August 28th, 2010
The Alpha release of the next major version of Fennec is now available for Android and Nokia N900 users to download and test. Fennec (codename for Firefox mobile) is the first mobile browser to offer add-ons and is built on the same technology that powers desktop Firefox. The latest version of Fennec builds on the rich set of features from the previous release and makes it easier for you to bring your Firefox experience with you anywhere.
Fennec Alpha now creates one fluid Web experience between desktop and mobile devices by providing Firefox Sync built-in into the browser, which provides seamless access to Awesome Bar browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs.
The main focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness to user actions. This is being implemented using two major technologies, “Electrolysis” and “Layers.” This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video. We’re also working to optimize these actions using the hardware-accelerated graphics rendering capabilities showing up in today’s mobile devices.
Watch the demo:
This first Alpha release of Fennec for Android is an exciting first step in bringing browser choice and customization, along with a seamless Web experience across devices, to a leading open mobile platform. Now, developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions of devices.
See the release notes for a full list of features with this release.
We value your feedback and will work to incorporate it in future versions of the browser, so please test Fennec Alpha and let us know what you think.
Stay tuned for updates in our newsletter.
August 28th, 2010
By Jan Dittrich, João Menezes, Ryan Bubinski, Zach Williams
Key Learnings – Status Quo and Gaps
Team 1 sent out a questionnaire form to all those who had participated in any Mozilla Labs Design Challenges. Thirty-seven past participants answered – thanks to all of them for supporting us!
Many of the participants had either a design (14) or Computer Science (10) academic background. In analyzing our outreach we had some interesting findings: The majority of participants found out about the Challenges through the Mozilla Labs website, others found out through blogs, news websites, or through their university. Though Twitter is supposed to be a popular and widely used service among designers or programmers, only 3 got to know about the challenge via twitter!
The majority of participants valued video as an efficient medium of explaining the Design Challenge brief, and almost everybody was satisfied with the information they found on the Mozilla Labs website concerning the Challenge.
93% felt they received good support from Mozilla. When asked about the evaluation of the submitted designs, 73% found the evaluation to be transparent and fair. Those who felt otherwise noted an inconsistency in judges providing feedback, while others expressed concerns on the voting system for submitted designs being gamed by participants recruiting friends to vote for particular submissions.
Since work in UX covers a lot of different topics we were interested if people worked in teams – less than a third did so which means that those who did the work alone are the majority but teamwork is nevertheless a common way of work that needs to be considered in our concepts.
As it would be great if people would carry on with their involvement in mozilla projects, we asked if they carried on with their work on the designs after the callenge. One third did this in one or the other way. Some tried to implement an extension while others said that the ideas they developed were integrated in other designs later.
When asked whether they would be interested in participating in future Design Challenges, 89% responded positively, and 84% responded they would recommend participation to their friends or colleagues.
The last point to talk about is a very important one: What were the motivations of the participants?
The most common answer (several could be given) was “furthering personal knowledge” (87%), followed by “Recognition” (56%). Analysing coherences in our data we found out that Resume-Building was more common among design students than among the ones with other academic backgrounds.
August 28th, 2010
I’ve been asked a few times what I think Mozilla can do to respond to the suffering caused by the floods in Pakistan. The answer is that I don’t know. I don’t know what particular expertise Mozilla has that can be put to use in a way that actually helps people. CrisisCommons works to develop technical solutions so that people can help, particularly to enable information sharing:
CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who help people in times and places of crisis. If you can use the Internet, a word processor, a cell phone or any other kind of technology, you can help. Right now virtually online or during one of our many CrisisCamps around the world!
CrisisCamps are held to bring focused attention on particular disasters. There’s one tonight in Silicon Valley focused on the Pakistan floods. Here’s the description:
Non-techies with laptops are needed do Pashtun translation, data entry, blogging, text editing, classifying messages, user-interface testing, collating web-based news updates, etc. We will also create technical tiger teams to provide Silicon Valley-located expertise to CrisisCommons projects managed by camps around the world. These projects involve mapping, databases, crowd-sourcing, coding, user-centered design, etc. This requires techies with laptops. Range of coding skills (python), geo-, and user interface skills are required.
I plan to go — anyone else?
August 28th, 2010
I have a quick and easy tutorial you can all do (as long as you are on Facebook, that is). I have started up my own fan page for Firefox Facts and my other projects – and here is how you can make sure you do not miss any of the awesome tips, links, videos or anything else I post there for you.
Step #1
The first thing you have to do is go log into Facebook – and visit this link (I don’t yet have enough fans to have a personal short URL yet).
http://www.facebook.com/MitchProjects
Step #2
Next, you will want to click the “Like” button at the top of the page.
Step #3
Enjoy! This Facebook Fan Page is not for me – it is for you. So if you have any questions, comments or just want to say, “Hey there!” please feel free. Also the fan page is still a work in progress, so if there is something you would like to see there (such as a certain application or ability) let me know and I will try to make it happen.
For the last four years, I have absolutely enjoyed providing the over 7,000 subscribers of Firefox Facts with the best Firefox add-ons, the coolest themes, the neatest hacks and more. This is just one more place we socialize, connect and make this resource even better. Thanks for the future, “Like” and hope you stop in and say, “Hi!” too.
Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!
© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
August 27th, 2010
- The panel API creates floating modal popups that appear on top of web content and browser chrome and persist until dismissed by users or programs.
- The clipboard API allows callers to interact with the system clipboard, setting and retrieving its contents.
- The notifications API allows you to display transient toaster- or Growl-style messages to the user.
- Firefox is now the default application for cfx.
- The directories contained in XPI files created by cfx xpi now have correct permission attributes.
- Discuss, debate, and get help in the discussion forum.
- Chat via IRC in #jetpack on irc.mozilla.org.
- Submit a bug report.
- Grab the source code and fix a bug or add a feature.
August 27th, 2010
We’ve just released a new Labs experiment: Doctor JS, a web service providing type inference for JavaScript, written by our amazing summer intern Dimitris Vardoulakis. Brendan Eich has more technical background about Doctor JS and our many static analysis projects at Mozilla. Check it out!
August 26th, 2010
In late 2006 Mozilla made a decision to move to the mercurial distributed version control system. Today most Mozilla projects are available in a publicly accessible mercurial instance. This has served Mozilla well for many years, however many of us in Labs have watched the developments and rising popularity of git with interest. In response to a growing number of requests from the community, we have decided to start mirroring all of the current Mozilla Labs experiments to github!
Github is a very popular social coding site, who provide git hosting in addition to several tools to support collaboration, discovery, and visualization of software projects. Our hope is that by hosting projects there we’ll make it easier for more folks in the community to find, follow, and work on Labs projects.
What’s happening to mercurial?
For now, this mirroring is very much an experiment. The Labs mercurial repositories will remain the primary place where commits are pushed. So as far as mercurial is concerned, nothing changes. That said, some projects are considering moving to git as the primary host for code, and conversations with the community are ongoing.
How can I contribute via github?
For now, the process is very lightweight. Simply fork the project that you’re interested in contributing and issue a pull request. These requests will be treated as “review requests” and will be need to be merged back into the primary repository by someone with commit access.
How’s it work?
Mirroring from mercurial to git is trivial given the availability of hg-git, a mercurial extension which allows you to interact with a remote git repo directly from the mercurial client. Leveraging this extensions, we pull from mercurial and push to github. By also using the Github API, it’s very simple to automate the batch creation of multiple repositories and make it simple to add new repositories to the mirroring as new projects are launched. The scripts that we use to perform the mirroring are themselves hosted on github.
What’s Next?
Several folks have kicked around ideas on how to improve the submission flow, including streamlining the creation of review requests by automatically converting pull requests on github into formal Bugzilla review requests. Some people from the community are already exploring these ideas, so stay tuned.
Happy forking!
August 26th, 2010
Need a quick way to go back to web pages you have already visited? The TidyFox add-on for Firefox will help you get the job done, and will also organize your visited pages into subpages too.
Once installed, TidyFox adds two new menu bar buttons. One is to go back and visit your most visited websites and the other is to visit your most recently visited websites.
As you can see from the picture above, each webpage in the TidyFox menu is organized by the URL. So, if you visited my about page on Firefox Facts, you would see it listed under www.firefoxfacts.com. So, as you can see the add-on does what it set out to do, bravo!
Now, as for the bad side of things – I found two annoyances. One thing was that it picked up on Google ads for some reason, giving me a chance go to visit doubleclick.net. There should be some sort of filtering in place for this I would say. Also, when you click on the “Most Visited” text or the “Last Visited” text in the menus you are taken to a weird page that has little to nothing to do with Firefox. The least they could do is link to Firefox Facts. (Just kidding!) I would like to see a more useful use of this link, if it is going to be a link at all.
Give it a shot, and let me know what you think. You can learn more about the TidyFox extension at tidyfox.com and pick it up to use at the Firefox Add-ons website.
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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
August 25th, 2010
The latest update to Firefox 4 Beta is now available with new features that offer more control over your Web experience. This release lets you own and control your personal Web experience by syncing your data across devices, and by helping you organize your tabs in order to juggle and prioritize your busy online life.
What new features are in this Firefox 4 Beta update?
Stay in Sync
Fire fox Sync makes your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs accessible across multiple computers and mobile devices. Now, with Firefox Sync, you can customize and take your Web experiences with you anywhere, even on your iPhone with Firefox Home.
Firefox Sync encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server and does not track your travels throughout the Web. This means that you never have to compromise your privacy for the convenience of using Firefox Sync.
When downloading or updating to the latest version of the Firefox 4 beta, you will automatically be prompted to create a Firefox Sync account. You can watch this video for a step-by-step guide:
Visit the Firefox Sync page for more information on how to use Firefox Sync. For an engineer’s perspective, see Mike Connor’s post.
A Tab Revolution
When tabs were first introduced, the feature changed the way people browse the Web. To continue the tab revolution, the beta now includes Firefox Panorama (formerly Tab Candy) as a new approach to tab management that makes it easy to organize and multi-task while on the Web. If you juggle many open tabs for work, shopping, music, social sites, vacation planning and more, you can easily group and prioritize those tabs any way you want. With one keystroke you can see an overview of all tabs to quickly locate and switch between tabs or groups of tabs.
See Aza Raskin’s blog post for more details.
Better feedback, a better browser
As always, Firefox 4 Beta includes a Feedback Add-on with Mozilla Labs Test Pilot, which enable you to take part in anonymous studies. You can choose to opt-out of any or all studies by managing your settings in the Feedback button.
We value feedback from our beta testers and ask for continued feedback on Firefox 4 Beta. The feedback is used to help improve future Firefox Beta releases.
Firefox 4 Beta testers will receive automatic updates, so stay tuned for the next release in the coming weeks.
August 25th, 2010
As many of you already know, last week we landed Sync for Firefox 4, and I’m really excited that it will be a part of the next Firefox 4 Beta update.
Sync has been on our radar for a very long time. One of the original goals for Places was to enable this type of add-on, and Weave was one of the first Mozilla Labs prototypes released, near the end of 2007. We’ve been through a number of changes since that time, largely focused on building a stable, scalable service. I moved over from the Firefox team just over a year ago to help make it something we could ship to all of our Firefox users.
Sync is important to me as the first step in evolving how users think about and interact with web services. The dominant model for services right now generally involves trading your personal data (who your friends are, the emails you send, the websites you visit) in exchange for useful services (social networking, bookmark sync, etc). For the vast majority of users, the real decision is simply “which company gets my data?”. That’s not really a great definition of choice.
Sync took a different tack, and started off with “what if we didn’t want the data? What if even having that data was a failure state?” That led us to cryptography. Sync uses strong crypto to encode your data before it is uploaded. The secret phrase is the key to this encryption, and we never send that anywhere to keep your data secure. This really means that Mozilla can’t see your data, giving you full control. (Which is great, because we really don’t want it!)
What’s most exciting is that this is just the first step. Services is a new place for Mozilla to compete and help shape the future of the Web. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but getting Sync into Firefox was a great first step. We really hope users love it as much as we do.
— Mike Connor, on behalf of the Firefox Sync team