Easy Firefox

Archive for the ‘Mozilla Labs’ Category

Test Pilot recently concluded a study on how the Firefox menus are used. Now, the results are in, and the data is available.

The study was designed to answer such questions as: Which menu items are used most often? How often do people use keyboard shortcuts to activate these items? When using the mouse, how long do people spend looking for the item they want, and which menu items take people the longest to find? You can read more background about this study here: Menu Item Usage Study.

Mozilla Labs is continuing to analyze the over 8,000 submissions we received as part of this study. At the same time, as part of our goal of being an open research lab, we are offering the data as a public resource. Various sample sizes of the data can be downloaded from this page, which also includes an explanation of the file format. The data has been sanitized and aggregated to ensure the privacy and anonymity of those who participated, so it contains no URLs, bookmark names, or anything of that nature.

We encourage anyone with an interest in usability research to download these samples, do their own analysis and draw their own conclusions. We would love to hear what you can find.

If you are looking for data samples from older studies, those are available too:

• A Week in the Life data samples
• Accounts and Passwords data samples
• Tab Open/Close data samples

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Longtime Ubiquity contributor and community member Satyr has continued working on the Ubiquity codeline. He’s posted a build of the extension based on the latest source from his personal code repository.

Satyr’s build is based on the 0.5 codeline and it should be able to work with Firefox 3.6, so you may want to try it out if you have been frustrated by the incompatibility between Ubiquity 0.5.x and Firefox 3.6.

Satyr provides the caveat:

“latest source” means it is pre-beta and most likely has issues, which won’t be fixed unless users report them in detail.

Still, if you are using Firefox 3.6 and you want features that are not available in Ubiquity 0.1.9.1, you may want to try out Satyr’s build.

Problems and workarounds with this version are being discussed on GetSatisfaction.

Thank you Satyr!

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MetaLab recently blogged that Mozilla had used their design work without permission or attribution.  

At issue are early mockups for one of the Jetpack developer tools that included design elements from the MetaLab web site. While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK.

We’ve since removed all of the early mockups from our web sites, and updated the videos and screenshots with the correct content.

We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.

We’re actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.

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We are proud to announce the first milestone release of the Jetpack SDK. While this release demonstrates the platform’s foundations and extensibility, it does not yet provide APIs for building rich add-ons. The next set of releases will add those APIs to the SDK. This release also marks the graduation of Jetpack from a Mozilla Labs prototype to a next-generation platform slated for production use with Firefox.

We learned a lot from creating the early Jetpack prototypes and the feedback we received from thousands of add-on developers and tens of thousands of testers. People created hundreds of add-ons and wrote dozens of articles and blog posts about their Jetpack experience. This feedback has been instrumental in the design of the new Jetpack SDK, and given us the confidence to plan out a roadmap that provides a rich, robust, extensible platform that will be fully supported for production use with Firefox.

With the Jetpack SDK, authors can take a small amount of high-level code, developed with clear API standards in mind, and turn it into a standard Firefox add-on — one that doesn’t require a restart to install or update. Minimal changes to Firefox are required to make this all work, and you can track those changes here.

The Jetpack SDK includes:

• An extensible library of capabilities and APIs for writing Firefox add-ons, as well as stand-alone web-based applications
• A set of command-line tools that package and security-harden your code into distributable packages
• A modern IDE with built-in reference guide for instant productivity

The Jetpack SDK will replace the Jetpack 0.8 prototype over the coming months. For now we recommend that authors who wish to create simple extensions continue to use Jetpack 0.8. The popular and simple IDE available in 0.8 is being revamped with major enhancements for use with the SDK and will be available for developers in Q2 2010.

Full extensibility has been a keystone to the resounding success of Firefox add-ons and fosters the creativity that has fueled nearly 2 billion add-on downloads. In creating the Jetpack SDK, it was important to make add-ons more secure and easier to write, without restricting the generativity of the platform. That’s why the SDK is being built on a rock-solid base of standards, like CommonJS, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and includes an extensible library system. With the library system, developers can write and share a module that creates an API to enable easy access to any capability of the Firefox platform.

To see the SDK in action, watch Atul Varma, the Jetpack architect, give a tutorial. Or, read through the getting started guide.

If you were participating or following the early Jetpack prototypes, here’s an overview of what’s changed now that Jetpack SDK is slated for production use and will be fully supported by Firefox.

Get the Jetpack SDK

• Download & Get Started
• Read the 0.1 Release Notes
• If you got questions, head over to the Jetpack SDK FAQ

The Roadmap

Now that the underlying architecture has settled, we will work on the Jetpack SDK standard library of UI elements and capabilities to ensure that the most important APIs are covered. From this point to the 1.0 milestone we will be releasing updates every 4 to 6 weeks. The full roadmap is available here.

What Will Version 1.0 of the Jetpack SDK Look Like?

For Developers

The Jetpack SDK aims to provide the following features by the time we reach the 1.0 milestone and it is declared ready and fully supported by Firefox for production use. You can see the roadmap here.

• An easy to use, well documented set of APIs that lets you write Firefox add-ons using standard Web technology (Javascript, HTML5, and CSS).
• An integrated IDE that enables rapid add-on developement and code collaboration.
• Faster development cycle using the save-refresh model of the Web.
• A set of command-line tools that lets you package code written with the Jetpack SDK into XPIs that can run in Firefox, Thunderbird, and Firefox mobile, or as stand-alone applications.
• An extensible library system that, in addition to the built-in APIs provided in the SDK, allows anyone to create a sharable module that implements new APIs to expose anything in the powerful Mozilla platform.
• A brand new security model.

For Firefox Users

There’s not much to see yet for everyday Firefox users. Stay tuned for opportunities to try out new and exciting add-ons as developers begin to take advantage of the power and flexibility to deliver compelling new user experiences. Add-ons developed with the Jetpack SDK will feature:

• No need to restart Firefox to install add-ons.
• Add-ons are automatically compatible with all future versions of Firefox updates, so no need to wait for add-on compatability.
• Stronger and more easily understood security and privacy controls.
• Automatic add-on updates.

Participate

• Visit the Jetpack SDK Website
• Report a bug
• Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature.
• Discuss and debate in the Jetpack discussion group.
• Participate in our API design.
• Join us in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.

– Aza Raskin from the Jetpack Team

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Thanks to a good deal of feedback and a number of patches, we’re pleased to announce the release of Bespin Embedded 0.6.2, a release that’s almost entirely bugfixes. Big changes are lurking in Bespin’s repositories, however…

A couple of minor improvements made it into the “visible part” of 0.6.2: the new “tabstop” setting and the cursor now blinks. If you use 4 space tabs, for example, you can now set your editor to use 4 spaces for tabs by setting tabstop to 4. Note that the rebooted Bespin editor does not yet support tab characters.

We squashed bugs in painting, syntax highlighting, text selection, undo/redo and more. If you’re using Bespin Embedded, you’ll certainly want this release.

The “invisible part” of what’s there in the code now is all of the work we’ve been doing to get ready for our beta testing of the new Bespin editor-in-the-cloud. The 0.6.2 tag of the bespinclient repository includes a whole bunch of improvements all over the application. Stay tuned, and if you’re interested in being an early adopter and diving into the Bespin code a bit, sign up for the bespin-core mailing list, where we’ll be announcing the test releases first.

As always, the new Bespin Embedded releases are available from ftp.mozilla.org.

– Kevin Dangoor, on behalf of the Bespin team

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Check out our post about the future of Personas on the Add-on Blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/03/03/the-future-of-personas/

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After two rounds of voting and nearly 3,000 votes, you have decided and bestowed the People’s Choice Award in the Home Tab Design Challenge to Yatrik Solanki.

Yatrik describes his concept as “Identities, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart search box define my concept. And it’s cool!”:

Honorable mentions go to Chad Pommiss, the NorCal Design Council (M. Hanratty, A. Abut, D. Goldstein, J. Kaufman), Alecsandru Grigoriu and Amine Zafri.

Congratulations to all participants, our First Round Top 10 concepts and the winner of the People’s Choice Award in this Design Challenge!

Our jury, consisting of the Firefox UX team (Alex Faaborg, Alexander Limi, Jennifer Boriss and Stephen Horlander) are now going through all submissions and will bestow a series of honors around March 15th. Stay tuned!

If your concept was part of the top 10 finalists, we will follow up via email and let you know what your score was and forward you the feedback which the wider community left for your concept. We also randomly selected 5 people from the pool of confirmed voters who submitted at least one vote and contact them via email regarding our swag bag.

- Pascal on behalf of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Team

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We’ve recruited for persona approvers for the past few months and I realized (thanks to Mary) that we never explained what’s involved in being a personas approver!

The responsibilities of being an approver are pretty simple: you review personas! We have a list of all unreviewed personas that have not been approved:

Our approvers work their way through the list every day.

To review a persona, you click on the ‘Administer’ link and view the full-size images. If the persona meets the review guidelines, you click ‘Approve’. If not you click ‘Reject’ and enter a reason (image is excessively stretched, offensive language, etc). You can also flag the persona for legal review if it is difficult to tell if the persona meets the review guidelines.

Speaking of which, here is an abbreviated version of the review guidelines:

The only things we should be reviewing for are:

• sexual, inappropriate, or offensive content;
• violence, war or weaponry images, or Nazi images;
• defamatory content;
• references to online gambling;
• general housekeeping that is readily apparent without further research.

You can spend as much or as little time as you want reviewing personas, it’s up to you (of course, we’d love for you to spend some time each day reviewing ). The only requirement we have for becoming an approver is that you’ve created at least one persona.

Interested in becoming an approver? Send an email to personas@mozilla.com with your username for getpersonas.com and we’ll get you setup!

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On the back of our announcement from Friday, we finished the first round of voting in the Mozilla Labs “The Home Tab” Design Challenge, identified the Top 10 concepts and moved them into a second round of voting.

In the second round we will once again ask the wider community to cast their vote – this time on three randomly selected concepts out of the top 10. Voting will be open until midnight March 1st. [more...]

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Just three days ago we announced the voting for the Design Challenge “People’s Choice Awards”. Within 72 hours, more than 1,400 people registered to choose, each voting on their five randomly selected concepts of the nearly 50 submissions. [more...]

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