Pascal Finette: An Open Letter to Fast Company: Drop the Sexism |
Dear Chris Gayomali, Dear Fast Company-Team,
I am extremely disappointed seeing you, a publication which self-proclaims to "inspire a new breed of innovative and creative thought leaders who are actively inventing the future of business", perpetuating a view of the world and fellow entrepreneurs which is sexist and one-dimensional.
Your recent article on Birch Box, the phenomenally successful ecommerce startup founded by Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna starts out with the following sentence:
"Birchbox’s co–CEO, wearing a dark monochrome dress that provides an understated canvas for her impeccable jewelry game [...]"
Reducing Katia to her "impeccable jewelry game" is offensive and sexist. I am sure you would never start out an article about a male founder with a statement about his "impeccable tie game".
Writing this as a white male - it offends me that you (and many of your colleagues) reduce my women entrepreneur colleagues to their choice of fashion instead of their incredible achievements.
Please live up to your motto and see people for what they do - not their gender, ethnicity or any other superficial distinction.
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The Mozilla Blog: First Panasonic Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS Debut Worldwide |
The first Panasonic VIERA Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS are now available in Europe and will be available worldwide in the coming months.
“Through our partnership with Mozilla and the openness and flexibility of Firefox OS, we have been able to create a more user friendly and customizable TV UI. This allows us to provide a better user experience for our consumers providing a differentiator in the Smart TV market,” said Masahiro Shinada, Director of the TV Business Division at Panasonic Corporation.
The Panasonic 2015 Smart TV lineup includes these models powered by Firefox OS: CR850, CR730, CX800, CX750, CX700 and CX680 (models vary by country).
“We’re happy to partner with Panasonic to bring the first Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS to the world,” said Andreas Gal, Mozilla CTO. “With Firefox and Firefox OS powered devices, users can enjoy a custom and connected Web experience and take their favorite content (apps, videos, photos, websites) across devices without being locked into one proprietary ecosystem or brand.”
Panasonic Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS are optimized for HTML5 to provide strong performance of Web apps and come with a new intuitive and customizable user interface which allows quick access to favorite channels, apps, websites and content on other devices. Through Mozilla-pioneered WebAPIs, developers can leverage the flexibility of the Web to create customized and innovative apps and experiences across connected devices.
Firefox OS is the first truly open mobile platform built entirely on Web technologies, bringing more choice and control to users, developers, operators and hardware manufacturers.
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The Servo Blog: This Week In Servo 32 |
In the past three weeks, we merged 141 pull requests.
Samsung OSG published another blog post by Lars and Mike. This one focuses on Servo’s support for embedding via the CEF API.
The Rust upgrade of doom is finally over. This brings us up to a Rust version from late April. We’ve now cleared all of the pre-1.0 breaking changes!
Firefox Nightly now has experimental support for components written in Rust. There’s a patch up to use Servo’s URL parser, and another team is working on media libraries.
border-collapse, a significant and painful part of implementing tables fully.Accept header../mach grep for speedy searching of the Servo tree.Having previously conquered rectangles, Servo’s WebGL engine is now capable of drawing a triangle inside a rectangle:
We’ve switched from Critic to Reviewable and it’s working pretty well.
Mozillians will be gathering in Whistler, BC next month, and we’ve started planning out how the Servo team will participate. We’re going to run Rust and Servo training sessions, as well as meetings with other teams to plan for the shared future of Gecko and Servo.
Aside from those ongoing topics, here’s the breakdown by date of what we’ve discussed:
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Daniel Stenberg: RFC 7540 is HTTP/2 |
HTTP/2 is the new protocol for the web, as I trust everyone reading my blog are fully aware of by now. (If you’re not, read http2 explained.)
Today RFC 7540 was published, the final outcome of the years of work put into this by the tireless heroes in the HTTPbis working group of the IETF. Closely related to the main RFC is the one detailing HPACK, which is the header compression algorithm used by HTTP/2 and that is now known as RFC 7541.
The IETF part of this journey started pretty much with Mike Belshe’s posting of draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00 in February 2012. Google’s SPDY effort had been going on for a while and when it was taken to the httpbis working group in IETF, where a few different proposals on how to kick off the HTTP/2 work were debated.
The first “httpbis’ified” version of that document (draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00) was then published on November 28 2012 and the standardization work began for real. HTTP/2 was of course discussed a lot on the mailing list since the start, on the IETF meetings but also in interim meetings around the world.
In Zurich, in January 2014 there was one that I only attended remotely. We had the design team meeting in London immediately after IETF89 (March 2014) in the Mozilla offices just next to Piccadilly Circus (where I took the photos that are shown in this posting). We had our final in-person meetup with the HTTP team at Google’s offices in NYC in June 2014 where we ironed out most of the remaining issues.
In between those two last meetings I published my first version of http2 explained. My attempt at a lengthy and very detailed description of HTTP/2, including describing problems with HTTP/1.1 and motivations for HTTP/2. I’ve since published eleven updates.
The last draft update of HTTP/2 that contained actual changes of the binary format was draft-14, published in July 2014. After that, the updates were in the language and clarifications on what to do when. There are some functional changes (added in -16 I believe) for like when which sort of frames are accepted that changes what a state machine should do, but it doesn’t change how the protocol looks on the wire.
RFC 7540 was published on May 15th, 2015
I’ve truly enjoyed having had the chance to be a part of this. There are a bunch of good people who made this happen and while I am most certainly forgetting key persons, some of the peeps that have truly stood out are: Mark, Julian, Roberto, Roy, Will, Tatsuhiro, Patrick, Martin, Mike, Nicolas, Mike, Jeff, Hasan, Herve and Willy.
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Mozilla Science Lab: Get involved: Contributorship Badges project call – May 20 |
Since our launch two years ago, we’ve been working on prototypes to not only address meaty problems in the research space, but also show how the web and open technology can further scientific tools. We believe there’s a tremendous amount one can learn about reuse and working collaboratively through open source projects, and want to (more explicitly) test that out as we develop our next prototype. On May 20th (next Wednesday) at 11am ET, I’ll be hosting a call for anyone interested in contributing to the Contributorship Badges project. We hope you’ll join us.
WHAT: Call for anyone interested in helping build Contributorship Badges for Science
WHEN: May 20, 11am ET
PAD: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/sciencelab-project-call-may20
We want to help researchers learn how to leverage the web by building within the open source community. By encouraging participation in an ongoing project, more researchers will experience best practices in open source and learn how to run their own projects in a way that engages the community and builds skills. This builds on a core belief part of our pedagogy here at Mozilla, that the most transformative moments often come from working on things that matter, building them together, and empowering others to get involved..
By learning best practices in open source, we can foster a community in research that shares skills, increases code quality and encourages discoverability and use through collaboration.
The Contributorship Badges project was announced late last year as a collaboration testing out the use of badges as a standardized digital credential for the work done by each author on an academic article. Since then, we’ve starting building a prototype that uses Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure to store and issue badges to an author’s ORCID (a unique researcher identifier) based on their contribution to a paper published by BioMed Central (BMC) or Public Library of Science (PLoS). The badges awarded are based on the 14-role author contribution ‘taxonomy’ being developed by the Wellcome Trust, Digital Science and others.
I’ve worked on setting up the bare-bones skeleton and general plan of this project, including getting started and contributing guidelines. Next wednesday, I’ll be hosting a call for anyone who wants to get involved where I’ll go over what’s been done and where people can jump in. I plan on spending majority of my time on badges mentoring new contributors and reviewing patches.
The Mozilla Science Lab will still be leading development on the prototype. I’d like to see more researchers contributing code, design, and other suggestions and experiencing being a part of an open source project.
This call is open to designers, developers, researchers, publishers — pretty much anyone interested in participating and learning more about the project. We could use all sorts of input on this (beyond just code), so if you’re new to open source, come join us – we’d love to have you involved. We want to give researchers a painless way to experience open, iterative workflow and learn how open source can help their community.
Building Contributorship Badges for Science has the potential to be a great learning experience for us. I hope you’ll join us as we learn and build together!
http://mozillascience.org/get-involved-contributorship-badges-call-may-20/
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Michael Kaply: First Beta of CCK2 2.1 Available |
The first beta of the next CCK2 is available here.
This upgrade has three main areas of focus:
Removing support for the distribution directory was a major internal change, so I would appreciate any testing you can do.
My plan is to finish support for a few Firefox 38 specific features and then release next week.
https://mike.kaply.com/2015/05/14/first-beta-of-cck2-2-1-available/
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Soledad Penades: “The disconnected ensemble”, at JSConf.Budapest |
Here I am in Budapest (for the first time ever
http://soledadpenades.com/2015/05/14/the-disconnected-ensemble-at-jsconf-budapest/
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Mozilla Science Lab: #mozsprint Projects: The BioUno Project |
This guest post is by Bruno Kinoshita and Ioannis Moutsatsos, leads on BioUno, one of the projects you’ll get the opportunity to jump into live at #mozsprint, June 4 & 5.
Scientific software is used in physical, environmental, earth and life sciences on a daily basis to make important discoveries. Due to its highly specialized nature, scientific software is frequently developed by scientists with deep domain knowledge, but not necessarily deep knowledge in technologies and tools used by software engineers and developers that build more mainstream applications. As a result, scientific software tends to be highly customized, less flexible, complex, poorly tested, less documented and even less maintained in the long run [1].
Many issues plaguing scientific software have been discussed in the literature, but the ability to reproduce computational discoveries has taken center stage in recent years [2]. The term reproducible computational research has been coined, and used as an umbrella concept for identifying and proposing solutions to issues that affect the reproducibility of computational scientific research.
Although the challenge of reproducible computational research is multi-dimensional, some of the proposed solutions are rooted in existing, well established and robust software engineering solutions such as:
In addition, the organized and homogeneous tagging of scientific data with metadata (data about data) has been a well-established foundation for information retrieval and discovery. The development of consistent metadata and controlled vocabularies is another important component to searching, finding and using scientific data in a manner consistent with reproducible research.
Finally, (and to some degree an obvious requirement) reproducible computational research depends on the ability of other scientists or research experts to freely access the source code and scientific data used in generating new computational discoveries. These free and open access concepts have been championed by many in the software development community under the umbrella of the open-source community. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community [3].
The BioUno open-source project seeks to improve scientific application automation, performance, reproducibility, usability, and management by applying and extending software engineering (SE) best practices in the field of scientific research applications. Deliverables from the project have found a variety of applications in life-science research (bioinformatics, genetics, drug discovery).
BioUno has pioneered the use of continuous integration tools and techniques to create reproducible computational pipelines and to manage computer clusters in support of scientific research applications.
In addition, BioUno has adopted a variety of Software Engineering best practices, to achieve its objectives:
Finally, BioUno strives to minimize the open source proliferation problem [4]. While the BioUno project covers a broad range of technologies and tools, it tries to avoid the Open-Source proliferation problem by actively contributing to existing open-source projects rather than releasing or starting a new project.
The BioUno project is participating in the 2015 Mozilla Science Global Sprint (MSGS 2015) with three main objectives.
Check out our etherpad with our ideas, issues and more information for the sprint. You can help us with suggestions, documentation, coding or testing – so you can help us even if you are not a programmer.
[1] [Computational science: Error… why scientific programming does not compute](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/467775a.html)(Zeeya Merali, Nature: 2010)
[2] [Scientific Reproducibility through Computational Workflows and Shared Provenance Representations](http://www.evernote.com/l/AJ8x2KJTSTlGmbrFDKXSR709G2wRjbN32Tk/) (Yolanda Gil, NSF Workshop: 2010)
[3] Wikipedia on [Open source](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) (accessed 5/7/2015)
[4] [The real Open-Source proliferation problem](http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/10/22/open-source-proliferation-problem/) (Mike Linksvayer, Blog 2013)
http://mozillascience.org/mozsprint-projects-the-biouno-project/
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About:Community: Announcing the MDN Fellows! |
The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is one of the most frequently used resources for web developers for all things documentation and code. This year we’re making the rich content on MDN available to even more people. We’re developing beginning learning materials as well as a template (which we’re calling “Content Kits”) to make preparing presentations on web topics much easier.
As part of this effort, we also launched the MDN Fellowship last quarter. This is a 7-week pilot contribution program for advanced web developers to expand their expertise through curriculum development on MDN. MDN Fellows are experts that will continue to grow their skills and impact by teaching others about web technologies. Specifically, the Fellows will be developing Content Kits, a collection of resources about specific topics related to web development to empower technical topic presenters.
After a lengthy process where we solicited applications and involved reviewers from across Mozilla, we’re delighted to announce our inaugural MDN Fellowship Fellows! Here they are in their own words – feel free to Tweet them a congratulations!
Steve Kinney, Curriculum Fellow (Colorado, U.S.A.) – @stevekinney
I am an instructor at the Turing School of Software and Design in Denver, Colorado, where I teach open web technologies. Prior to Turing, I hailed from the great state of New Jersey and was a New York City public school teacher for seven years, where I taught special education, science, and — eventually — JavaScript to students in high-need schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I have a master’s degree in special education. I’ve spoken at EmberConf and RailsConf, and will be speaking at JSConf US at the end of the month. In my copious free time, I teach classes on web development with Girl Develop It.
Istv'an “Flaki” Szmozs'anszky, Service Workers Fellow (Budapest, Hungary) – @slsoftworks
I’ve been following Service Workers’ journey since before it was cool as a web developer and longtime contributor to Mozilla. Known as “Flaki” in the community, I’ve been evangelizing new technologies to display the Open Web as a first-class citizen. As Service Workers seemingly plays a key role in this battle, there is no better place to do this than at Mozilla, the most adamant proponent of the Open Web. During my Fellowship I hope to further previous work on MDN’s offline support, while helping in the explorations into Firefox OS’s reimagined new architecture.
Ben Boyle, Test The Web Forward Fellow (Upper Caboolture, Australia) – @bboyle
I’m a front-end developer from Australia, making websites since 1998 primarily for the Queensland Government. Lots of forms, templates and QA. I also mentor front-end web development students at Thinkful. I got interested in automated quality control using custom stylesheets and scripts in Opera, then YUItest, then inspired by ThoughtWorks developers on a project when they introduced selenium and automated acceptance tests in the browser. I’m excited to be helping Test The Web Forward as an opportunity to both learn and share. Because everything runs off browser. Love the latest front-end frameworks? They don’t exist without web standards. I cannot sufficiently appreciate the work so many people have done creating a solid foundation for everything we (as web developers) often take for granted. I am really glad to have this chance to give back!
Vignesh Shanmugam, Web App Performance Fellow (Bangalore, India) – @_vigneshh
I’m a Web Developer from India focused on building the Web Performance platform at Flipkart, one of Asia’s leading e-commerce sites. I am also responsible for advocating front-end engineering best practises, developing tools that help identify performance bottlenecks, and analyzing metrics. I am an Open Source contributor with a deep research background in front-end performance and am happy to be a part of the MDN Fellowship program to contribute to MDN’s Web App Performance curriculum.
Greg Tatum, WebGL Fellow (Oklahoma, U.S.A) – @tatumcreative
My background is in contemporary sculpture, aquarium exhibit design, marketing, animation, and web development: in short, it is all over the place 
But the central guiding principle behind my work is to find the middle ground between the technical and creative, and explore it to see what emerges. I am a Senior Web Developer at Cubic, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based creative branding agency where I help create rich experiences for tourism and destinations. I applied for the MDN Fellowship because I’m passionate about the open web and inspired by the possibilities of using 3D for new, richer experiences online with the potential reach that WebGL can have. I really enjoy helping to build the creative coding community and hope to make it even easier for more people to get involved with my own passion of exploring creative code.
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/05/14/mdnfellowsannouncement/
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Air Mozilla: Quality Team (QA) Public Meeting |
This is the meeting where all the Mozilla quality teams meet, swap ideas, exchange notes on what is upcoming, and strategize around community building and...
https://air.mozilla.org/quality-team-qa-public-meeting-20150513/
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Emma Irwin: Participation Team Heartbeat #1 – Demos! |
As shared on the recent Participation Call, the Participation ‘Team’ is starting to work in heartbeats – mirroring the success of the Mozilla Foundation Team working ‘agile and open’. We just completed our first heartbeat, which included evaluation of the Heartbeat process and the new tool we’ll use to bring community into the center.
As you can see from the Heartbeat ‘life cycle’: Demo is an important milestone of evaluation and measurement prior to starting the next one. Like the Webmaker team, we will be inviting contributors, and streaming our Demos on Air Mozilla. ‘Hearbeat #1 was about finding our feet in the process, so we apologize that demos for this cycle will come in the form of a blog post – but also hope you’re excited as we are about the potential of working, collaborating and demoing in the open for the next cycle.
For Heartbeat project on our team we asked the following questions for Demo:
Our call went well over one hour, and so I am providing the TL;DR version of Demos.
We established our process for this first heartbeat, built out user stories (contributor, team and project), evaluated the Mozilla Foundation tool, and others to ensure our decision was informed. Emphasis on leveraging the ‘open-ness’ of the Heartbeat tool, while improving and building better efficiency for project management by leveraging Github and Github issues.
Mark and Brian had a good discussion with community member Mak on the practicalities of rolling out a distributed leadership model that will empower the already strong community as it evolves. We set dates for a community meetup (5-7 June), and talked how the community and the Participation team will be supporting the Webmaker campaign kicking off in Bangladesh soon.
Working on betterment of planned community surveys to measure community health. Thanks to collaboration with the Metrics team and improved hypotheses, questions are improving to get better and more relevant answers. Plan is to go live by the end of the week. This is especially important in with recent changes to Regional Leadership.
Collected information about existing processes, assets and products relating to events. We don’t have a consistent way to measure events yet. We drafted a survey, an agenda template and a document that explains the template for re-usability. We have a busy May and June filled with meetups where we can test out new things.
This project was about identifying organizations outside of Mozilla who are doing incredible things with participation. We were especially focused on not the typical ‘big players’, or those who can’t be seen from silicon valley. We will be reaching out to the community and preparing them to identify and interview local orgs. Might be able to tie Marketpulse interviewing course into this effort. We are also building a Participation advisory board for well-known experts in participation, who we’ll be inviting to the Whistler work week in June.
Started the ball rolling for participation experiments in Africa. SUMO workshops, intro to SUMO and internships at Universities + Firefox OS launch and Webmaker Club initiative.
Initial impact was great, lots of momentum around Firefox OS, positive reception to workshops, and a re-energized Mozilla Senegal. Timing matters, more time to plan in advance would be good, especially across initiatives.
We used some time during the recent Indian community meetup to get ideas on what a product focused approach on Firefox for Android could look like in India. During a short workshop, we explored the product positioning, opportunities, challenges, and developed a series of personas that could be users. The next steps will involve exploring what a detailed set of experiments could be for this product in India.
Version 2! New release of App for collecting competitor phone data. Coming soon: release of supporting educational content, and refresh of existing training materials, supported by thoughful participation design and a new community manager , Akshay onboard (yay!). Work and planning to launch a 4 week participatory course ‘Interviewing User’ on the horizon, thanks to involvement of market research experts at Mozilla. Challenge compiling with communication channels in target markets.
Setup a participation infrastructure stack on AWS to meet our user stories for developers, community and support team. We can deploy in 1/4 of the time a new or newer version of an app. We learned that we can solidly build on best practices gathered within Mozilla, while working with volunteers in the open.
We tested an Actions to Impact workshop just last week at the Mozilla India Taskforce Meetup, many volunteers seemed to find the leadership workshop very useful, and used it throughout the weekend. Still to capture notes on leadership and capture the workshop facilitator’s guide.
Conversation between Rosana, William and Brian, as well as Reps team. Presented slide deck outlining the hypothesis for helping shape what comes next.
We want to better support communications, announcements about important issues in Mozilla, and make them more valuable for community, as well as a way to collect feedback. We recorded as many channels as we could, people saw many uses for this list and were enthusiastic. We learned that communities are more fragmented than we thought, lots of groups using lots of channels so communicating centrally is especially difficult. Also identifying NDA is challenging and complex. Volunteer members of this team doing a fantastic job.
Spoke with 25+ team leaders to get them thinking strategically about who they invite, which came with a letter from Chris Beard. Wrangled a final list. 98% are now booked for travel. Many hands make great work, a team effort with Brianna, Francisco and Brian. As a result of this, teams are thinking of volunteers in more strategic way and reasons behind invitations are clearer to all of community. We will continue to work on a plan for workweek & volunteers.
This project is two-fold: creating a system to bring experiments currently going on in the organization into the ‘Participation Lab’, and also tracking the experiments in a way that is beneficial to all. We are currently tracking 10 experiments, 7 focused and 3 distributed. People (Community and Staff) appear to feel supported, optimistic and grateful to have monitoring and support in goals, hypothesis and assistance measuring success. We will continue to track and offer support to move these along to their goals during the next heartbeat.
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Mark Banner: Using eslint alongside the Firefox Hello code base to help productivity |
On Firefox Hello, we recently added the eslint linter to be run against the Hello code base. We started of with a minimal set of rules, just enough to get us something running. Now we’re working on enabling more rules.
Since we enabled it, I feel like I’m able to iterate faster on patches. For example, if just as I finish typing I see something like:
I know almost immediately that I’ve forgotten a closing bracket and I don’t have to run anything to find out – less run-edit-run cycles.
Now I think about it, I’m realising it has also helped reduced the amount of review nits on my patches – due to trivial formatting mistakes being caught automatically, e.g. trailing white-space or missing semi-colons.
Talking about reviews, as we’re running eslint on the Hello code, we just have to apply the patch, and run our tests, and we automatically get eslint output:
Hopefully our patch authors will be running eslint before uploading the patch anyway, but this is an additional test, and a few less things that we need to look at during review which helps speed up that cycle as well.
I’ve also put together a global config file for eslint (see below), that I use for outside of the Hello code, on the rest of the Firefox code base (and other projects). This is enough, that, when using it in my editor it gives me a reasonable amount of information about bad syntax, without complaining about everything.
I would definitely recommend giving it a try. My patches feel faster overall, and my test runs are for testing, not stupid-mistake catching!
Want more specific details about the setup and advantages? Read on…
My Setup
For my setup, I’ve recently switched to using Sublime. I used to use Aquamacs (an emacs variant), but when eslint came along, the UI for real-time linting within emacs didn’t really seem great.
I use sublime with the SublimeLinter and SublimeLinter-contrib-eslint packages. I’m told other editors have eslint integration as well, but I’ve not looked at any of them.
You need to have eslint installed globally, or at least in your path, other than that, just follow the installation instructions given on the SublimeLinter page.
One configuration I change I did have to make to the global configuration:
Weekly Mozilla Reps call
{
"extensions":
[
"jsm",
"jsx",
"sjs"
]
}
This makes sure sublime treats the .jsm and .jsx files as javascript files, which amongst other things turns on eslint for those files.
Global Configuration
I’ve uploaded my global configuration to a gist, if it changes I’ll update it there. It isn’t intended to catch everything – there’s too many inconsistencies across the code base for that to be sensible at the moment. However, it does at least allow general syntax issues to be highlighted for most files – which is obviously useful in itself.
I haven’t yet tried running it across the whole code base via eslint on the command line – there seems to be some sort of configuration issue that is messing it up and I’ve not tracked it down yet.
Firefox Hello’s Configuration
The configuration files for Hello can be found in the mozilla-central source. There’s a few of these because we have both content and chrome code, and some of the content code is shared with a website that can be viewed by most browsers, and hence isn’t currently able to use all the es6 features, whereas the chrome code can. This is another thing that eslint is good for enforcing.
Our eslint configuration is evolving at the moment, as we enable more rules, which we’re tracking in this bug.
Any Questions?
Feel free to ask any questions about eslint or the setup in the comments, or come and visit us in #loop on irc.mozilla.org (IRC info here).
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Air Mozilla: Product Coordination Meeting |
Duration: 10 minutes This is a weekly status meeting, every Wednesday, that helps coordinate the shipping of our products (across 4 release channels) in order...
https://air.mozilla.org/product-coordination-meeting-20150513/
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Air Mozilla: The Joy of Coding (mconley livehacks on Firefox) - Episode 14 |
Watch mconley livehack on Firefox Desktop bugs!
https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-mconley-livehacks-on-firefox-episode-14/
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Compatibility update: Firefox 38 and 38.0.5 |
Following up on my previous post on Firefox 38 compatibility, I wanted to highlight an important change that I missed: in-content preferences. The preferences window is no more, and instead the main preferences UI is shown in a new tab. This only affects add-ons that overlay the preferences window, which should be rare.
Additionally, there’s an out-of-cycle release planned for June 2nd, which will go with version number 38.0.5. This is 38 with a few additions, which you can see in the release notes. These additions shouldn’t conflict with extensions compatible with 38, but it could conflict with complete themes. The new release is now available in the beta channel, so we recommend you test your add-ons on that version.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/13/compatibility-update-firefox-38-and-38-0-5/
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Mozilla Science Lab: Registration open for #mozsprint 2015! |
Join us as we learn to build projects helping researchers leverage the open web! Registration is now open with our second global sprint June 4-5, 2015. We could use your help to make this year’s #mozsprint bigger and better than last.
Ready to join us for two days of learning and building together? To register:
Can’t find a site near you? You can still join us remotely! Add your name under ‘Remote Participants’ at the bottom of the pad, and join in from anywhere.
http://mozillascience.org/registration-open-for-mozsprint-2015/
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Gervase Markham: Anonymity and the Secure Web |
Ben Klemens has written an essay criticising Mozilla’s moves towards an HTTPS web. In particular, he is worried about the difficulty of setting up an HTTPS website and the fact that (as he sees it) getting a certificate requires the disclosure of personal information. There were some misunderstandings in his analysis, so I wanted to add a comment to clarify what we are actually planning to do, and how we are going to meet his concerns.
However, he wrote it on Medium. Medium does not have its own login system; it only permits federated login using Twitter or Facebook. Here’s the personal information I would have to give away to Medium (and the powers I would have to give it) in order to comment on his essay about the problems Mozilla are supposedly causing by requiring people to give away personal information:
Don’t like that? That’s OK, I could use Facebook login, if I was willing to give away:
So I’ll have to comment here and hope he sees it. (Anyone who has decided the tradeoffs on Medium are worth it could perhaps post the URL in a comment for me.)
The primary solution to his issues is Let’s Encrypt. With Let’s Encrypt, you will be able to get a cert, which works in 99%+ of browsers anyone uses, without needing to supply any personal information or to pay, and all at the effort of running a single command on the command line. That is, the command line of the machine (or VM) that you have rented from the service provider and to whom you gave your credit card details and make a monthly payment to put up your DIY site. That machine. And the cert will be for the domain name that you pay your registrar a yearly fee for, and to whom you have also provided your personal information. That domain name.
If you have a source of free, no-information-required server hosting and free, no-information-required domain names (as Ben happens to for his Caltech Divinity School example), then it’s reasonable to say that you are a little inconvenienced if your HTTPS certificate is not also free and no-information-required. But most people doing homebrew DIY websites aren’t in that position – they have to rent such things. Once Let’s Encrypt is up and running, the situation with certificates will actually be easier and more anonymous than that with servers or domain names.
“Browsers no longer supporting HTTP” may well never happen, and it’s a long way off if it does. But insofar as the changes we do make are some small infringement on your right to build an insecure website, see it as a civic requirement, like passing a driving test. This is a barrier to someone just getting in a car and driving, but most would suggest it’s reasonable given the wider benefit to society of training those in control of potentially dangerous technology. Given the Great Cannon and similar technologies, which can repurpose accesses to any website as a DDOS tool, there are no websites which “don’t need to be secure”.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/9fUjmhZHNSk/
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John O'Duinn: Interviews about “Work from home” policies at Facebook, Virgin and yes, Yahoo! |
When I talk about “remoties”, I frequently get asked my thoughts on Yahoo’s now (in)famous “no more work-from-home” policy.
Richard Branson (Virgin, link to first video) and the separate comments from Jackie Reses (Yahoo, 2.27 into the link to second video) confirm what I’d heard from multiple unofficial mutterings – that Yahoo’s now (in)famous “no more work from home” decree was actually intended as a way to jolt the company culture into action.
I also liked Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook) comments about how a successful remote workplace depends on having clear measures of successful results. Rather then valuing someone by how many hours they are seen working in the office, instead it is better to have a company culture where you measure people by results. This echoes comments I’ve seen from Jason Fried in his “Remote” book, comments I’ve made in my “we are all remoties” presentations and which I’ve heard again and again from various long-term remote workers.
These two interviews discuss these points really well. The entire article is well worth a read, and both videos are only a few minutes long, so worth the quick watch.
Encouraging!
http://oduinn.com/blog/2015/05/13/interviews-about-work-from-home-policies/
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About:Community: Good Bye Firefox Affiliates; Hello Firefox Friends |
For 2015, one of Mozilla’s primary goals is to grow Firefox. In order to achieve the growth we are looking for we looked closely at all of our programs and channels to identify opportunities. We focused on how we can better leverage our most powerful differentiator; our global community of contributors, supporters and users. We quickly realized that Firefox Affiliates was limiting our community’s potential. We needed a program that allowed people to participate in spreading the word in a way that aligns with how people share on the Web today.
Firefox Affiliates in its current form was outdated. It was focused on banner creation that supporters could post to their sites/blogs to spread the word about Mozilla and it wasn’t built to be available on mobile. Today, the majority of Web users are consumers of content vs creators of content and a large percentage of people are consuming this content on a mobile device. These are two of the reasons why social media engagement took off so quickly. Sharing content is a simple action that anyone can take without having to go through the process of actually creating content to share and it’s easily accessible on a mobile device.
Some of the biggest brands in technology, retail and nonprofit industries are having huge success with word of mouth marketing programs all focused on making it really simple for fans, contributors and supporters to share content the way people consume it on the Web today.
We decided that our referral program needed to better reflect how people engage with content today. We did extensive research, talked to a number of companies, followed by a very thorough RFP process to learn more about word of mouth marketing programs and eventually select a partner. Volunteer contributors helped by demoing the top potential partners and providing feedback.
Once we dug in, we knew we were on the right track as our own research showed that the more people know about why we do what we do, the happier they are about using Firefox. And the happier users are about using Firefox the more inclined they are to tell other people and the more they know about us, the more they love us.
There is also industry research confirming the power of referral marketing:
Source: 2014 WOMMA Study
The data reinforces our need to introduce a new program that would arm our community with:
This is how Firefox Friends was born! Firefox Friends is our new social sharing program that offers a fresher, better way to show your support for Firefox and all things Mozilla.
With Firefox Friends, you’re at the forefront of our mission, sharing our latest news and announcements with the world. And much like Affiliates, you’re able to track your impact (but with even more stats & data) and get rewarded along the way! Plus Firefox Friends is available on mobile, so its really easy to participate from wherever you are.
It’s really easy to get started with Firefox Friends. Just go to friends.mozilla.org and sign up. You’ll be asked to give your email and create a password. We ask for the password just so you can keep track of your activities and see the impact you’re making along the way. Plus, this way we can recognize you for the great work you’re doing.
We need everyone’s help to ensure we are hitting our goals and growing the number of long-term relationships we hold. That is the key to our success. Firefox Friends will help us foster these long term relationships.
Sign up with Firefox Friends today. (friends.mozilla.org)
If you’re interested in contributing to Firefox Friends, please contact us firefoxfriends@mozilla.com.
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/05/12/shutting-down-firefox-affiliates/
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