Advancing Content: First Wave of Suggested Tiles Partners Go Live |
Next week, the Content Services team will be at dmexco in Cologne and I wanted to share an update about Content Services’ work ahead of the event. Last May, we announced “Suggested Tiles”, and during the summer, we went live with users of the American English (“en-US”) version of Firefox.
Since early August, we have been delivering promoted content provided by our first wave of partners including Yahoo, a number of top tier news titles including Fortune Magazine and Quartz, and mission-oriented partners such as the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
These partners are leaders in their categories, and we chose them for their ability to add value in Firefox. While we consider these to be commercial partnerships, we are not receiving money to show this content. That is why Firefox users see only the label, “Suggested”, next to these tiles, rather than “Sponsored” (at the moment, the only sponsored Tiles we are running are Directory Tiles, which we launched last November).
Excitingly, we’re seeing high engagement rates with the content in the new tab. We’re also learning about the variables in the experience, such as the breadth of an interest category, the frequency and pacing of content, and of course, the creative assets themselves, and how they affect the rate of engagement.
As I wrote in March, we’re here to improve the state of digital advertising, and we continue to examine opportunities throughout the space. One is increasing transparency across the industry: as well as making sure that users understand their experience, and how they control it, we’ve also provided functional details of how the Suggested Tiles experience is delivered, including how interest categories are defined. This is transparent for partners, and transparent for users.
If you’re going to be dmexco in Cologne next week, we would be very interested to learn more about your needs and discuss the opportunities that Tiles represent. I look forward to seeing you there.
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/09/10/first-wave-suggested-tiles-partners-live/
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Marco Zehe: Accessibility features in Firefox for iOS |
After nine months in development, Mozilla recently released a preview of Firefox for iOS to New Zealand, Austria and Australia, with it slowly rolling out to more select countries over the coming weeks. Firefox for iOS is bringing your synchronized bookmarks, history and other information associated with your Firefox account to the iOS platform. Moreover, it is also going to record pages you visit in your history and sync these back to your Firefox on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android devices.
From the start, we also made sure that Firefox for iOS supports multiple features of the iOS platform. Here are some highlights:
Firefox for iOS supports VoiceOver. Since Apple’s app store rules force us to use the Safari rendering engine, that is accessible anyway. But we also made sure the browser’s UI, Settings views and other features all talk well with VoiceOver. Moreover, we also implemented audio cues to indicate page load progress and finish. Those of you using NVDA might feel a certain familiarity with these sounds.
https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/09/10/accessibility-features-in-firefox-for-ios/
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Emily Dunham: Ansible: Conditional role dependencies |
I’ve recently been working on an Ansible role that applies to both Ubuntu and OSX hosts. It has some dependencies which are only needed on OSX. There doesn’t seem to be a central document on all the options available for solving this problem, so here are my notes.
http://edunham.net/2015/09/10/ansible_conditional_role_dependencies.html
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Mike Taylor: initTouchEvent is a rat's nest |
Reading my bugmail this morning, as one does, I came upon a comment by my colleague Hallvord in a bug about FoxNews video not working in Firefox for Android due to this cool error "Argument 10 of TouchEvent.initTouchEvent is not an object.".
(Arguably FoxNews video not working is a competitive advantage in the mobile browser market landscape. But I don't work in marketing.)
Alright, let's check the spec for initTouchEvent and see what's up. Oh wait, this method isn't specced. Coooool:
Some user agents implement an initTouchEvent method…The initTouchEvent method is not standardized and is superseded by the TouchEvent constructor.
So that's how we end up with awesome stuff like this, forever and ever and ever.
if (touchEvent && touchEvent.initTouchEvent) {
if (touchEvent.initTouchEvent.length == 0) { //chrome
touchEvent.initTouchEvent(a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i);
} else if ( touchEvent.initTouchEvent.length == 12 ) { //firefox
touchEvent.initTouchEvent(a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l);
} else { //iOS length = 18
touchEvent.initTouchEvent(a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r);
}
}
That probably looks like garbage on anything that isn't an iPad Pro, so here's a screenshot of the original.
Anyways kids, TouchEvent constructors are the future. We've got too many nests for rats as it is.
https://miketaylr.com/posts/2015/09/init-touch-event-is-a-rats-nest.html
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Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: CalECPA nears the finish line, to potential global benefits |
Earlier this year, we wrote about CalECPA (official name: SB 178), a bill in the state of California that would improve privacy protections for Internet users by requiring due process to ask for online communications data and metadata. This bill has been passed by the California legislature, and is now on its way to the Governor to be signed into law.
In some circumstances, we’d declare victory at this point. But other electronic privacy bills have advanced very far in the California political processes before, only to fail. So it’s not over yet. Fortunately, the scale of support for the legislation in this version is greater than it has ever been, both inside and outside government. We’re hopeful it can succeed this time.
It is important that it passes. California privacy law needs to catch up with other countries and other U.S. states (including Texas, Maine, and Utah). Federal law in the U.S. needs to follow suit. In too many areas, the United States is still applying privacy law written decades ago, long before smartphones were introduced, even before the ubiquity of personal computing devices at any scale. Old law doesn’t always equate to bad law. We rely on a fundamental document, the Constitution, that measures its age in the centuries, after all. In this case however, old privacy laws aren’t protecting Internet users adequately. Today’s old privacy laws weren’t written in a way that adapts well to evolving technology. CalECPA improves on this significantly.
Mozilla Manifesto principle #4 reads, “Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.” To us, this begins with our technologies. Our privacy principles emphasize limited data, transparency, and meaningful user control, informing and guiding how we engineer all of our products and services.
Legal safeguards, such as the changes proposed in CalECPA, are essential as a complement to good technical practices. Governments want access to the data that businesses collect, store, and use. But when there are no or insufficient protections on what information they can ask for, transparency, accountability, user control, and privacy all suffer.
We saw significant progress on surveillance reform earlier this year through the passage of USA FREEDOM – but we have a very, very long way to go. Adopting CalECPA into law would not only have tangible benefits for Internet users, with impact felt far beyond the state of California. It would also help sustain momentum and contribute to future victories on surveillance reform.
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Air Mozilla: Improving QA: Automation |
The first in a series of discussions to try to make sense of some of the larger problems facing QA at Mozilla. Follow further discussion...
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Support.Mozilla.Org: SUMO Questions Day, Thursday, September 10 |
Time flies! It’s already September and it’s time for a new SUMO Day!
Last time we managed to answer 90% of the questions across the board with Firefox Desktop being the overall winner ( 96% of the questions were answered). It was a great effort from everybody involved and I cannot stress enough how incredible the SUMO community is!
So let’s try again, shall we?
SUMO Day is that time of the week where everybody who loves doing support, contributors, admins, moderators gather together and try and answer all the incoming questions on the Mozilla support forums. This is a 24 hour event, we will start early during European mornings and finish late during US Pacific evenings.
Moderators
Thursday’s SUMO Day will be moderated by madasan (EU morning/afternoon). Unfortunately guigs won’t be able to participate on Thursday so if anybody wants to help moderate during the US time zone do let me know. We can always use more people to help moderate through the day so don’t forget to add your name to the etherpad!
New to SUMO? Here’s how you can participate:
Just create an account and then take some time to help with unanswered questions. We have an etherpad ready with all the details plus additional tips and resources.
If you get stuck with questions that are too difficult feel free to ping us on IRC #sumo or ask for help on the contributors forums.
Join the party on IRC!
We’re always on IRC but during SUMO Day we’re having a special party where we’re hanging out having fun and helping each other in #sumo on IRC. Don’t be shy, join us, we’re a friendly bunch! You’ll feel less lonely when answering questions plus we can help out if some question proves to be too difficult.
If you’re new to IRC here’s how you can join: http://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org and add the #sumo channel. You can find more info for IRC chat: https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC#Connect_to_the_Mozilla_IRC_server.
Happy SUMO Day and see you on Thursday!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2015/09/09/sumo-questions-day-thursday-september-10/
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Yunier Jos'e Sosa V'azquez: El futuro de los complementos en Firefox |
Hace pocos d'ias, Mozilla ha anunciado importantes cambios a las extensiones de Firefox en su blog oficial de los complementos.
Entre lo m'as destacado, podemos mencionar una nueva API llamada WebExtensions compatible con el motor Blink, el mismo que utilizan Google Chrome y Opera, esta permitir'a desarrollar f'acilmente extensiones para m'ultiples navegadores y beneficiar'a a los usuarios en general pues el creador podr'a tomar el mismo c'odigo para empaquetarla hacia la plataforma deseada.
Esto es un paso importante para crear un ecosistema est'andar donde s'olo se haga un complemento y sea compatible entre todos los navegadores existentes. Tal como Kev Needham dice:
Queremos que el desarrollo de complementos, sea m'as parecido a desarrollar una p'agina web: el mismo c'odigo deber'ia correr en diferentes navegadores con un comportamiento acorde a est'andares, con documentaci'on disponible en m'ultiples fuentes.
Ahora en Firefox podr'as utilizar las extensiones de Chrome, permitiendo as'i una f'acil migraci'on entre navegadores, ya que puedes utilizar de forma nativa las extensiones que te gustan del navegador de Google en el de Mozilla. Este es un paso m'as en la estandarizaci'on de la Web, donde la tecnolog'ia sea implementada en todos los lugares para beneficiar al usuario sin necesidad de obligar a un usuario a usar un software por un beneficio 'unico.
WebExtensions podr'a estar disponible en Firefox a partir de noviembre pues actualmente se encuentra en la Edici'on para Desarrolladores, mientras tanto, puedes ir mirando como probar esta API desde su p'agina en la Wiki de Mozilla.
Adem'as se anunci'o que las extensiones tambi'en utilizar'an la tecnolog'ia Electrolysis, la misma que permite que el navegador separe las tareas en procesos independientes, mejorando la estabilidad y la seguridad, ya que si alg'un proceso falla, el navegador solo deber'a reiniciar el proceso, mientras las dem'as partes del navegador corren igual, sin sufrir da~nos, ni p'erdida de datos.
En resumen, novedades que buscan ayudar tanto a usuarios como a desarrolladores.
Fuente: Mozilla Hispano
http://firefoxmania.uci.cu/el-futuro-de-los-complementos-en-firefox/
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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-20150909/
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Air Mozilla: MozFest Volunteer's Briefing - Sept 2015 |
Live streaming of the briefing session for Mozilla Festival 2015 volunteers held in Mozilla London offices 9th Sept 2015 Full slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GdteQfutxUoqO3yHBi9FvaHTsC8_TLkf0nVkYcIUX4Y/edit?usp=sharing
https://air.mozilla.org/mozfest-volunteers-briefing-sept-2015/
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Mozilla WebDev Community: Extravaganza – September 2015 |
Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to to work on our containerization startup. While we buy up the latest stock of Tupperware, we find time to talk about the work that we’ve shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by!
You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, or view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla. Or just read on for a summary!
The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library.
Pontoon is a tool for translating Mozilla software. This past month saw several changes ship, including a brand new sync process that is up to 80% faster than the old sync process. Other changes include a new listing page for locale teams, a 50% speedup on the translation view, several new locales, and several visual improvements.
Crash-Stats is a service for analyzing crash reports from various Mozilla products. This month they shipped more aggressive cache headers for static assets, as well as Gzip compression for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files. The result was a 25% improvement in load time! Further improvements are planned to reduce the time-to-first-byte.
DXR is a code search and navigation tool for Mozilla (and other) projects. DXR 2.0 has been in development for a long time and has shipped at last! The new version comes with a host of updates, including:
Here we talk about libraries we’re maintaining and what, if anything, we need help with for them.
Peterbe shared a library he created called optisorl. It is a pluggable backend for sorl-thumbnail that optimizes thumbnails using pngquant, gifsicle, and, coming soon, mozjpeg for optimizing the generated thumbnails.
The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else.
Potch informed us of his in-progress redesign of the Hacks blog. A demo of his progress is available and he is looking for feedback. Check it out! Tell him how you feel about it!
If you sign up in the next month, you get a free upgrade to Rubbermaid-brand containers! As always, our compute instances are delivered straight to your door and are always fresh, never frozen.
If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you!
See you next month!
https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2015/09/09/extravaganza-september-2015/
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QMO: Firefox 42.0 Aurora Testday, September 11th |
Great news y’all! This Friday, September 11th, we are hosting a new event – Firefox 42.0 Aurora Testday. The main focus will be on the new Control Center feature, and last but not least, Tab visual sound indicator and Hello. Check out the detailed instructions via this etherpad.
No previous testing experience is required! Therefore, feel free to join us on #qa IRC channel and our moderators will happily offer you guidance.
Looking forward to see you on Friday!
https://quality.mozilla.org/2015/09/firefox-42-0-aurora-testday-september-11th/
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Byron Jones: happy bmo push day! |
the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:
discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.
https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/happy-bmo-push-day-160/
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Vladan Djeric: Update your custom Telemetry dashes: telemetry.js is obsolete |
If you built a custom dashboard and used telemetry.js to query telemetry.mozilla.org for histogram data, you’ll need to switch your dash to a newer library — either the new telemetry.js library (preferred option) or our shim library.
This change is necessary because Telemetry is retiring its old backend in favour of the new “unified” Telemetry backend which combines the capabilities of both FHR & Telemetry. The old backend sprouted data quality issues and supporting two backends is too time-consuming for a small team.
The old telemetry.js dashboarding library will be retired starting Monday, September 14th next week. If you don’t replace telemetry.js in your dashboard, your dash will stop seeing any new data.
There is additional background on this decision here: http://anthony-zhang.me/blog/telemetry-demystified/
You can ask for help with porting your dash in the comments below, or ping vladan / mreid / rvitillo on #telemetry
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Monty Montgomery: Announcing VP9 (And Opus and Ogg and Vorbis) support coming to Microsoft Edge |
Oh look, an official announcement: http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/09/08/announcing-vp9-support-coming-to-microsoft-edge/
In any case, welcome to the party Microsoft. Feel free to help yourself to the open bar. :-)
(And, to be fair, this isn't as fantastically unlikely as some pundits have been saying. After all, MS does own an IP stake in Opus).
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Air Mozilla: Localization — Enabling the Next Billion Users - Intern Presentation, Theo Chevalier |
Th'eo Chevalier will talk about Localization Drivers daily job so you can get to know the team better, team goals, and where he contributed. He'll...
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Chris Cooper: URES’15 Call for Participation Extended |
By request, the deadline for submissions for the third USENIX Release Engineering Summit (URES ‘15) has been extended. URES ‘15 will take place during LISA15, on November 13, 2015, in Washington, D.C.
If you would like to present a full-length or lightning talk on a release engineering topic, you can find more details on the submission process here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/ures15/call-for-participation
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Learning Community Call Sept 8 |
Mozilla Learning community calls are open to all. The goal: work on the Mozilla Learning plan together.
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-learning-community-call-sept-8/
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Christian Heilmann: Quick trick: using template to delay loading of images |
In addition to this explanation, I also recorded a quick screencast. Feel free to check that one first.
When it comes to newer elements to play with there are a few that are slightly odd. Canvas is one of them, as it doesn’t do anything without scripting. It is a placeholder for a canvas painting or animation and can contain fallback content when it is not supported. This ailed purists of semantic HTML when it came out, because – to a degree – this was just a rehash of applet or object we used with Java or Flash.
Template is an even weirder thing. Using template you can define inert content in HTML - this means the content is not rendered by the browser, and anything inside it is not executed (for example script elements). Again, this is something that can annoy purists, as this content only makes sense when JavaScript is available. But, to people who are used to templating in other languages, this is a great opportunity.
The biggest issue with template is that it can’t really by polyfilled as browsers that don’t know template, treat it like a DIV and render its content. In the past we simulated this functionality with script elements with a type of text/html as those will be skipped by browsers.
For more info about template itself, check these resources:
One thing you can do with template is to put content in it that is “nice to have” but would delay the loading of the page and especially the firing of the onload handler.
I’ve done this in the Cuter demo of Tinderesque. This demo loads a lot of images, and not all of them need to be available right away. That’s why I put five of them in the document and wrapped the rest in a template:
span> class="cardlist">
span> class="card current">span> src="images/a-push-please.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/amazing-dog.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/awesome-mix-dog.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/baby-amardillo.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/baby-hippo-nom.jpg" alt="">>
>
span> class="card">span> src="images/baby-rhino.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/barbie-frenchie.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/basset-helmet.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/bear-dog.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/bear-puppy-fluff.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/best-day-ever-puppy.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/bleh-puppy.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/bleh-tapir.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/cat-on-stairs.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/chocolate-puppy.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/corgisquee.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/corns-and-penny.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/crazy-otter.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/cute-brown-puppy.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/dalmatian.jpg" alt="">>
span> class="card">span> src="images/derpy-hedgehog.jpg" alt="">>
>
> |
This allows me to maintain all the info of my images in HTML (rather than having to add all the sources, alternative text, titles and so on in some JSON blob) and only load the first five when the page loads.
To add the rest, I just use an onload handler, that takes the content of the template and adds it to the parent element.
window.addEventListener('load', function(ev) { // check if template is supported // browsers without it wouldn't need to // do the content shifting if ('content' in document.createElement('template')) { // get the template var t = document.querySelector('template'); // get its parent element var list = t.parentNode; // cache the template content var contents = t.innerHTML; // kill the template list.removeChild(t); // add the cached content to the parent list.innerHTML += contents; } all = document.body.querySelectorAll('.card').length + 1; updatecounter(); }); |
The difference is pretty significant. Without the template trick the 542 KB transferred in 26 requests take 6.43 seconds on a 3G connection. The onload handler fires after that. With the template, onload fires at 2.08 seconds. Here’s a screenshot of both using Chrome Devtools:
Template support is pretty great. The only browsers that don’t support it for now are IE and Microsoft Edge. Opera Mini also doesn’t support it, but that’s due to it’s non-client script nature.
Browsers that don’t support template will load all the images and delay the onload handler. But all the others can properly benefit from this. Why not give it a go?
http://christianheilmann.com/2015/09/08/quick-trick-using-template-to-delay-loading-of-images/
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QMO: Firefox 41 Beta 7 Testday Results |
Hello Mozillians!
As you may already know, last Friday – September 4th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 41 Beta 7.
Results:
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Moin Shaikh, Aaron, alex_mayorga and the people from our Bangladesh Community: Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Forhad Hossain and Rezaul Huque Nayeem for getting involved in this event and making Firefox as best as it could be.
Also a big thank you goes to all our active moderators.
Keep an eye on QMO for upcoming events!
https://quality.mozilla.org/2015/09/firefox-41-beta-7-testday-results/
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