Mozilla Addons Blog: May 2016 Featured Add-ons |
by Raymond Hill
Very efficient blocker with a low CPU footprint.
”Wonderful blocker, part of my everyday browsing arsenal, highly recommended.”
by Abraham
Schedule download times for large files during off-peak hours.
”Absolutely beautiful interface!!”
by Harry N.
Input emojis right from the browser.
”This is a good extension because I can input emojis not available in Hangouts, Facebook, and email.”
by Quicksaver
A simple way to organize a ton of tabs.
”Awesome feature and very intuitive to use.”
Featured add-ons are selected by a community board made up of add-on developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months, so there’s always an opportunity to participate. Stayed tuned to this blog for the next call for applications. Here’s further information on AMO’s featured content policies.
If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured@mozilla.org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/05/02/may-2016-featured-add-ons/
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Wladimir Palant: Adventures porting Easy Passwords to Chrome and back to Firefox |
Easy Passwords is based on the Add-on SDK and runs in Firefox. However, people need access to their passwords in all kinds of environments, so I created an online version of the password generator. The next step was porting Easy Passwords to Chrome and Opera. And while at it, I wanted to see whether that port will work in Firefox via Web Extensions. After all, eventually the switch to Web Extensions will have to be done.
The goal was using the same codebase for all variants of the extension. Most of the logic is contained in HTML files anyway, so it wouldn’t have to be changed. As to the remaining code, it should just work with some fairly minimal implementation of the SDK APIs on top of the Chrome APIs. Why not the other way round? Well, I consider the APIs provided by the Add-on SDK much cleaner and easier to use.
It turned out that Easy Passwords used twelve SDK modules, many of these could be implemented in a trivial way however. For example, the timers module merely exports functions that are defined anyway (unlike SDK extensions, Chrome extensions run in a window context).
There were a few conceptual differences however. For example, Chrome extensions don’t support modularization — all background scripts execute in a single shared scope of the background page. Luckily, browserify solves this problem nicely by compiling all the various modules into a single background.js script while giving each one its own scope.
The other issue is configuration: Chrome doesn’t generate settings UI automatically the way simple-prefs module does it. No way around creating a special page for the two settings. Getting automatic SDK-style localization of HTML pages on the other hand was only a matter of a few lines (Chrome makes it a bit more complicated by disallowing dashes in message names).
A tricky issue was unifying the way scripts are attached to HTML pages. With the Add-on SDK these are content scripts which are defined in the JavaScript code — otherwise they wouldn’t be able to communicate to the extension. In Chrome you use regular
https://palant.de/2016/05/02/adventures-porting-easy-passwords-to-chrome-and-back-to-firefox
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting, 02 May 2016 |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20160502/
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Armen Zambrano: Open Platform Operations’ logo design |
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Daniel Glazman: BlueGriffon officially recommended by the French Government |
en-US TL;DR: BlueGriffon is now officially recommended as the html editor for the French Administration in its effort to rely on and promote Free Software!
Je suis tr`es heureux de signaler que BlueGriffon, mon 'editeur Web cross-platform et Wysiwyg, est officiellement recommand'e par le Socle Interminist'eriel de Logiciels Libres pour 2016 !!! Vous trouverez la liste officielle des logiciels recommand'es ici (document pdf).
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Gervase Markham: DNSSEC on gerv.net |
My ISP, the excellent Mythic Beasts, has started offering a managed DNSSEC service for domains they control – just click one button, and you’ve got DNSSEC on your domain. I’ve just enabled it on gerv.net (which, incidentally, as of a couple of weeks ago, is also available over a secure channel thanks to MB and Let’s Encrypt).
If you have any problems accessing any resources on gerv.net, please let me know by email – gerv at mozilla dot org should be unaffected by any problems.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/3NqEQ1ap3lM/
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Laurent Jouanneau: Release of SlimerJS 0.10 |
I'm pleased to announce the release of SlimerJS 0.10!
SlimerJS is a scriptable browser. It is a tool like PhantomJS except it is based on Firefox and and it is not (yet) "headless" (if some Mozillians could help me to have a true headless browser ;-)...).
This new release brings new features and compatibility with Firefox 46. Among of them:
This version fixes also many bugs and conformance issues with PhantomJS 1.9.8 and 2.x. It fixed also some issues to run CasperJS 1.1.
See change details in release notes. As usual, you can download SlimerJS from the download page.
Note that there isn't anymore "standalone edition" (with embedding of XulRunner), because Mozilla ceased to maintain and build XulRunner. Only the "lightweight" edition is available from now, and you must install Firefox to run SlimerJS.
Consider this release as a "1.0pre". I'll try to release in few weeks the next major version, 1.0. It will only fix bugs found in 0.10 (if any), and will implement last few features to match the PhantomJS 2.1 API.
http://ljouanneau.com/blog/post/2016/05/02/Release-of-SlimerJS-0.10
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Matej Cepl: On GitLab growing an OStatus extension |
Finally, this issue ticket gave me the opportunity to write what I think about OStatus. So, I did.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html -- I am sorry, if you like OStatus, but it is the most insane open source example of this disease. After the astro design, we have no working and stable platform for the thing.
There was old identi.ca, which was scrapped (I know more polite term is "moved to GNU/Social", yeah … how many users of this social software there is? And yes, I know, the protocol is named differently, but it is just another version of the same thing from my point of view), and pump.io, which is … I have just upgraded my instance to see whether I can write honestly that it is a well working proprietary (meaning, used by one implementation by the author of the protocol only) distributed network, and no, it is broken.
And even if the damned thing worked, it would not offer me the functionality I really want: which is to connect with my real friends, who are all on Twitter, Facebook, or even some on G+. Heck, pump.io would be useless even these friends were on Diaspora (no, they are not, nobody is there). So, yes, if you want something which is useless, go and write OStatus component.
I don't know what happens when we want to share issues, etc. I don't know and I don't care (for example, it seems to me that issues are something which is a way more linked to one particular project). And yes, I am the reporter of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=719725 (and author of http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/79936/), and I think that it is impossible to do it. At least, nobody have managed to do it and it was not for the lack of trying. How is that OpenID or other federated identity doing?
Besides, Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work because You Aren’t Gonna Need It . I vote for git request-pull(1) parser. And, no, not just sending an URL in HTTP GET, I would like to see that button (when the comment is recognized as being parseable) next to the comment with the plain text output of git request-pull.
Actually, git request-pull(1) parser not only follows YAGNI, but it also in a loving way steps around the biggest problem of all federated solution: broken or missing federated identity.
https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/on-gitlab-growing-an-ostatus-extension.html
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Matej Cepl: On GitLab growing and OStatus extension |
Finally, this issue ticket gave me the opportunity to write what I think about OStatus. So, I did.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html -- I am sorry, if you like OStatus, but it is the most insane open source example of this disease. After the astro design, we have no working and stable platform for the thing.
There was old identi.ca, which was scrapped (I know more polite term is "moved to GNU/Social", yeah … how many users of this social software there is? And yes, I know, the protocol is named differently, but it is just another version of the same thing from my point of view), and pump.io, which is … I have just upgraded my instance to see whether I can write honestly that it is a well working proprietary (meaning, used by one implementation by the author of the protocol only) distributed network, and no, it is broken.
And even if the damned thing worked, it would not offer me the functionality I really want: which is to connect with my real friends, who are all on Twitter, Facebook, or even some on G+. Heck, pump.io would be useless even these friends were on Diaspora (no, they are not, nobody is there). So, yes, if you want something which is useless, go and write OStatus component.
I don't know what happens when we want to share issues, etc. I don't know and I don't care (for example, it seems to me that issues are something which is a way more linked to one particular project). And yes, I am the reporter of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=719725 (and author of http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/79936/), and I think that it is impossible to do it. At least, nobody have managed to do it and it was not for the lack of trying. How is that OpenID or other federated identity doing?
Besides, Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work because You Aren’t Gonna Need It . I vote for git request-pull(1) parser. And, no, not just sending an URL in HTTP GET, I would like to see that button (when the comment is recognized as being parseable) next to the comment with the plain text output of git request-pull.
Actually, git request-pull(1) parser not only follows YAGNI, but it also in a loving way steps around the biggest problem of all federated solution: broken or missing federated identity.
https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/on-gitlab-growing-and-ostatus-extension.html
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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 128 |
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.
This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.
This week's edition was edited by: Vikrant and llogiq.
This week's Crate of the Week is arrayvec, which gives us a Vec-like interface over plain arrays for those instances where you don't want the indirection. Thanks to ehiggs for the suggestion!
Submit your suggestions for next week!
Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!
Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.
If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here.
92 pull requests were merged in the last week.
Entry::key() methodClone::clone() no longer deep-clones Copy typesIPV6_V6ONLY removed (breaking change!)-Z save_analysis now uses JSON formattrans::collector improvementspub(restricted) on tuple struct fieldsChanges to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:
No RFCs were approved this week!.
Every week the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now. This week's FCPs are:
as_millis function on std::time::Duration.TryFrom and TryInto traits.::clone(&t) T: Copy should be equivalent to ptr::read(&t).#[repr(align = "N")].dyn keyword.If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Email Erick Tryzelaar or Brian Anderson for access.
No jobs listed for this week.
Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust to get your job offers listed here!
In general, enough layers of Rc/RefCell will make anything work.
Thanks to birkenfeld for the suggestion.
Submit your quotes for next week!
https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2016/05/02/this-week-in-rust-128/
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Karl Dubost: [worklog] Kusunoki, that smell. |
This feeling when finally things get fixed after 2 years of negociating. Sometimes things take longer. Sometimes policies change on the other side. All in one, that's very good fortune for the Web and the users. It's bit like that smell for the last two years in summer time in my street, I finally got to ask the gardener of one of the houses around and it revealed what I should have known: Camphor tree (
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Support.Mozilla.Org: Mozillian profile: Jayesh |
Hello, SUMO Nation!
Do you still remember Dinesh? Turns out he’s not the only Mozillian out there who’s happy to share his story with us. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Jayesh, one of the many SUMOzillians among you, with a really inspiring story of his engagement in the community to share. Read on!
Jayesh
I’m Jayesh from India. I’ve been contributing to Mozilla as a Firefox Student Ambassador since 2014. I’m a self-made entrepreneur, tech lover, and passionate traveller. I am also an undergraduate with a Computer Science background.
During my university days I used to waste a lot of time playing games as I did not have a platform to showcase my technical skills. I thought working was only useful when you had a “real” job. I only heard about open source, but in my third year I came to know about open source contributors – through my friend Dinesh, who told me about the FSA program – this inspired me a lot. I thought it was the perfect platform for me to kickstart my career as a Mozillian and build a strong, bright future.
Being a techie, I could identify with Mozilla and its efforts to keep the web open. I registered for the FSA program with the guidance of my friend, and found a lot of students and open source enthusiasts from India contributing to Mozilla in many ways. I was very happy to join the Mozilla India Community.
Around 90% of Computer Science students at the university learn the technology but don’t actually try to implement working prototypes using their knowledge, as they don’t know about the possibility of open source contributions – they just believe that showcasing counts only during professional internships and work training. Thus, I thought of sharing my knowledge about open source contributors through the Mozilla community.
I gained experience conducting events for Mozilla in the Tirupati Community, where my friend was seeking help in conducting events as he was the only Firefox Student Ambassador in that region. Later, to learn more, we travelled to many places and attend various events in Bengaluru and Hyderabad , where we met a very well developed Mozilla community in southern India. We met many Mozilla Representatives and sought help from them. Vineel and Galaxy helped us a lot, guiding us through our first steps.
Later, I found that I was the only Mozillian in my region – Kumbakonam, where I do my undergrad studies – within a 200 miles radius. This motivated me to personally build a new university club – SRCMozillians. I inaugurated the club at my university with the help of the management.
More than 450 students in the university registered for the FSA program in the span of two days, and we have organized more than ten events, including FFOS App days, Moz-Quiz, Web-Development-Learning, Connected Devices-Learning, Moz-Stall, a ponsored fun event, community meet-ups – and more! All this in half a year. For my efforts, I was recognized as FSA of the month, August 2015 & FSA Senior.
The biggest problems we faced while building our club were the studying times, when we’d be having lots of assignments, cycle tests, lab internals, and more – with everyone really busy and working hard, it took time to bridge the gap and realise grades alone are not the key factor to build a bright future.
My contributions to the functional areas in Mozilla varied from time to time. I started with Webmaker by creating educational makes about X-Ray Goggles, App-Maker and Thimble. I’m proud of being recognized as a Webmaker Mentor for that. Later, I focused on Army of Awesome (AoA) by tweeting and helping Firefox users. I even developed two Firefox OS applications (Asteroids – a game and a community application for SRCMozillians), which were available in the Marketplace. After that, I turned my attention to Quality Assurance, as Software Testing was one of the subject in my curriculum. I started testing tasks in One And Done – this helped me understand the key concepts of software testing easily – especially checking the test conditions and triaging bugs. My name was even mentioned on the Mozilla blog about the Firefox 42.0 Beta 3 Test day for successfully testing and passing all the test cases.
I moved on to start localization for Telugu, my native language. I started translating KB articles – with time, my efforts were recognized, and I became a Reviewer for Telugu. This area of contribution proved to be very interesting, and I even started translating projects in Pontoon.
As you can see from my Mozillian story above, it’s easy to get started with something you like. I guarantee that every individual student with passion to contribute and build a bright career within the Mozilla community, can discover that this is the right platform to start with. The experience you gain here will help you a lot in building your future. I personally think that the best aspect of it is the global connection with many great people who are always happy to support and guide you.
– Jayesh , a proud Mozillian
Thank you, Jayesh! A great example of turning one’s passion into a great initiative that enables many people around you understand and use technology better. We’re looking forward to more open source awesomeness from you!
SUMO Blog readers – are you interested in posting on our blog about your open source projects and adventures? Let us know!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/04/29/mozillian-profile-jayesh/
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Dustin J. Mitchell: Loading TaskCluster Docker Images |
When TaskCluster builds a push to a Gecko repository, it does so in a docker image defined in that very push.
This is pretty cool for developers concerned with the build or test environment: instead of working with releng to deploy a change, now you can experiment with that change in try, get review, and land it like any other change.
However, if you want to actually download that docker image, docker pull doesn’t work anymore.
The image reference in the task description looks like this now:
"image": {
"path": "public/image.tar",
"taskId": "UDZUwkJWQZidyoEgVfFUKQ",
"type": "task-image"
},
This is referring to an artifact of the task that built the docker image. If you want to pull that exact image, there’s now an easier way:
./mach taskcluster-load-image --task-id UDZUwkJWQZidyoEgVfFUKQ
will download that docker image:
dustin@dustin-moz-devel ~/p/m-c (central) $ ./mach taskcluster-load-image --task-id UDZUwkJWQZidyoEgVfFUKQ
Task ID: UDZUwkJWQZidyoEgVfFUKQ
Downloading https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/UDZUwkJWQZidyoEgVfFUKQ/artifacts/public/image.tar
######################################################################## 100.0%
Determining image name
Image name: mozilla-central:f7b4831774960411275275ebc0d0e598e566e23dfb325e5c35bf3f358e303ac3
Loading image into docker
Deleting temporary file
Loaded image is named mozilla-central:f7b4831774960411275275ebc0d0e598e566e23dfb325e5c35bf3f358e303ac3
dustin@dustin-moz-devel ~/p/m-c (central) $ docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED VIRTUAL SIZE
mozilla-central f7b4831774960411275275ebc0d0e598e566e23dfb325e5c35bf3f358e303ac3 51e524398d5c 4 weeks ago 1.617 GB
But if you just want to pull the image corresponding to the codebase you have checked out, things are even easier: give the image name (the directory under testing/docker), and the tool will look up the latest build of that image in the TaskCluster index:
dustin@dustin-moz-devel ~/p/m-c (central) $ ./mach taskcluster-load-image desktop-build
Task ID: TjWNTysHRCSfluQjhp2g9Q
Downloading https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/TjWNTysHRCSfluQjhp2g9Q/artifacts/public/image.tar
######################################################################## 100.0%
Determining image name
Image name: mozilla-central:f5e1b476d6a861e35fa6a1536dde2a64daa2cc77a4b71ad685a92096a406b073
Loading image into docker
Deleting temporary file
Loaded image is named mozilla-central:f5e1b476d6a861e35fa6a1536dde2a64daa2cc77a4b71ad685a92096a406b073
http://code.v.igoro.us/posts/2016/04/taskcluster-load-image.html
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Tim Taubert: A Fast, Constant-time AEAD for TLS |
The only TLS v1.2+ cipher suites with a dedicated AEAD scheme are the ones using AES-GCM, a block cipher mode that turns AES into an authenticated cipher. From a cryptographic point of view these are preferable to non-AEAD-based cipher suites (e.g. the ones with AES-CBC) because getting authenticated encryption right is hard without using dedicated ciphers.
For CPUs without the AES-NI instruction set, constant-time AES-GCM however is slow and also hard to write and maintain. The majority of mobile phones, and mostly cheaper devices like tablets and notebooks on the market thus cannot support efficient and safe AES-GCM cipher suite implementations.
Even if we ignored all those aforementioned pitfalls we still wouldn’t want to rely on AES-GCM cipher suites as the only good ones available. We need more diversity. Having widespread support for cipher suites using a second AEAD is necessary to defend against weaknesses in AES or AES-GCM that may be discovered in the future.
ChaCha20 and Poly1305, a stream cipher and a message authentication code, were designed with fast and constant-time implementations in mind. A combination of those two algorithms yields a safe and efficient AEAD construction, called ChaCha20/Poly1305, which allows TLS with a negligible performance impact even on low-end devices.
Firefox 47 will ship with two new ECDHE/ChaCha20 cipher suites as specified in the latest draft. We are looking forward to see the adoption of these increase and will, as a next step, work on prioritizing them over AES-GCM suites on devices not supporting AES-NI.
https://timtaubert.de/blog/2016/04/a-fast-constant-time-aead-for-tls/
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QMO: Firefox 47 Beta 3 Testday, May 6th |
Hey everyone,
I am happy to announce that the following Friday, May 6th, we are organizing a new event – Firefox 47 Beta 3 Testday. The main focus will be on Synced Tabs Sidebar and Youtube Embedded Rewrite features. The detailed instructions are available via this etherpad.
No previous testing experience is needed, so feel free to join us on #qa IRC channel where our moderators will offer you guidance and answer your questions.
Join us and help us make Firefox better!
https://quality.mozilla.org/2016/04/firefox-47-beta-3-testday-may-6th/
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Mozilla Addons Blog: WebExtensions in Firefox 48 |
We last updated you on our progress with WebExtensions when Firefox 47 landed in Developer Edition (Aurora), and today we have an update for Firefox 48, which landed in Developer Edition this week.
With the release of Firefox 48, we feel WebExtensions are in a stable state. We recommend developers start to use the WebExtensions API for their add-on development. Over the last release more than 82 bugs were closed on WebExtensions alone.
If you have authored an add-on in the past and are curious how it’s affected by the upcoming changes, please use the lookup tool. There is also a wiki page filled with resources to support you through the changes.
Many APIs gained improved support in this release, including: alarms, bookmarks, downloads, notifications, webNavigation, webRequest, windows and tabs.
The options v2 API is now supported so that developers can implement an options UI for their users. We do not plan to support the options v1 API, which is deprecated in Chrome. You can see an example of how to use this API in the WebExtensions examples on Github.
In Firefox 48 we pushed hard to make the WebRequest API a solid foundation for privacy and security add-ons such as Ghostery, RequestPolicy and NoScript. With the current implementation of the onErrorOccurred function, it is now possible for Ghostery to be written as a WebExtension.
The addition of reliable origin information was a major requirement for existing Firefox security add-ons performing cross-origin checks such as NoScript or uBlock Origin. This feature is unique to Firefox, and is one of our first expansions beyond parity with the Chrome APIs for WebExtensions.
Although requestBody support is not in Firefox 48 at the time of publication, we hope it will be uplifted. This change to Gecko is quite significant because it will allow NoScript’s XSS filter to perform much better as a WebExtension, with huge speed gains (20 times or more) in some cases over the existing XUL and XPCOM extension for many operations (e.g. form submissions that include file uploads).
We’ve also had the chance to dramatically increase our unit test coverage again across the WebExtensions API, and now our modules have over 92% test coverage.
By default WebExtensions now use a Content Security Policy, limiting the location of resources that can be loaded. The default policy for Firefox is the same as Chrome’s:
"script-src 'self'; object-src 'self';"
This has many implications, such as the following: eval will no longer work, inline JavaScript will not be executed and only local scripts and resources are loaded. To relax that and define your own, you’ll need to define a new CSP using the content_security_policy entry in the WebExtension’s manifest.
For example, to load scripts from example.com, the manifest would include a policy configuration that would look like this:
"content_security_policy": "script-src 'self' https://example.com; object-src 'self'"
Please note: this will be a backwards incompatible change for any Firefox WebExtensions that did not adhere to this CSP. Existing WebExtensions that do not adhere to the CSP will need to be updated.
To improve the compatibility with Chrome, a change has landed in Firefox that allows an add-on to be run in Firefox without the add-on id specified. That means that Chrome add-ons can now be run in Firefox with no manifest changes using about:debugging and loading it as a temporary add-on.
Support for WebExtensions with no add-on id specified in the manifest is being added to addons.mozilla.org (AMO) and our other tools, and should be in place on AMO for when Firefox 48 lands in release.
With the release of Firefox 48 we are announcing Android support for WebExtensions. WebExtensions add-ons can now be installed and run on Android, just like any other add-on. However, because Firefox for Android makes use of a native user interface, anything that involves user interface interaction is currently unsupported (similar to existing extensions on Android).
You can see what the full list of APIs supported on Android in the WebExtensions documentation on MDN, these include alarms, cookies, i18n and runtime.
In Firefox 45 the ability to load add-ons temporarily was added to about:debugging. In Firefox 48 several exciting enhancements are added to about:debugging.
If your add-on fails to load for some reason in about:debugging (most commonly due to JSON syntax errors), then you’ll get a helpful message appearing at the top of about:debugging. In the past, the error would be hidden away in the browser console.
It still remains in the browser console, but is now visible that an error occurred right in the same page where loading was triggered.
You can now debug background scripts and content scripts in the debugging tools. In this example, to debug background scripts I loaded the add-on bookmark-it from the MDN examples. Next click “Enable add-on debugging”, then click “debug”:
You will need to accept the incoming remote debugger session request. Then you’ll have a Web Console for the background page. This allows you to interact with the background page. In this case I’m calling the toggleBookmark API.
This will call the toggleBookmark function and bookmark the page (note the bookmark icon is now blue. If you want to debug the toggleBookmark function, just add the debugger statement at the appropriate line. When you trigger toggleBookmark, you’ll be dropped into the debugger:
You can now debug content scripts. In this example I’ve loaded the beastify add-on from the MDN examples using about:debugging. This add-on runs a content script to alter the current page by adding a red border.
All you have to do to debug it is to insert the debugger statement into your content script, open up the Developer Tools debugger and trigger the debug statement:
You are then dropped into the debugger ready to start debugging the content script.
As you may know, restarting Firefox and adding in a new add-on is can be slow, so about:debugging now allows you to reload an add-on. This will remove the add-on and then re-enable the add-on, so that you don’t have to keep restarting Firefox. This is especially useful for changes to the manifest, which will not be automatically refreshed. It also resets UI buttons.
In the following example the add-on just calls setBadgeText to add “Test” onto the browser action button (in the top right) when you press the button added by the add-on.
Hitting reload for that add-on clears the state for that button and reloads the add-on from the manifest, meaning that after a reload, the “Test” text has been removed.
This makes developing and debugging WebExtensions really easy. Coming soon, web-ext, the command line tool for developing add-ons, will gain the ability to trigger this each time a file in the add-on changes.
There are also lots of other ways to get involved with WebExtensions, so please check them out!
Update: clarified that no add-on id refers to the manifest as a WebExtension.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-firefox-48/
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Daniel Stenberg: curl 7.49.0 goodies coming |
Here’s a closer look at three new features that we’re shipping in curl and libcurl 7.49.0, to be released on May 18th 2016.
If you’re one of the users who thought --resolve and doing Host: header tricks with --header weren’t good enough, you’ll appreciate that we’re adding yet another option for you to fiddle with the connection procedure. Another “Swiss army knife style” option for you who know what you’re doing.
With --connect-to you basically provide an internal alias for a certain name + port to instead internally use another name + port to connect to.
Instead of connecting to HOST1:PORT1, connect to HOST2:PORT2
It is very similar to --resolve which is a way to say: when connecting to HOST1:PORT1 use this ADDR2:PORT2. --resolve effectively prepopulates the internal DNS cache and makes curl completely avoid the DNS lookup and instead feeds it with the IP address you’d like it to use.
--connect-to doesn’t avoid the DNS lookup, but it will make sure that a different host name and destination port pair is used than what was found in the URL. A typical use case for this would be to make sure that your curl request asks a specific server out of several in a pool of many, where each has a unique name but you normally reach them with a single URL who’s host name is otherwise load balanced.
--connect-to can be specified multiple times to add mappings for multiple names, so that even following HTTP redirects to other host names etc can be handled. You don’t even necessarily have to redirect the first used host name.
The libcurl option name for for this feature is CURLOPT_CONNECT_TO.
Michael Kaufmann brought this feature.
In our ongoing quest to provide more and better HTTP/2 support in a world that is slowly but steadily doing more and more transfers over the new version of the protocol, curl now offers --http2-prior-knowledge.
As the name might hint, this is a way to tell curl that you have “prior knowledge” that the URL you specifies goes to a host that you know supports HTTP/2. The term prior knowledge is in fact used in the HTTP/2 spec (RFC 7540) for this scenario.
Normally when given a HTTP:// or a HTTPS:// URL, there will be no assumption that it supports HTTP/2 but curl when then try to upgrade that from version HTTP/1. The command line tool tries to upgrade all HTTPS:// URLs by default even, and libcurl can be told to do so.
libcurl wise, you ask for a prior knowledge use by setting CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION to CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_PRIOR_KNOWLEDGE.
Asking for http2 prior knowledge when the server does in fact not support HTTP/2 will give you an error back.
Diego Bes brought this feature.
TCP Fast Open is documented in RFC 7413 and is basically a way to pass on data to the remote machine earlier in the TCP handshake – already in the SYN and SYN-ACK packets. This of course as a means to get data over faster and reduce latency.
The --tcp-fastopen option is supported on Linux and OS X only for now.
This is an idea and technique that has been around for a while and it is slowly getting implemented and supported by servers. There have been some reports of problems in the wild when “middle boxes” that fiddle with TCP traffic see these packets, that sometimes result in breakage. So this option is opt-in to avoid the risk that it causes problems to users.
A typical real-world case where you would use this option is when sending an HTTP POST to a site you don’t have a connection already established to. Just note that TFO relies on the client having had contact established with the server before and having a special TFO “cookie” stored and non-expired.
TCP Fast Open is so far only used for clear-text TCP protocols in curl. These days more and more protocols switch over to their TLS counterparts (and there’s room for future improvements to add the initial TLS handshake parts with TFO). A related option to speed up TLS handshakes is --false-start (supported with the NSS or the secure transport backends).
With libcurl, you enable TCP Fast Open with CURLOPT_TCP_FASTOPEN.
Alessandro Ghedini brought this feature.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/04/29/curl-7-49-0-goodies-coming/
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Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s Up with SUMO – 28th April |
Hello, SUMO Nation!
Did you know that in Japanese mythology, foxes with nine tails are over a 100 years old and have the power of omniscience? I think we could get the same result if we put a handful of SUMO contributors in one room – maybe except for the tails ;-)
Here are the news from the world of SUMO!
We salute you!
What’s your experience of release week? Share with us in the comments or our forums! We are looking forward to seeing you all around SUMO – KEEP ROCKING THE HELPFUL WEB!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/04/28/whats-up-with-sumo-28th-april/
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Air Mozilla: Web QA Weekly Meeting, 28 Apr 2016 |
This is our weekly gathering of Mozilla'a Web QA team filled with discussion on our current and future projects, ideas, demos, and fun facts.
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Air Mozilla: Reps weekly, 28 Apr 2016 |
This is a weekly call with some of the Reps to discuss all matters about/affecting Reps and invite Reps to share their work with everyone.
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