Adam Stevenson: Supported Official |
Recently a bug was reported for the Bank of America (BOA) website. The problem is that BOA is alerting Firefox users on OSX that the site may not work for the browser they are using. We have a really nice contact at BOA so I reached out this morning to find out what’s up. He said that Firefox for OSX has dipped below 1% of their overall traffic. They have a policy that any browser with this low of traffic is not officially supported.
Some random questions came to my head while I scratched it:
OK, so what about Firefox on Windows? Yep that’s supported.
Is Chrome OSX supported? Yeah, obvi.
What could be different between Windows and OSX Firefox versions? Not much.
What does Officially Supported mean? Now we’re getting deep.
Does it require more testing for QA? Probably not, if it works in Windows.
What about customer service? Well they already support browsers in OSX and they know how Firefox works.
Do they prevent Firefox OSX from using the site? Nah.
Will users see that alert as a reason to use another browser, assuming Firefox is less secure? My brain hurts.
At the end of the day Firefox in OSX will continue to work fine on this website, but users will be nagged at every visit. Not a great experience and not great for the web. Let's hope that they reconsider this policy over time.
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Chris Cooper: RelEng & RelOps Weekly highlights - June 27, 2016 |
In better news, Anthony Miyaguchi has returned for his second internship with releng. He’ll be working with Jordan on migrating Fennec nightly builds to TaskCluster (TC).
Improve Release Pipeline:
njira fixed a few paper cuts on the Balrog Admin UI.
Ben, Nick, and Benson identified the remaining blockers before we migrate Balrog to CloudOps infrastructure, which is expected to be completed in the next couple of weeks.
Varun completed his GSoC project, which will make nightly build submission to Balrog much more efficient.
Aki got a rough instance of the signing server running in docker: https://github.com/escapewindow/docker-signing-server
Aki got build-tools tests passing in python3. The scripts still need some py3 fixes. https://github.com/escapewindow/build-tools/tree/py3
Callek has stood up Linux l10n try builds in TC. This was one a the few outstanding pieces blocking us from getting nightlies working in TC.
gbrown has ASAN and Android 4.3 tests (both opt and debug) running at tier 2 in TC.
Operational:
Andrei Obreja (aobreja on IRC) has joined the buildduty team at SoftVision. He replaces Vlad who has moved on to another opportunity.
Release:
Callek is in the releaseduty driver seat for the Firefox 48 release cycle. We’re currently at beta 3.
See you next week!
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting, 27 Jun 2016 |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20160627/
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QMO: Firefox 48 Beta 3 Testday Results |
Hi everyone!
Last Friday, June 24th, we held Firefox 48 Beta 3 Testday. It was a successful event (please see the results section below) so a big Thank You goes to everyone involved.
First of all, many thanks to our active contributors: Iryna Thompson, Paarttipaabhalaji, Karthikeya LK, Prasanth P, Ashly Rose Mathew.M, Moin Shaikh, Bhuvana Meenakshi.K, Pushanshu Avinash Sharma, Ilse Mac'ias, Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Maruf Rahman, Rezaul Huque Nayeem, Md. Rahimul Islam, Akash, Sayed Ibn Masud, Zayed News, Saddam Hossain, Sufi Ahmed Hamim, Md.Majedul islam, Md.Tarikul Islam Oashi, Tanvir Rahman, Sajedul Isalm, Forhad Hossain, Sudipto Krishna Dutta, Mohammad Maruf Islam, Fahim, Khalid Syfullah Zaman, T.M. Sazzad Hossain.
Secondly, a big thank you to all our active moderators.
Results:
We hope to see you all in our next events, all the details will be posted on QMO!
https://quality.mozilla.org/2016/06/firefox-48-beta-3-testday-results/
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John O'Duinn: “Distributed” ER#8 now available! |
“Distributed” Early Release #8 is now publicly available, about 6 weeks after the last EarlyRelease came out.
This ER#8 includes a significant reworking and trimming of both Chapter 1 (“The Real Cost of an Office”) and also Chapter 5 (“Organizational Pitfalls to Avoid”). I know that might not sound glamorous but it was a lot of slow, careful, detailed work which I believe makes these chapters better and also helps with the structure of the overall book.
You can buy ER#8 by clicking here, or clicking on the thumbnail of the book cover. Anyone who already bought any of the previous ERs should have already been prompted with a free update to ER#8 – if you didn’t get updated, please let me know so I can investigate! And yes, you’ll get updated when ER#9 comes out.
Thanks again to everyone for their ongoing encouragement and feedback so far. Each piece of great feedback makes me wonder how I missed such obvious errors before and also makes me happy, as each fix helps make this book better. Keep letting me know what you think! It’s important this book be interesting, readable and practical – so if you have any comments, concerns, etc., please email me. Yes, I will read and reply to each email personally! To make sure that any feedback doesn’t get lost or caught in spam filters, please email comments to feedback at oduinn dot com. I track all feedback and review/edit/merge as fast as I can.
Thank you to everyone who has already sent me feedback/opinions/corrections – all really helpful.
John.
=====
ps: For the curious, here is the current list of chapters and their status:
Chapter 1 The Real Cost of an Office – AVAILABLE
Chapter 2 Distributed Teams Are Not New – AVAILABLE
Chapter 3 Disaster Planning – AVAILABLE
Chapter 4 Diversity
Chapter 5 Organizational Pitfalls to Avoid – AVAILABLE
Chapter 6 Physical Setup – AVAILABLE
Chapter 7 Video Etiquette – AVAILABLE
Chapter 8 Own Your Calendar – AVAILABLE
Chapter 9 Meetings – AVAILABLE
Chapter 10 Meeting Moderator – AVAILABLE
Chapter 11 Single Source of Truth
Chapter 12 Email Etiquette – AVAILABLE
Chapter 13 Group Chat Etiquette – AVAILABLE
Chapter 14 Culture, Conflict and Trust
Chapter 15 One-on-Ones and Reviews – AVAILABLE
Chapter 16 Hiring, Onboarding, Firing, Reorgs,
Layoffs and other Departures – AVAILABLE
Chapter 17 Bring Humans Together – AVAILABLE
Chapter 18 Career Path – AVAILABLE
Chapter 19 Feed Your Soul – AVAILABLE
Chapter 20 Final Chapter
Appendix A The Bathroom Mirror Test – AVAILABLE
Appendix B How NOT to Work – AVAILABLE
Appendix C Further Reading – AVAILABLE
=====
http://oduinn.com/blog/2016/06/26/distributed-er8-now-available/
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Air Mozilla: ONOS Project Presentation |
The event aims to educate the general public about the ONOS project and give them the opportunity to meet members of ON.Lab, the non profit...
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Cameron Kaiser: Progress to TenFourFox 45: milestone 2 (plus: get your TALOS on or else, and Let's Engulf Comodo) |
Anyway, the next step is to port 45 using the 43 sets, and that's what I'll be working on over the next several weeks. I'm aiming for the first beta in mid-July, so stay tuned.
For those of you who have been following the Talos POWER8 workstation project (the most powerful and open workstation-class Power Architecture system to date; more info here and here), my contacts inform me that the fish-or-cut-bait deadline is approaching where Raptor needs to determine if the project is financially viable with the interest level so far received. Do not deny me my chance to give them my money for the two machines I am budgeting (a kidneystone) for. Do not foresake me, O my audience. I will find thee and smite thee. Sign up, thou cowards, and make this project a reality. Let's get that Intel crap you don't actually control off thy desks. You can also check out using the Talos to run x86 applications through QEMU, making it the best of both worlds, as demonstrated by a video on their Talos pre-release page.
Last but not least, increasingly sketchy certificate authority and issuer Comodo, already somewhat of a pariah for previously dropping their shorts, has decided to go full scumbag and is trying to trademark "Let's Encrypt." Does that phrase seem familiar to you? It should, because "Let's Encrypt" is (and has been for some time) a Mozilla-sponsored free and automated certificate authority trying to get certificates in the hands of more people so that more websites can be protected by strong encryption. As their FAQ says, "Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let's Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost."
Methinks Comodo is hoping to lawyer Let's Encrypt out of existence because they believe a free certificate issuer will be a huge impact to their business model. Well, yes, that's probably true, which makes me wonder what would happen if Mozilla threatened to pull the Comodo CA root out of Firefox in response. Besides, based on this petulant and almost certainly specious legal action and their previous poor security history, the certificate authority pool could definitely use a little chlorine anyhow.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/06/progress-to-tenfourfox-45-milestone-2.html
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Gervase Markham: Project Fear |
I’ve been campaigning a bit on the EU Referendum. (If you want to know why I think the UK should leave, here are my thoughts.) Here’s the leaflet my wife and I have been stuffing into letterboxes in our spare moments for the past two weeks:
And here’s the leaflet in our area being distributed today by one of the Labour local councillors and the Remain campaign:
Says it all.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/dnY1tpWtK5M/
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Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s Up with SUMO – 23rd June |
Hello, SUMO Nation!
Did you miss us? WE MISSED YOU! It’s good to be back, even if we had quite a fateful day today… The football fever in Europe reaching new heights, some countries wondering aloud if they want to keep being a part of the EU, and a Platform meeting to inform you about the current state of our explorations. Busy times – let’s dive straight into some updates:
We salute you!
Once again – it’s good to be back, and we’re looking forward to a great end of June and kick-off in July with you all. Keep rocking the helpful web!
PS. If you’re a football fan, let’s talk about it in our forums!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/06/23/whats-up-with-sumo-23rd-june/
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Air Mozilla: Reps weekly, 23 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.
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Air Mozilla: Web QA Weekly Team Meeting, 23 Jun 2016 |
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...
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Daniel Glazman: Implementing Media Queries in an editor |
You're happy as a programmer ? You think you know the Web ? You're a browser implementor ? You think dealing with Media Queries is easy ? Do the following first:
Given a totally arbitrary html document with arbitrary stylesheets and arbitrary media constraints, write an algo that gives all
h1
a red foreground color when the viewport size is betweenmin
andmax
, wheremin
is a value in pixels (0 indicating nomin-width
in the media query...) , andmax
is a value in pixels or infinite (indicating nomax-width
in the media query). You can't use inline styles, of course.!important
can be used ONLY if it's the only way of adding that style to the document and it's impossible otherwise. Oh, and you have to handle the case where some stylesheets are remote so you're not allowed to modify them because you could not reserialize them
What's hard? Eh:
My implementation in BlueGriffon is almost ready. Have fun...
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Friend of Add-ons: Yuki Hiroshi |
Please meet our newest Friend of Add-ons: Yuki “Piro” Hiroshi. A longtime add-on developer with 37 extensions and counting (he’s most proud of Tree Style Tab and Second Search), Hiroshi also recently filed more than two dozen high-impact WebExensions bugs.
Hiroshi recently recounted his experience porting one of his XUL add-ons to WebExtensions in the hopes that he could help support fellow add-on developers through the transition. He likens XUL to an “experimental laboratory” that over the past decade allowed us to explore the possibilities of a customized web browser. But now, Hiroshi says, we need to “go for better security and stability” and embrace forward-thinking API’s that will cater to building richer user experiences.
While add-ons technology is evolving, Hiroshi’s motivation to create remains the same. “It’s an emotional reason,” he says, which took root when he first discovered the power of a Gecko engine that allowed him to transform himself from being a mere hobbyist to a true developer. “Mozilla is a symbol of liberty for me,” Hiroshi explains. “It’s one of the legends of the early days of the web.”
When he’s not authoring add-ons, Hiroshi enjoys reading science fiction and manga. A recent favorite is The Hyakumanjo Labyrinth, a “bizarre adventure story” that takes place on an infinity field beyond space and time within an old Japanese apartment building.
Do you contribute to AMO in some fashion? If so, don’t forget to add your contributions to our Recognition page!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/06/22/friend-of-add-ons-yuki-hiroshi/
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Robert O'Callahan: PlayCanvas Is Impressive |
I've been experimenting on my children with different ways to introduce them to programming. We've tried Stencyl, Scratch, JS/HTML, Python, and CodeAcademy with varying degrees of success. It's difficult because, unlike when I learned to program 30 years ago, it's hard to quickly get results that compare favourably with a vast universe of apps and content they've already been exposed to. Frameworks and engines face a tradeoff between power, flexibility and ease-of-use; if it's too simple then it's impossible to do what you want to do and you may not learn "real programming", but if it's too complex then it may just be too hard to do what you want to do or you won't get results quickly.
Recently I discovered PlayCanvas and so far it looks like the best approach I've seen. It's a Web-based 3D engine containing the ammo.js (Bullet) physics engine, a WebGL renderer, a WYSIWYG editor, and a lot more. It does a lot of things right:
So far I'm very impressed and my child is getting into it.
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/06/playcanvas-is-impressive.html
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Add-ons Update – Week of 2016/06/22 |
I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.
In the past 3 weeks, 1432 listed add-ons were reviewed:
There are 61 listed add-ons awaiting review.
You can read about the recent improvements in the review queues here.
If you’re an add-on developer and are looking for contribution opportunities, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.
Most of you should have received an email from us about the future compatibility of your add-ons. You can use the compatibility tool to enter your add-on ID and get some info on what we think is the best path forward for your add-on. This tool only works for listed add-ons.
To ensure long-term compatibility, we suggest you start looking into WebExtensions, or use the Add-ons SDK and try to stick to the high-level APIs. There are many XUL add-ons that require APIs that aren’t available in either of these options, which is why we ran a survey so we know which APIs we should look into adding to WebExtensions. You can read about the survey results here.
We’re holding regular office hours for Multiprocess Firefox compatibility, to help you work on your add-ons, so please drop in on Tuesdays and chat with us!
The compatibility blog post for Firefox 48 is up, and the bulk validation will be run shortly.
As always, we recommend that you test your add-ons on Beta and Firefox Developer Edition to make sure that they continue to work correctly. End users can install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter to identify and report any add-ons that aren’t working anymore.
The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions. The current plan is to remove the signing override preference in Firefox 48.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/06/22/add-ons-update-83/
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The Mozilla Blog: Mozilla Awards $385,000 to Open Source Projects as part of MOSS “Mission Partners” Program |
For many years people with visual impairments and the legally blind have paid a steep price to access the Web on Windows-based computers. The market-leading software for screen readers costs well over $1,000. The high price is a considerable obstacle to keeping the Web open and accessible to all. The NVDA Project has developed an open source screen reader that is free to download and to use, and which works well with Firefox. NVDA aligns with one of the Mozilla Manifesto’s principles: “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”
That’s why, at Mozilla, we have elected to give the project $15,000 in the inaugural round of our Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) “Mission Partners” awards. The award will help NVDA stay compatible with the Firefox browser and support a long-term relationship between our two organizations. NVDA is just one of eight grantees in a wide range of key disciplines and technology areas that we have chosen to support as part of the MOSS Mission Partners track. This track financially supports open source software projects doing work that meaningfully advances Mozilla’s mission and priorities.
Aside from accessibility, security and privacy are common themes in this set of awards. We are supporting several secure communications tools, a web server which only works in secure mode, and a distributed, client-side, privacy-respecting search engine. The set is rounded out with awards to support the growing Rust ecosystem and promote open source options for the building of compelling games on the Web. (Yes, games. We consider games to be a key art-form in this modern era, which is why we are investing in the future of Web games with WebAssembly and Open Web Games.)
MOSS is a continuing program. The Mission Partners track has a budget for 2016 of around US$1.25 million. The first set of awards listed below total US$385,000 and we look forward to supporting more projects in the coming months. Applications remain open both for Mission Partners and for the Foundational Technology track (for projects creating software that Mozilla already uses or deploys) on an ongoing basis.
We are greatly helped in evaluating applications and making awards by the MOSS Committee. Many thanks again to them.
The first eight awardees are:
Tor: $152,500. Tor is a system for using a distributed network to communicate anonymously and without being tracked. This award will be used to significantly enhance the Tor network’s metrics infrastructure so that the performance and stability of the network can be monitored and improvements made as appropriate.
Tails: $77,000. Tails is a secure-by-default live operating system that aims at preserving the user’s privacy and anonymity. This award will be used to implement reproducible builds, making it possible for third parties to independently verify that a Tails ISO image was built from the corresponding Tails source code.
Caddy: $50,000. Caddy is an HTTP/2 web server that uses HTTPS automatically and by default via Let’s Encrypt. This award will be used to add a REST API, web UI, and new documentation, all of which make it easier to deploy more services with TLS.
Mio: $30,000. Mio is an asynchronous I/O library written in Rust. This award will be used to make ergonomic improvements to the API and thereby make it easier to build high performance applications with Mio in Rust.
DNSSEC/DANE Chain Stapling: $25,000. This project is standardizing and implementing a new TLS extension for transport of a serialized DNSSEC record set, to reduce the latency associated with DANE and DNSSEC validation. This award will be used to complete the standard in the IETF and build both a client-side and a server-side implementation.
Godot Engine: $20,000. Godot is a high-performance multi-platform game engine which can deploy to HTML5. This award will be used to add support for Web Sockets, WebAssembly and WebGL 2.0.
PeARS: $15,500. PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed web search engine which runs in an individual’s browser and indexes the pages they visit in a privacy-respecting way. This award will permit face-to-face collaboration among the remote team and bring the software to beta status.
NVDA: $15,000. NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows. This award will be used to make sure NVDA and Firefox continue to work well together as Firefox moves to a multi-process architecture.
This is only the beginning. Stay tuned for more award announcements as we allocate funds. Open Source is a movement that is only growing, both in numbers and in importance. Operating in the open makes for better security, better accessibility, better policy, better code and, ultimately, a better world. So if you know any projects whose work furthers the Mozilla Mission, send them our way and encourage them to apply.
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Air Mozilla: Weekly SUMO Community Meeting June 22, 2016 |
This is the sumo weekly call
https://air.mozilla.org/weekly-sumo-community-meeting-june-22-2016/
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David Lawrence: Happy BMO Push Day! |
the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:
discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.
https://dlawrence.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/happy-bmo-push-day-23/
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Firefox UX: What We Learned from the Government Digital Service Design Team |
Toward the end of Mozilla’s All-Hands Meeting in London last week, about a dozen members of the Firefox UX team paid a visit to the main…
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