Once a month web developers from across Mozilla get together to share news about the things we've shipped, news about open source libraries we maintain...

https://air.mozilla.org/webdev-extravaganza-june-2016/

https://blog.mozilla.org/mozillareps/2016/06/07/rep-of-the-month-april-2016/

Reuni'on bi-semanal para hablar sobre el estado de Mozilla, la comunidad y sus proyectos. Bi-weekly meeting to talk (in Spanish) about Mozilla status, community and...

https://air.mozilla.org/martes-mozilleros-20160607/

In the recent past we have made several improvements to Firefox Accounts that make your browsing better. Those improvements include personalizing your account and the ability to sync passwords, bookmarks and other browsing data between your desktop and mobile devices.

Now, we are making it even easier to access synced tabs directly in your desktop Firefox browser. If you’re logged into your Firefox Account, you will see all open tabs from your smartphone or other computers within the sidebar. In the sidebar you can also search for specific tabs quickly and easily.

Do you have a powerful multi-processor computer? If so, Firefox now delivers an improved video experience when viewing videos on YouTube. This means videos will run smoother. You will also use less bandwidth and get improved battery life on your laptop.

And if you are an Android user, we have removed the icons that show up in the URL bar. This prevents unsecured sites from copying the images of legitimate sites to try to trick you into thinking the site is safe for sensitive information.

Lastly, we added to Firefox for Android a feature that lets you show or hide web fonts. This may reduce the amount of data required for browsing, an important factor for data-conscious users. We hope you enjoy these new features. Feel free to send us any feedback.

• Download Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Release Notes for Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Download Firefox for Android
• Release Notes for Firefox for Android

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/07/tab-video-improvements/

Hello Mozillians!

As you may already know, last Friday – June 3rd – we held a new successful Testday event, for Firefox 48.0 Aurora.

Results:

• 2 known bugs were noticed while testing New Awesomebar and APZ:  Bug 604710 and  Bug 779465;
• 2 bugs were verified: Bug 1274017 and Bug 1263943.

We’d like to take this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to Cory, Prasanth P, Rishav Kumar, Moin Shaikh, Chandrakant Dhutadmal, Iryna Thompson, PUSHANSHU, Stelian Ionce, gaby2300 and to our amazing Bangladesh QA Community: Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Khalid Syfullah Zaman, Rezaul Huque Nayeem, Md. Rahimul Islam, Sajal Ahmed, Roman Syed, Tovfikur Rahmast, Maruf Rahman, Niaz Bhuiyan Asif, Sajedul Islam, Saddam Hossain, Mahfuza Humayra Mohona, Md.Majedul islam, Tanvir Rahman, Akash, Sauradeep Dutta, Md Rakibul Islam, ria, Fahim, Zayed News, Kazi Sakib Ahmad, Asif Mahmud Rony, F areha Alamgir, Tariqul Islam Chowdhury, Asif Mahmud Shuvo for getting involved in this event and making Firefox as best as it could be.

Also, many thanks to all our active moderators.

Keep an eye on QMO for upcoming events!

https://quality.mozilla.org/2016/06/firefox-48-0-aurora-testday-results/

the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:

• [1262474] the ‘rank’ field label is incorrectly visible in view mode
• [1262459] restyle the “this bug has been marked as a duplicate” comment
• [1272546] unauthenticated users cannot expand the cc list
• [1153105] add orange factor to modal view
• [1146778] link to the classic printing format for now
• [1269549] Component watching prefix matches too much
• [1270720] Do not add reporter email address to CC list when flagging “Need more information from reporter”
• [1277863] Add crash signature field for “External Software Affecting Firefox” product

discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.

https://dlawrence.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/happy-bmo-push-day-21/

To those I haven’t yet had a chance to speak to one-to-one (there have been a lot of you!), this is my last week as a paid contributor to the Mozilla project. It’s also the week I finished and published a board game I’ve been working on for a year or so, called Moving Out (At Last).

It’s a misleading naming combo for this blog post title, but it made me chuckle, so I’m sticking with it

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adamlofting/blog/~3/1lzJeZhJWss/

Ben Radler over at Teespring was awesome enough to put up a set of curl tshirts and hoodies sporting the new fancy logo.

Run over to https://teespring.com/curl-logo to order your own set!

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/06/07/curl-tshirts-and-hoodies/

Note: This post is geared towards Mozilla developers.

I would like to announce a new tool I’ve been working on for source code searching called Searchfox (http://searchfox.org). If you use MXR or DXR, I recommend you try Searchfox. Here are some of the benefits:

• Besides C++ code, Searchfox indexes JavaScript, XBL, and IDL. You can search by property name and, in some cases, qualified property name (e.g., SessionStore.duplicateTab). IDL files link to both JS and C++ implementations and users.

  

  

  

• Blame in Searchfox is fast and easy. Every file includes blame information in a gray bar on the left side, and walking through the blame history takes only one click per revision. Each file in the blame chain downloads quickly, and blame goes all the way back to 1998. Say goodbye to the frustration of reaching “Free the (distributed) Lizard” at hg.mozilla.org and finding that GitHub blame times out.

  

  

• Searchfox jumps to the actual definition of methods rather than the header file declaration.
• C++ template handling is a little better, files download a little quicker, and other smaller improvements.

If you would like to try out Searchfox, I recommend that you change your keyword searches to point to it. Otherwise it’s too easy to forget and revert to muscle memory.

Keyword search:
http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=%s

Keyword search to find a particular file:
http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=&path=%s

Some help on using Searchfox can be found at http://searchfox.org.

Also, here are some reasons not to use Searchfox:

• You frequently look at repositories besides mozilla-central. Searchfox only handles m-c.
• You like MXR’s ability to sorta index all platforms. Like DXR, Searchfox uses a clang plugin that only analyzes Linux64 debug builds. I’m very eager to fix this problem, but it will take some time. Full-text search finds everything, of course.

https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/searchfox/

Our globetrotting releng heroes are off to London next week for the Mozilla all-hands meeting, but the weekly highlights are back after a brief Nigerian vacation. ;)

Modernize infrastructure:

Joel, Q, and Catlee have moved another 1/3 of our Windows 7 test load into AWS, bringing us to about 2/3 of our total test load migrated. This further reduces our turnaround time and backlog for that platform.

Mark landed several Puppet patches to support package installs for Windows 7. Including WIndows 7 sdk, Apache, and others. This furthers our progress on having programmatically installed and managed Windows 7.

Kendall and Jake spent the week together making significant progress towards phase 1 of moving mozreview and autoland into the cloud as production-grade services. The new architecture has been planned, diagrammed, passed a preliminary security review, and much of the new deployment automation and management code has been written.

We’ve dropped support for architectures that don’t support SSE2. This allows us to switch to VS2015 for compilation on Windows, which brings with it a substantial improvement (>1 hour) in Windows PGO build times. See the thread in dev.platform for details.

Improve Release Pipeline:

Varun’s patch to improve Balrog for multifile updates landed successfully in production.

As of Firefox 45.2.0 ESR all desktop releases have been switched to Release Build Promotion.

Improve CI Pipeline:

Kim landed changes to run ASAN builds on Taskcluster.

Francis landed changes to enable Valgrind builds on taskcluster and move them to mozharness.

Release:

Shipped Firefox 47.0b6 and 47.0b7, Fennec 47.0b6. Details here:

• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases:Release_Post_Mortem:2016-05-18
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases:Release_Post_Mortem:2016-05-25

Outreach/Community:

Kim attended DevOps Days Toronto and wrote a summary here.

If you are interested in submitting a talk to the Releng 2016 conference in Seattle on Nov 18, the deadline is July 1.

See you next week!

http://coopcoopbware.tumblr.com/post/145523280835

I've not posted many entries in the past year-- practically none at all in fact. There's something entirely different about coding and writing prose that makes it difficult to shift between one and the other. Nor have I been particularly good (or even acceptably bad) about responding to questions and replies, especially those asking where Daala is, or where Daala is going in the era of AOM.

In the meantime, though, Jean-Marc has written another demo-style post that revisits many of the techniques we've tried out in Daala while applying the benefit of hindsight. I've got a number of my own comments I want to make about what he's written, but in the meantime it's an excellent technical summary.

http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/68468.html

Tomorrow In the next few days, Firefox 48 Beta becomes available. If all goes well in our beta testing, we’re about 6 weeks away from shipping the first phase of E10S to Firefox release users with the launch of Firefox 48 on August 2nd.

E10S is short for “Electrolysis”. Similar to how chemists can use the technique called electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we’re using project Electrolysis to split Firefox into a UI process and a content process. Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor,  your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too.

E10S has been enabled for some portion of our Beta audience since December of 2015 and we’ve had it enabled for half of our Beta population for the last 6 weeks. The team has been comparing the half with E10S to the half without for things like stability, responsiveness, memory usage, and more. And so far, so good. We’ve met all of our release criteria and assuming nothing shows up in Beta 48, we should be good to go.

(When we hit release in about six weeks, not all of our Firefox 48 users will get E10S. The teams have been working really hard but we’ve still got some compatibility and other work to do to make E10S ready for everyone. The groups that will have to wait a bit for E10S account for about half of our release users and include Windows XP users, users with screen readers, RTL users, and the largest group, extension users.)

This is a huge change for Firefox, the largest we’ve ever shipped. But don’t worry. The Electrolysis team at Mozilla has a release roll-out plan that ensures we’re going slowly, measuring as we go and that we can throttle up as well as down depending on what we see.

Here’s what that looks like. When we launch Firefox 48, approximately 1% of eligible Firefox users will get updated to E10S immediately. The 1% of release users should get us up to a population similar to what we have in Beta so we’ll be able compare the two. About ten days after launch, we’ll get another round of feedback and analysis related to the release users with and without E10S. Assuming all is well, we’ll turn the knobs so that the rest of the eligible Firefox users get updated to E10S over the following weeks. If we run into issues, we can slow the roll-out, pause it, or even disable E10sS for those who got it. We have all the knobs.

As noted earlier, this is just the first phase. Next up we’ll be working to get E10S to the cohorts not eligible in Firefox 48. We want 100% of our release users to benefit from this massive improvement. After that, we’ll be working on support for multiple content processes. With that foundation in place, the next projects are sandboxing for security, and isolating extensions into their own processes.

It’s an exciting time at Mozilla. E10S is the largest change we’ve ever made to Firefox and we hope you’ll help us get through this with as few surprises as possible. To help out, get on Beta and let us know what you find.

update: There is some confusion about what’s new here. I think I can clear that up. E10S has been in beta for some time. That’s not new. It was there for half of our beta users for the entire previous 6-weeks cycle. What’s new here is that we’ve just recently met all of our release criteria and we think we can take the feature from beta to release in the next 6 weeks. Now we’re down to one final cycle — assuming we don’t encounter any surprises. That’s where you all come in. Please help us test this upcoming Firefox 48 beta well so we have confidence when we get to the end of the beta cycle that E10S works well for everyone that gets it. Thanks.

https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/

Over the last three years, we have published a number of Daala technology demos. With pieces of Daala being contributed to the Alliance for Open Media's AV1 video codec, now seems like a good time to go back over the demos and see what worked, what didn't, and what changed compared to the description we made in the demos.

Read more!

http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/14419.html

Speaker: K Lars Lohn Keynote Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2016 and https://github.com/PyCon/2016-slides

https://air.mozilla.org/k-lars-lohn-keynote-pycon-2016-20160606/

The Monday Project Meeting

https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20160606/

Backtrack is about to be a new performance tool, focused on revealing and solving scheduling and delay problems.  Those are big offenders of performance, very hard to track, and hidden from conventional profilers.

To find out how long and what all has to happen to reach a certain point – an objective, just add a simple instrumentation marker.  When hit during run, it’s added to a list you can then pick from and start tracing to its origin.  Backtrack follows from the selected objective back to the originating user input event that has started the whole processing chain.

The walk-back crosses runnables and their wait time in thread event queues, but also network requests and responses, any code specific queues such as DOM mutations, scheduled reflows or background JS parsing ¹⁾, monitor and condvar notifications, mutex acquirements ²⁾, and disk I/O operations.

Visually the result is a single timeline – we can call it a critical path – revealing wait, network and CPU times as distinct intervals involved in reaching solely the selected objective.  Spotting mainly dispatch wait delays is then very easy.  The most important and new is that Backtrack tells you what other operations or events block (makes the critical path wait) and where from have been scheduled.  And more importantly, it recognizes which of them are (or are not) related to reaching the selected objective.  Those not related are then clear candidates for rescheduling.

To distinguish related and unrelated operations Backtrack captures all sub-tasks that are involved in reaching the selected objective.  Good example is the page first paint time – actually unsuppress of painting.  First paint is blocked by loading more than one resource, the HTML and head referenced CSS and JS.  These loads and their processing – the sub-tasks – happen in parallel and only completion of all of them unsuppresses the painting (said in a very simplified way, of course.)  Each such sub-task’s completion is marked with an added instrumentation.  That creates a list of sub-objectives that are then added to the whole picture.

Future improvements:

• Backtrack could be used in our perfomance automation.  Except calculation of time between an objective and its input source event, it can also calculate CPU vs dispatch delays vs network response time.  It could also be able to filter out code paths clean of any outer jitter.
• Indeed, networking has strong influence to load times.  Adding more detailed breakdown and analyzes how well we schedule and allocate network resources is one of the next steps.
• Adding PCAPs or even let Backtrack capture network activity like Wireshark directly from inside Firefox and join it with the Gecko Profiler UI might help too.

The current state of Backtrack development is a work in active progress and is not yet available to users of Gecko Profiler.  There are patches for Gecko, but also for the Cleopatra UI and the Gecko Profiler Add-on.  The UI changes, where also the analyzes happens, are mostly prototype-like and need a clean up.  There are also problems with larger memory consumption and bigger chances to hit OOMs when processing the captured data with Backtrack captured markers.

1) code specific queues need to be manually instrumented
2) with ability to follow to the thread that was keeping the mutex for the time you were waiting to acquire it

The post Backtrack meets Gecko Profiler appeared first on mayhemer's blog.

http://www.janbambas.cz/backtrack-meets-gecko-profiler/

If you are a Firefox Nightly user and you think you have found a bug in Firefox, a regression maybe, then you should wonder if the bug is in Firefox or if your data profile is causing it.

Maybe you changed some setting in about:config? Maybe you have an add-on causing problems? In that case, you might be hesitent to file a bug. Don't be!

Just try to reproduce your bug in a fresh data profile, if you are on Linux or MacOS you can even use this small script that I am using that automates the creation of a temporary user profile, name it Nightly_temp_profile.sh, make the file executable with chmod +x and launch the script from your terminal. Done.

Here is below the script I am using to do that, as you can see I put it as a gist on GitHub for easy sharing. If you use it, like it or want to improve it, don't hesitate to contact me (pascal AT mozilla DOT com)!

PS1: Yes, this is blatant self-plagiarism of a post I wrote in French in 2010 ;)

PS2: This script comes with no guarantee, it has been working for me on Ubuntu for years, it might not work at all for you.

https://www.chevrel.org/carnet/?post/2016/06/06/Launching-Firefox-Nightly-with-a-temporary-profile-from-bash

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.

Updates from Rust Community

News & Blog Posts

• Why is a Rust executable large?
• & vs. ref in Rust patterns.
• How do I use the Standard Library Macros in Rust? Part 1.
• Things you could do with the Rust AST.
• Beyond memory safety with types.
• Interfacing Rust with the JVM.
• Tween: a middleware library experiment.
• [podcast] New Rustacean: News episode 01. A year in, Rust is changing fast but still stable.
• [video] Ferris makes emulators: Episode 11 - Debugger part 2. Live stream of Ferris developing a N64 emulator in Rust (also on Twitch).

New Crates & Project Updates

• GDB now supports debugging programs written in Rust.
• Redox OS will from now on comply with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines.
• dikaiosune released a new project metrics dashboard.
• Tickets are now available for Rust Belt Rust Conference (27 & 28 October 2016, Pittsburgh, US).
• This week in Servo 65.
• This week in Rust docs 6.
• This week in intermezzOS 2.
• This week in Parity 3.
• imag. Text based personal information management suite.

Crate of the Week

This week's Crate of the Week is pbr, which gives us a simple way to set up a progress bar for our applications. Thanks to Lukas Kalbertodt for the suggestion!

Submit your suggestions for next week!

Call for Participation

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.

• [easy] rust: Participate in 2016 State of Rust Survey.
• [easy] rust: Add error explanations for all error codes.
• [easy] Speed up crypto in Rust by contributing to and using crypto-bench.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here.

Updates from Rust Core

84 pull requests were merged in the last two weeks.

• Avoid double-locking RWLock/Mutex
• Deny unsound projections and speeding up the compiler
• Rust aborts processes on Windows with __fastfail (instead of invalid instruction, this is a potentially breaking change)
• New AST validation pass to ensure macro expansions obey language rules
• MIR Non-zeroing Drop A journey of three years find a happy conclusion
• MIR Don't generate 3-armed boolean switches
• Support 16-bit pointers for embedded (or oldschool?) systems
• def_map no longer RefCelld in TyCtxt and driver::Resolutions
• Btree{Set,Map}::split_off (RFC #509)
• HIR Split Bindings and Paths
• Span of derived attributes fixed
• MIR range overflow checks
• byte slice compare checks for pointer equality (performance improvement)

New Contributors

• cheercroaker
• Ivan Shapovalov
• Jamey Sharp
• M Farkas-Dyck
• Scott A Carr
• Zack M. Davis

Approved RFCs

Changes 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.

Final Comment Period

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:

• Implement new methods for checked and wrapping casts for potentially lossy integer conversions.
• Change thread local variables to only accept async-signal-safe types.
• Add a initial, minimal form of impl Trait.
• Normalization for long error codes explanations.
• Standardise stream wrappers like compression, encryption.
• Add a lifetime specifier to macro_rules!.
• Remove the one-type-only restriction on format_args! arguments.

New RFCs

• Require documentation for all new features.
• Automatically implement some traits for !.
• Add two new pointer-sized integer types; uptr and iptr.
• Add checked_sub() already known from various primitive types to the Duration struct.
• Add PTX and AMDGPU targets.

Upcoming Events

• 6/8. Rust Community Team Meeting at #rust-community on irc.mozilla.org.
• 6/8. Rust Berlin Meetup.
• 6/8. Rust Boulder/Denver Monthly Meeting.
• 6/9. Columbus Rust Society.
• 6/13. Seattle Rust Meetup.
• 6/14. Eat – Drink – Rust! Downtown Rust Meetup (San Diego)
• 6/15. Rust Community Team Meeting at #rust-community on irc.mozilla.org.
• 6/15. Rust Los Angeles Monthly Meetup - Hack Night.
• 6/17. Rhein-Main Rust Regulars' Table.

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.

fn work(on: RustProject) -> Money

No jobs listed for this week.

Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust to get your job offers listed here!

Quote of the Week

No quote was selected for QotW.

Submit your quotes for next week!

https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2016/06/06/this-week-in-rust-133/

Traveling from Japan to France early on with family, a toddler, and 8 hours of flight delay on an already 12 hours long flight is tough. So light week. At least the tsuyu season in Japan will be avoided. Next-next week London meeting, then a bit of holidays in Normandy.

Tune of the week: Singing In The Rain

Webcompat Life

Progress this week:

Today: 2016-06-06T06:52:30.312973
356 open issues
----------------------
needsinfo       3
needsdiagnosis  109
needscontact    22
contactready    44
sitewait        163
----------------------

I need to improve this script generating the summary. Specifically I need to highlight each browser manufacturers.

We also receive a lot of spams lately on webcompat.com. This is not good. Is it a mark of success of the project.

You are welcome to participate

London agenda.

Webcompat issues

(a selection of some of the bugs worked on this week).

• Discovered that JavaScript lacks the s modifier in regex through this strange issue on http://blog.chromium.org/
• Uniqlo has fixed the issues with redirection

WebCompat.com dev

• Adam restarted the discussion on anonymous bug reporting. Interesting stuff with its own challenges.

Reading List

• CSS When/Else Rules: "A proposal to extend the concept of CSS conditional rules to arbitrary when/else chains, and supporing this, a proposal to unify the disparate conditional rules into a single grammar."

Follow Your Nose

• Previous Worklog
• Bugzilla Activity
• Github Activity

TODO

• Document how to write tests on webcompat.com using test fixtures.
• ToWrite: Amazon prefetching resources with for Firefox only.

Otsukare!

http://www.otsukare.info/2016/06/03/worklog-tsuyu

Since I know Ric Ford from MacInTouch reads this blog for updates (hi Ric!), let me also be clear that 38.9 is an interim stopgap release only -- the plan is still to get TenFourFox to version 45, hopefully by 45.4. There will also likely be a 38.10 (security parity with official Firefox ESR 45.3) to allow 45 enough time to bake in beta and the localizers to catch up, but I'm determined to get us there ultimately with more information on my plans to come. 38.9 and 38.10 are TenFourFox-specific updates to Firefox 38ESR and do not correspond to any official version of Firefox.

38.9 will become live on Monday evening Pacific as usual, assuming no showstoppers.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/06/389-available.html