind. And neither Word’s venerable composition tools or Silverlight’s new-fangled ones were. So the Outlook team is stuck with a product that needs an upgrade and a need for both composition tools and a rendering engine, neither of which it can control. It’s not going to end well for at least some people.
[As a side note: the pragmatist in me wonders whether Outlook could use the Word HTML engine to render emails from Outlook users, and the IE8 engine for emails not from Outlook users. As long as no one ever edits forwarded emails it'd work!]
Now, it’s awful easy to make fun of Microsoft. The story on the side of the Open Web is better in part, but there are areas needing improvement. On the rendering engine side (displaying beautiful documents with fidelity and speed), the world is looking better than it has in years, with several rendering engines competing in healthy ways like standards compliance, leading-edge-but-not-stupid innovation, performance, and the like. Life is good. For email marketers, getting email clients to render real web content is all that matters — they pay professional designers to author their HTML content using professional web page composition tools, and the revenue associated with a successful email marketing campaign makes those investments worthwhile. Email is just a delivery vehicle to them, and it’s a perfectly valid perspective. They like Thunderbird a lot, because we’re really good at rendering the web, thanks to Gecko.
However, for regular folks, life is not rosy yet in the Open Web world. Authoring beautiful HTML is, even with design and graphics talent, still way, way too hard. I’m writing this using WordPress 2.8, which has probably some of the best user experience for simple HTML authoring. As Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) says, it’s still not good enough. As far as I can tell, there are currently no truly modern, easy to use, open source HTML composition tools that we could use in Thunderbird for example to give people who want to design wholly original, designed email messages. That’s a minor problem in the world of email, which is primarily about function, not form, and I think we’ll be able to go pretty far with templates, but it’s a big problem for making design on the web more approachable.
There are some valiant efforts to clean up the old, crufty, scary composer codebase that Mozilla has relied on for years. There are simple blog-style editors like FCKEditor and its successor CKEditor. There are in-the-browser composition tools like Google Pages or Google Docs, but those are only for use by Google apps, and only work well when they limit the scope of the design space substantially (again, a rational choice). None of these can provide the flexibility that Ventura Publisher or PageMaker had in the dark ages; none of them can compete from a learnability point of view with the authoring tools that rely on closed stacks; none of them allow the essential polish that hand-crafted code can yield. That’s a gap, and an opportunity.
I think radical reinvention is needed. Something with the chutzpah of Bespin, which simply threw away most of the stack that we all assumed was needed, but this time, aimed at the creative class (and the creative side in all of us), rather than the geeks. I know that lots of folks at Mozilla would love to help work on this, but we know we’re too small to do it alone. We know what modern CSS can do, we just don’t know how to make it invisible to authors.
This is a hard task, because it’s about designing design tools, which combines psychological, social, product design, usability, and technical challenges. It’s a worthy task, though, and one that I’d love to see someone tackle, especially if we can get non-geeks involved. There are tens of thousands of web designers who know the magic triad of 1) design, 2) HTML/CSS, 3) what aspects of existing tools make them productive, and what aspects fail. If we could get them to work productively with the tens of thousands of open source developers who currently build the applications that power the net (web, email, and others), we could throw away the broken metaphors of the 20th century and come up with new ways of designing using web technologies that everyone could use. Or maybe we just need one brilliant idea. I’ll take either.