Mozilla Addons Blog: WebExtensions for Firefox 49 |
Firefox 49 landed in Developer Edition this week, so we have another update on WebExtensions for you!
Since 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. Since the last release, more than 35 bugs were closed on WebExtensions alone.
If you have authored an add-on in the past and are curious about how it’s affected by the upcoming changes, please use this lookup tool. There is also a wiki page and MDN articles filled with resources to support you through the changes.
The history API allows you to interact with the browser history. In Firefox 49 the APIs to add, query, and delete browser history have been merged. This is ideal for developers who want to build add-ons to manage user privacy.
In Firefox 48, Android support was merged, and in Firefox 49 support for some of the native elements has started to land. Firefox 49 on Android supports some of the pageAction APIs. This work lays the foundation for new APIs such as tabs, windows, browserAction in Android.
The WebNavigation API now supports the manual_subframe transitionType and keeps track of user interaction with the url bar appropriately. The downloads API now lets you download a blob created in a background script.
For a full list of bugs, please check out Bugzilla.
Things are a little bit quieter recently because there are things in progress that have absorbed a lot of developer time. They won’t land in the tree for Firefox 49, but we’ll keep you updated on their progress in later releases.
This API allows you to store some data for an add-on in Firefox and have it synced to another Firefox browser. It is most commonly used for storing add-on preferences, because it is not designed to be a robust data storage and syncing tool. For sync, we will use Firefox Accounts to authenticate users and enforce quota limits.
Whilst the API contains the word “sync” and it uses Firefox Accounts, it should be noted that it is different from Firefox Sync. In Firefox Sync there is an attempt to merge data and resolve conflicts. There is no similar logic in this API.
You can track the progress of storage.sync in Bugzilla.
This API allows you to communicate with other processes on the host’s operating system. It’s a commonly used API for password managers and security software which needs to communicate with external processes.
To communicate with a native process, there’s a two-step process. First, your installer needs to install a JSON manifest file at an appropriate file location on the target computer. That JSON manifest provides the link between Firefox and the process. Secondly, the user installs the add-on. Then the add-on can call the connectNative, sendNativeMessage and other APIs:
chrome.runtime.sendNativeMessage('your-application',
{ text: "Hello" },
function(response) {
console.log("Received " + response);
});
Firefox will start the process if it hasn’t started already, and pipe commands through to the process. Follow along with the progress of runtime.connectNative on Bugzilla.
With these ongoing improvements, we realise there are lots of add-ons that might want to start moving towards WebExtensions and utilise the new APIs.
To allow this, you will soon be able to embed a WebExtension inside an add-on. This allows you to message the WebExtension add-on.
The following example works with SDK add-ons, but this should work with any bootstrapped add-on. Inside your SDK add-on you’d have a directory called webextensions containing a full-fledged WebExtension. In the background page of that WebExtension will be the following:
chrome.runtime.sendMessage("test message", (reply) => {
console.log("embedded webext got a reply", reply);
});
Then you’d be able to reply in the SDK add-on:
var { api } = require('sdk/webextension');
api.onMessage.addListener((msg, sender, sendReply) =>
console.log("SDK add-on got a message", {msg,sender});
sendReply("reply");
});
This demonstrates sending a message from the WebExtension to the SDK add-on.Persistent bi-directional ports will also be available.
Using this technique, we hope add-on developers can leverage WebExtensions APIs as they start migrating their add-on over to WebExtensions. Follow along with the progress of communication on Bugzilla.
There are also lots of other ways to get involved with WebExtensions, so please check them out!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/06/09/webextensions-for-firefox-49/
|
|
Mitchell Baker: Joi Ito changes role and starts new “Practicing Open” project with Mozilla Foundation |
Since the Mozilla Foundation was founded in 2003, we’ve grown remarkably – from impact to the size of our staff and global community. We’re indebted to the people whose passion and creativity made this possible, people like Joi Ito.
Joi is a long-time friend of Mozilla. He’s a technologist, a thinker, an activist and an entrepreneur. He’s been a Mozilla Foundation board member for many years. He’s also Director of the MIT Media Lab and was very recently appointed Professor of the Practice by MIT.
As Joi has become more deeply involved with the Media Lab over the past few years, we’ve come to understand that his most important future contributions are, rather than as a Board member, to spur innovative activities that advance the goals of both the Mozilla Foundation and the Media Lab.
The first such project and collaboration between Mozilla and the Media Lab, is an “Open Leadership Camp” for senior executives in the nonprofit and public sectors.
The seeds of this idea have been germinating for a while. Joi and I have had an ongoing discussion about how people build open, participatory, web-like organizations for a year or so now. The NetGain consortium led by Ford, Mozilla and a number of foundations, has shown the pressing need for deeper Internet knowledge in the nonprofit and public sectors. Also, Mozilla’s nascent Leadership Network has been working on how to provide innovative ways for leaders in the more publicly-minded tech space to learn new skills. All these things felt like the perfect storm for a collaborative project on open leadership and to work with other groups already active in this area.
The project we have in mind is simple:
Topics we’ll cover include everything from design thinking (think: sticky notes) to working in the open (think: github) to the future of open technologies (think: blockchain). The initial camp will run at MIT in early 2017, with Joi and myself as the hosts. Our hope is that a curriculum and method can grow from there to seed similar camps within public-interest leadership programs in many other places.
I’m intensely grateful for Joi’s impact. We’ve been lucky to have him involved with Mozilla and the open Internet. We’re lucky to have him at the Media Lab and I’m looking forward to our upcoming work together.
|
|
Chris AtLee: PyCon 2016 report |
I had the opportunity to spend last week in Portland for PyCon 2016. I'd like to share some of my thoughts and some pointers to good talks I was able to attend. The full schedule can be found here and all the videos are here.
Brandon Rhodes' Welcome to PyCon was one of the best introductions to a conference I've ever seen. Unfortunately I can't find a link to a recording... What I liked about it was that he made everyone feel very welcome to PyCon and to Portland. He explained some of the simple (but important!) practical details like where to find the conference rooms, how to take transit, etc. He noted that for the first time, they have live transcriptions of the talks being done and put up on screens beside the speaker slides for the hearing impaired.
He also emphasized the importance of keeping questions short during Q&A after the regular sessions. "Please form your question in the form of a question." I've been to way too many Q&A sessions where the person asking the question took the opportunity to go off on a long, unrelated tangent. For the most part, this advice was followed at PyCon: I didn't see very many long winded questions or statements during Q&A sessions.
Ned Batchelder gave this great talk about using python's language features to debug problematic code. He ran through several examples of tricky problems that could come up, and how to use things like monkey patching and the debug trace hook to find out where the problem is. One piece of advice I liked was when he said that it doesn't matter how ugly the code is, since it's only going to last 10 minutes. The point is the get the information you need out of the system the easiest way possible, and then you can undo your changes.
I found this session pretty interesting. We certainly have lots of code that needs refactoring!
I found this interesting, but a little too theoretical. Object capabilities are a completely orthogonal way to access control lists as a way model security and permissions. It was hard for me to see how we could apply this to the systems we're building.
A really cool intro to the Home Assistant project, which integrates all kinds of IoT type things in your home. E.g. Nest, Sonos, IFTTT, OpenWrt, light bulbs, switches, automatic sprinkler systems. I'm definitely going to give this a try once I free up my raspberry pi.
A very entertaining session about closures in Python. Does Python even have closures? (yes!)
Lots of good information about how classes work in Python, including some details about meta-classes. I think I understand meta-classes better after having attended this session. I still don't get descriptors though!
(I hope Mike learns soon that __new__ is pronounced "dunder new" and not "under under new"!)
Very good presentation about getting started with deep learning. There are lots of great libraries and pre-trained neural networks out there to get started with!
I really enjoyed this talk. Cory Benfield describes the importance of keeping a clean separation between your protocol parsing code, and your IO. It not only makes things more testable, but makes code more reusable. Nearly every HTTP library in the Python ecosystem needs to re-implement its own HTTP parsing code, since all the existing code is tightly coupled to the network IO calls.
(video)
Some interesting notes in here about the history of Python, and a look at what's coming in 3.6.
An intro to the click module for creating beautiful command line interfaces.
I like that click helps you to build testable CLIs.
A good introduction to what HTTP/2 can do, and why it's such an improvement over HTTP/1.x.
Really good talk about failing gracefully. He covered some familiar topics like adding timeouts and retries to things that can fail, but also introduced to me the concept of circuit breakers. The idea with a circuit breaker is to prevent talking to services you know are down. For example, if you have failed to get a response from service X the past 5 times due to timeouts or errors, then open the circuit breaker for a set amount of time. Future calls to service X from your application will be intercepted, and will fail early. This can avoid hammering a service while it's in an error state, and works well in combination with timeouts and retries of course.
I was thinking quite a bit about Ben's redo module during this talk. It's a great module for handling retries!
I didn't end up going to this talk, but I did have a chance to chat with Brian before. magic-wormhole is a tool to safely transfer files from one computer to another. Think scp, but without needing ssh keys set up already, or direct network flows. Very neat tool!
How to do planetary orbit simulations in Python. Pretty interesting talk, he introduced me to Feynman, and some of the important characteristics of the simulation methods introduced.
Hilarious talk about building bots with Python. Definitely worth watching, although unfortunately it's only a partial recording.
The infamous GIL is gone! And your Python programs only run 25x slower!
Larry describes why the GIL was introduced, what it does, and what's involved with removing it. He's actually got a fork of Python with the GIL removed, but performance suffers quite a bit when run without the GIL.
|
|
Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s Up with SUMO – 9th June |
Hello, SUMO Nation!
I wonder how many football fans do we have among you… The Euro’s coming! Some of us will definitely be watching (and being emotional) about the games played out in the next few weeks. If you’re a football fan, let’s talk about it in our forums!
We salute you!
That’s it for this week – next week the blog post may not be here… but if you keep an eye open for our Twitter updates, you may see a lot of smiling faces.
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/06/09/whats-up-with-sumo-9th-june/
|
|
Mark Surman: Making the open internet a mainstream issue |
The Internet as a global public resource is at risk. How do we grow the movement to protect it? Thoughts from PDF
Today I’m in New York City at the 13th-annual Personal Democracy Forum, where the theme is “The Tech We Need.” A lot of bright minds are here tackling big issues, like civic tech, data privacy, Internet policy and the sharing economy. PDF is one of the world’s best spaces for exploring the intersection of the Internet and society — and we need events like this now more than ever.
This afternoon I’ll be speaking about the open Internet movement: its genesis, its ebb and why it needs a renaissance. I’ll discuss how the open Internet is much like the environment: a resource that’s delicate and finite. And a resource that, without a strong movement, is spoiled by bad laws and consolidation of power by a few companies.
At its core, the open Internet movement is about more than just technology. It’s about free expression and democracy. That’s why members of the movement are so diverse: Activists and academics. Journalists and hackers.
photo via Flickr/ Stacie Isabella Turk/RibbonheadToday, this movement is at an inflection point. The open Internet is increasingly at risk. Openness and freedom online are being eroded by governments creating bad or uninformed policy, and by tech companies that are creating monopolies and walled gardens. This is all compounded by a second problem: Many people still don’t perceive the health of the Internet as a mainstream issue.
In order to really demonstrate the importance of the open Internet movement, I like to use an analogue: The environmental movement. The two have a lot in common. Environmentalists are all about preserving the health of the planet. Forests, not clearcutting. Habitats, not smokestacks. Open Internet activists are all about preserving the health of the Internet. Open source code, not proprietary software. Hyperlinks, not walled gardens.
The open Internet is also like the environmental movement in that it has rhythm. Public support ebbs and flows — there are crescendos and diminuendos. Look at the cadence of the environmental movement: It became a number of times in a number of places. For example, an early crescendo in the US came in the late 19th century. On the heels of the Industrial Revolution, there’s resistance. Think of Thoreau, of “Walden.” Soon after, Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir emerge as champions of the environment, creating the Sierra Club and the first national parks. Both national parks and a conservation movement filled with hikers who use them both become mainstream — it’s a major victory.
But movements ebb. In the mid-20th century, environmental destruction continues. We build nuclear and chemical plants. We pollute rivers and air space. We coat our food and children with DDT. It’s ugly — and we did irreparable damage while most people just went about their lives. In many ways, this is where we’re at with the Internet today. There is reason to worry that we’re doing damage and that we might even lose what we built without even knowing it. .
In reaction, the US environmental movement experiences a second mainstream moment. It starts in the 60s: Rachel Carson releases “Silent Spring,” exposing the dangers of DDT and other pesticides. This is a big deal: Citizens start becoming suspicious of big companies and their impact on the environment. Governments begin appointing environmental ministers. Organizations like Greenpeace emerge and flourish.
For a second time, the environment becomes an issue worthy of policy and public debate. Resting on the foundations built by 1960s environmentalism, things like recycling are a civic duty today. And green business practices are the expectation, not the exception.
The open Internet movement has had a similar tempo. It’s first crescendo — its “Walden” moment — was in the 90s. Users carved out and shaped their own spaces online — digital homesteading. No two web pages were the same, and open was the standard. A rough analogue to Thoreau’s “Walden” is John Perry Barlow’s manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow boldly wrote that governments and centralized power have no place in the digital world.
It’s during this time that the open Internet faces its first major threat: centralization at the hands of Internet Explorer. Suddenly, it seems the whole Web may fall into the hands of Microsoft technology. But there was also a push back and crescendo — hackers and users rallied to create open alternatives like Firefox. Quickly, non-proprietary web standards re-emerge. Interoperability and accessibility become driving principles behind building the Web. The Browser Wars are won: Microsoft as monopoly over web technology is thwarted.
But then comes inertia. We could be in the open Internet movement’s DDT moment. Increasingly, the Internet is becoming a place of centralization. The Internet is increasingly shaped by a tiny handful of companies, not individuals. Users are transforming from creators into consumers. In the global south, millions of users equate the Internet with Facebook. These developments crystallize as a handful of threats: Centralization. Loss of privacy. Digital exclusion.
It’s a bit scary: Like the environment, the open Internet is fragile. There may be a point of no return. What we want to do — what we need to do — is make the health of the open Internet a mainstream issue. We need to make the health of the Internet an indelible issue, something that spurs on better policy and better products. And we need a movement to make this happen.
This is on us: everyone who uses the internet needs to take notice. Not just the technologists — also the activists, academics, journalists and everyday Internet users who treasure freedom of expression and inclusivity online.
There’s good news: This is already happening. Starting with SOPA and ACTA a citizen movement for an open Internet started accelerating. We got organized, we rallyied citizens and we took stands on issues that mattered. Think of the recent headlines. When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of mass surveillance, people listened. Privacy and freedom from surveillance online were quickly enshrined as rights worth fighting for. The issue gained momentum among policymakers — and in 2015, the USA Freedom Act was passed.
Then there is 2015’s net neutrality victory: Over 3 million comments flooded the FCC protesting fast lanes and slow lanes. Most recently, Apple and the FBI clashed fiercely over encryption. Apple refused to concede, standing up for users’ privacy and security. Tim Cook was applauded, and encryption became a word spoken at kitchen tables and coffee shops.
Of course, this is just the beginning. These victories are heartening, for sure. But even as this new wave of internet activism builds, the threats are becoming worse, more widespread. We need to fuel the movement with concrete action — if we don’t, we may lose the open Web for good. Today, upholding the health of the planet is an urgent and enduring enterprise. So too should upholding the health of the Internet.
A small PS, I also gave a talk on this topic at re:publica in Berlin last month. If you want to watch that talk, the video is on the re:publica site.
The post Making the open internet a mainstream issue appeared first on Mark Surman.
https://marksurman.commons.ca/2016/06/09/making-open-internet-mainstream-issue/
|
|
Air Mozilla: Mapathon Missing Maps #4 |
Ateliers de cartographie collaborative sur OpenStreetMap de r'egions du monde peu ou pas encore cartographi'ees. Organis'e par Missing Maps et MSF.
|
|
Air Mozilla: Web QA team meeting |
They say a Mozilla Web QA team member is the most fearless creature in the world. They say their jaws are powerful enough to crush...
|
|
Air Mozilla: Reps weekly, 09 Jun 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.
|
|
The Mozilla Blog: Help Make Open Source Secure |
Major security bugs 
in core pieces of open source software – such as Heartbleed and Shellshock – have elevated highly technical security vulnerabilities into national news headlines. Despite these sobering incidents, adequate support for securing open source software remains an unsolved problem, as a panel of 32 security professionals confirmed in 2015. We want to change that, starting today with the creation of the Secure Open Source (“SOS”) Fund aimed at precisely this need.
Open source software is used by millions of businesses and thousands of educational and government institutions for critical applications and services. From Google and Microsoft to the United Nations, open source code is now tightly woven into the fabric of the software that powers the world. Indeed, much of the Internet – including the network infrastructure that supports it – runs using open source technologies. As the Internet moves from connecting browsers to connecting devices (cars and medical equipment), software security becomes a life and death consideration.
The SOS Fund will provide security auditing, remediation, and verification for key open source software projects. The Fund is part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS) and has been allocated $500,000 in initial funding, which will cover audits of some widely-used open source libraries and programs. But we hope this is only the beginning. We want to see the numerous companies and governments that use open source join us and provide additional financial support. We challenge these beneficiaries of open source to pay it forward and help secure the Internet.
Security is a process. To have substantial and lasting benefit, we need to invest in education, best practices, and a host of other areas. Yet we hope that this fund will provide needed short-term benefits and industry momentum to help strengthen open source projects.
Mozilla is committed to tackling the need for more security in the open source ecosystem through three steps:
We have already tested this process with audits of three pieces of open source software. In those audits we uncovered and addressed a total of 43 bugs, including one critical vulnerability and two issues with a widely-used image file format. These initial results confirm our investment hypothesis, and we’re excited to learn more as we open for applications.
We all rely on open source software. We invite other companies and funders to join us in securing the open source ecosystem. If you’re a developer, apply for support! And if you’re a funder, join us. Together, we can have a greater impact for the security of open source systems and the Internet as a whole.
More information:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/09/help-make-open-source-secure/
|
|
Daniel Stenberg: curl on windows versions |
I had to ask. Just to get a notion of which Windows versions our users are actually using, so that we could get an indication which versions we still should make an effort to keep working on. As people download and run libcurl on their own, we just have no other ways to figure this out.
As always when asking a question to our audience, we can’t really know which part of our users that responded and it is probably more safe to assume that it is not a representative distribution of our actual user base but it is simply as good as it gets. A hint.
I posted about this poll on the libcurl mailing list and over twitter. I had it open for about 48 hours. We received 86 responses. Click the image below for the full res version:
So, Windows 10, 8 and 7 are very well used and even Vista and XP clocked in fairly high on 14% and 23%. Clearly those are Windows versions we should strive to keep supported.
For Windows versions older than XP I was sort of hoping we’d get a zero, but as you can see in the graph we have users claiming to use curl on as old versions as Windows NT 4. I even checked, and it wasn’t the same two users that checked all those three oldest versions.
The “Other” marks were for Windows 2008 and 2012, and bonus points for the user who added “Other: debian 7”. It is interesting that I specifically asked for users running curl on windows to answer this survey and yet 26% responded that they don’t use Windows at all..
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/06/09/curl-on-windows-versions/
|
|
Matej Cepl: vim-sticky-notes — vim support for paste.fedoraproject.org |
I have started to work on updating pastebin.vim so that it works with fpaste The result is available on my GitLab project vim-sticky-notes Any feedback, issue reports, and (of course) merge requests are very welcome.
https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/vim-sticky-notes-vim-support-for-pastefedoraprojectorg.html
|
|
Yunier Jos'e Sosa V'azquez: Firefox incorpora Widevine, pesta~nas sincronizadas y mucho m'as |
Como @Pochy hab'ia anunciado, ya se encuentra disponible la descarga de una actualizaci'on de Firefox. Tras 6 semanas de estar en fase beta, en el d'ia de ayer fue liberada una nueva versi'on de Firefox, por lo que es tiempo de actualizar. En este lanzamiento sobresale el empleo de Google’s Widevine CDM para reproducir contenido a trav'es del plugin Silverlight que contenga protecci'on DRM, la posibilidad de visualizar y buscar f'acilmente las pesta~nas sincronizadas en otros dispositivos, importantes cambios relacionados con los complementos, mejoras en la seguridad y mucho m'as.
El a~no pasado Mozilla introdujo en Firefox la posibilidad de reproducir contenidos protegidos bajo DRM a trav'es de Adobe’s Primetime CDM y ahora se ha a~nadido Google Widevine CDM en Windows y Mac. Widevine es una alternativa para la para la transmisi'on de los servicios que en la actualidad se basan en Silverlight y son protegidos por DRM. Es v'alido recordar que Widevine se activar'a cuando los usuarios interact'uen por primera vez con un sitio web que requiera Widevine.
Widevine CDM se ejecuta en un entorno seguro y abierto en Firefox, permitiendo mejor seguridad que los plugins NPAPI y a su vez significa un importante paso en los planes de Mozilla para eliminar los plugins NPAPI. Algunas p'aginas web utilizan un tipo de DRM que no admiten los m'odulos de cifrado de contenido de Adobe Primetime ni de Google Widevine. Para poder verlo, quiz'as necesites un plugin NPAPI de terceros, como Microsoft Silverlight.
Desde la inclusi'on de Sync en el navegador puedes compartir tu informaci'on y preferencias (como marcadores, contrase~nas, pesta~nas abiertas, lista de lectura y complementos instalados) con todos tus dispositivos para mantenerte actualizado y no perderte nada.
Con este lanzamiento, ver las pesta~nas abiertas en otros dispositivos ser'a mucho m'as f'acil e intuitivo pues al sincronizar inmediatamente se mostrar'a el bot'on 
en la barra de herramientas, el cual te permite acceder mediante un panel a estas p'aginas en tu equipo con tan solo un clic. Tambi'en, mientras busques en la barra de direcciones, las pesta~nas ser'an mostradas en la lista desplegable.
Barra lateral que muestra las pesta~nas abiertas en otros dispositivos
Si nunca has configurado Sync y deseas hacerlo, puedes leer este art'iculo en la Ayuda de Mozilla. !Es muy f'acil y r'apido!
La decodificaci'on del c'odec VP9 ha sido habilitada solo para usuarios que cuenten con m'aquinas r'apidas y los videos embebidos de YouTube ahora se reproducen a trav'es de HTML5 si Flash no esta instalado. Esto significa que los videos se reproducir'an de una forma m'as fluida, empleando menos ancho de banda y extendiendo la vida 'util de tu bater'ia.
El idioma Latgalu ha sido incorporado y se suma a la larga lista de lenguas soportadas por el panda rojo.
FUEL (Firefox User Extension Library) ha sido eliminada y debido a ello, los complementos que la incorporen no funcionar'an m'as en el navegador, a menos que sus desarrolladores actualicen su c'odigo.
La lista blanca para ejecutar plugins fue suprimida, por lo que todos los plugins estar'an inhabilitados por defecto para ejecutarse y debemos permitir seg'un su nivel de confianza u otro aspecto personal.
Por otra parte, la preferencia browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand ha sido establecida a su valor original (true) para evitar problemas de rendimiento en e10s.
Si deseas conocer m'as detalles de las novedades para desarrolladores puedes leer este art'iculo publicado en el blog de Mozilla Hispano donde abordan m'as el tema.
Si prefieres ver la lista completa de novedades, puedes llegarte hasta las notas de lanzamiento (en ingl'es).
Puedes obtener esta versi'on desde nuestra zona de Descargas en espa~nol e ingl'es para Android, Linux, Mac y Windows. Si te ha gustado, por favor comparte con tus amigos esta noticia en las redes sociales. No dudes en dejarnos un comentario.
http://firefoxmania.uci.cu/firefox-incorpora-widevine-pestanas-sincronizadas-y-mucho-mas/
|
|
Air Mozilla: The Joy of Coding - Episode 60 |
mconley livehacks on real Firefox bugs while thinking aloud.
|
|
Dave Townsend: New Firefox reviewers |
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just made Andrew Swan (aswan on IRC) a reviewer for Firefox code. That also reminds me that I failed to announce when I did the same for Rob Helmer (rhelmer). Please inundate them with patches.
There are a few key things I look for when promoting folks to reviewers, surprisingly none of them are an understanding of the full breadth of code in Firefox or Toolkit:
Pretty much all of this is demonstrated by seeing what code the potential reviewer is writing and letting them review smaller patches by already well-versed contributors.
https://www.oxymoronical.com/blog/2016/06/New-Firefox-reviewers
|
|
Air Mozilla: Weekly SUMO Community Meeting June 8, 2016 |
This is the sumo weekly call
https://air.mozilla.org/weekly-sumo-community-meeting-june-8-2016-20160608/
|
|
Carsten Book: Please take part in the Sheriff Survey! |
Hi,
When we moved to the “inbound” model of tree management, the Tree Sheriffs became a crucial part of our engineering infrastructure. The primary responsibility of the Sheriffs is and will always be to aid developers to easily, quickly, and seamlessly land their code in the proper location(s) and ensure that code does not break our automated tests.
But of course there is always room for improvements and ideas how we can make things better. In order to get a picture from our Community (YOU!) how things went and how we can improve our day-to day-work we created a Survey!
You can find the Survey here:
|
|
Karl Dubost: User Experience on Fail or Block |
There is a "discussion" going on about Progressive Web Apps and the user experience currently provided by Flipkart.
If they are not sure the site is not fully working on a browser X, they block it through user agent sniffing. It is a double fail strategy.
A path in between? Managing user expectations.
Create your Web site in a way which gives universal access, what is called progressive Web. It works in the simplest environment and offers a better experience for users with different type of choices.
But if you really have to prioritize your work, then just say it, inform the user once, that this site has been fully checked on these platforms X, Y and Z and it might fail in some areas. That you welcome bug reports explaining in which ways it fails and that you are interested by receiving some hints on how to fix it. This is thousand times better than blocking a user.
Otsukare!
|
|
David Clarke: American Airlines – What do you believe in ? |
Back story: The flight was delayed, approx 4 hours, on top of a 3 hour layover in Dallas. It’s Thursday night, and I was watching the Warriors / Cleveland Cavaliers game with Siqi another person in the group we were travelling with. (we just met at the game mind you)
“Over the loud speaker American Airlines announces that they are boarding group 2”
I walk to the front of the line as I’m in group 1. And my question to the gate agent was merely if I should come to the front or wait at the back of the line. (I think both Siqi + myself were all group 1 boarding )
Philip: “Come around the other side of this line, you aren’t getting on this flight. ”
David: “What is the problem”
Philip: “You have been drinking”
David: (In my head i’m thinking, but we were watching the game ? Aren’t you supposed to ? We had a delay of over 4 hours ? I’m not flying the plane ? I’ve been waiting at the gate for 6 hours + ) . I tried to discuss with the gate agent that it is not acceptable to arbitrarily kick people off the plane. “I am not loud, or inebriated and I have done nothing wrong”.
The uprising begins:
Other passengers also realize the injustice of being singled out for no apparent reason to make way for someone else.
The first person to stand up was the Air Force refueling pilot who came from watching the same game. The gate agent threatens, and then kicks him off the plane.
The second person to stand up was a couple from Canada. Tyler (Post Doc research fellow ) / Wife said the same thing, it doesn’t seem right to kick someone of the flight who has done nothing wrong.
Their punishment was much swifter, and more irrational. The gate agent then canceled their tickets completely, and then threatened / potentially executed a “lifetime” ban on his wife.
I would like to wholeheartedly thank the people who stood up to “Philip”, because it struck me as the right thing to do, and I was surprised that more people on the flight didn’t feel confident saying anything.
Lack of checks and balances
There were no checks / balances to regulate the gate agent, he seemed to believe he could do what he liked / when he liked, and was by far the loudest voice. ? Should any 1 person be able to affect so many people so arbitrarily. \
No other agents working at american airlines booth needed sign off for this type of a response.
Philip was able to call the airport security forces without any justification as to what we had done, and why they were needed.
Philip used the security forces in an intimidation tactic to get us to tacitly sign off on getting rebooked to the next morning.
Refusal
With American Airlines ticket for the next morning in hand, I decided the greatest mistake would be to get on that plane, and let the people who had stood up for me in the process try to find their own way to New Orleans.
Instead we went to Budget rent a car, and traversed from Dallas -> New Orleans overnight. The weather was atrocious we battled rain, and fog as thick as I’d ever seen to make it, but make it we did, together.
Disappointments
My disappointment was in the lack of process, and the lack of accountability at american airlines.
I didn’t even think I was being racially profiled, until Siqi had mentioned it on Twitter. And I realized that @AmericanAirlines has a real problem.
During the 15 minute process, I just kept assuming this was a mistake and would be ironed out.. I just couldn’t imagine why me ? But in truth the question is why not me ?
The Unknown
The other part of this experience was the lack of knowing why none of the other american airlines employees did anything. They just stood there, and let it happen.
Is the expectation that people of color should accept being kicked off of planes, because they are the least defended, and least likely to complain.
How can American Airlines serve me first class on one flight, but then kick me off on the other flight.
How can they board me on a plane at 8pm, unboard me, and then at midnight tell me I cannot fly because I had some beer. Isn’t that what we do in America ? Have beer and watch a basketball game ?
https://onecyrenus.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/american-airlines-what-do-you-believe-in/
|
|
Karl Dubost: Some Loosely Connected Progressive Web App Silos |
A couple of days ago, I collected the blog posts about Progressive Web Apps (PWA). This morning I was reading a new blog post by Alex Russel about the user experience related to the add to home screen. There's one thing which I would welcome in the user experience: The silo'ed PWA.
One thing which regularly frustrates me with the Web sites are trackers, and more specifically trackers across Web sites. My browser is a set of intimacies, a whole me which is rightly connected in my physical embodiment. I never close the browser, except for upgrades. I have 273 tabs (right now) opened. And I use uBlock and uMatrix heavily by blocking everything by default and allowing things on a resource by resource case. The reason apart of performances is to silo my individual intimacies from the outside. To make the choice to share your personal data with one site is a thing, to give a blank check to reveal your intimacies across sites is another one.
I can see a sweet spot for Progressive Web Apps as a silo for the relationship you decide to establish with this Web site. I really dislike centralized silos when it's about big deep pits of communications such as Facebook, twitter, and so on, but I praise for the silos you create for yourself. I may decide to share my data with this Web site, because I trust it, because I decided I can live with it.
What about having an option on the browser to always add my home screen in a private tab-like environment? Here I would feel a bit more respect for our individual complexities and diversities.
PS: It also could be a nice feature in browser tabs.
Otsukare!
|
|
Air Mozilla: Connected Devices Weekly Program Update, 07 Jun 2016 |
Weekly project updates from the Mozilla Connected Devices team.
https://air.mozilla.org/connected-devices-weekly-program-update-20160607/
|
|