Daniel Stenberg: curl wants to QUIC |
The interesting Google transfer protocol that is known as QUIC is being passed through the IETF grinding machines to hopefully end up with a proper “spec” that has been reviewed and agreed to by many peers and that will end up being a protocol that is thoroughly documented with a lot of protocol people’s consensus. Follow the IETF QUIC mailing list for all the action.
Similarly to how we implemented HTTP/2 support early on for curl, I would like us to get “on the bandwagon” early for QUIC to be able to both aid the protocol development and serve as a testing tool for both the protocol and the server implementations but then also of course to get us a solid implementation for users who’d like a proper QUIC capable client for data transfers.
The current version (made entirely by Google and not the output of the work they’re now doing on it within the IETF) of the QUIC protocol is already being widely used as Chrome speaks it with Google’s services in preference to HTTP/2 and other protocol options. There exist only a few other implementations of QUIC outside of the official ones Google offers as open source. Caddy offers a separate server implementation for example.
For curl’s sake, it can’t use the Google code as a basis for a QUIC implementation since it is C++ and code used within the Chrome browser is really too entangled with the browser and its particular environment to become very good when converted into a library. There’s a libquic project doing exactly this.
The ideal way to implement QUIC for curl would be to create “nghttp2” alternative that does QUIC. An ngquic if you will! A library that handles the low level protocol fiddling, the binary framing etc. Done that way, a QUIC library could be used by more projects who’d like QUIC support and all people who’d like to see this protocol supported in those tools and libraries could join in and make it happen. Such a library would need to be written in plain C and be suitably licensed for it to be really interesting for curl use.
I’m hoping my post here will inspire someone to get such a project going. I will not hesitate to join in and help it get somewhere! I haven’t started such a project myself because I think I already have enough projects on my plate so I fear I wouldn’t be a good leader or maintainer of a project like this. But of course, if nobody else will do it I will do it myself eventually. If I can think of a good name for it.
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Air Mozilla: Connected Devices Weekly Program Update, 19 Jul 2016 |
Weekly project updates from the Mozilla Connected Devices team.
https://air.mozilla.org/connected-devices-weekly-program-update-20160719/
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Air Mozilla: Martes mozilleros, 19 Jul 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...
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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/2016/07/19/happy-bmo-push-day-24/
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Armen Zambrano: Usability improvements for Firefox automation initiative - Status update #1 |
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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 139 |
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 has a belated Crate of the Week with Vincent Esche's self-submitted cargo-modules, which gives us the cargo modules subcommand that shows the module structure of our crates in a tree view, optionally warning of orphans. Thanks, Vincent!
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.
imag forward --debug and --verbose to subcommands.path::Path by
value. This is bad
error message that is hit often. Good bug to get familiar with the
compiler.--version and --versions yield helptext instead of version(s).If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here.
105 pull requests were merged in the last two weeks.
new_parser_from_tsreaddir now also works on Solaris&Mutex is now RefUnwindSafeLinkedList with Shared instead of Boxcargo publish --dry-runChanges to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation 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:
! to a type-C link-arg and -C llvm-arg which allow you to pass along argument with spaces.#[macro_use(not(...))].global_asm! for module-level inline assembly.assert_ne to compliment assert_eq.RefCell.assert_gt, assert_lt, assert_ge, and assert_le.i8…i64 and u8…u64 in a trait containing the family of overflowing/checked/wrapping/saturating variants of arithmetic operations, as well as a few new ones.abs() functions to all signed integer types.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.
Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust to get your job offers listed here!
fzammetti: Am I the only one that finds highly ironic the naming of something that's supposed to be new and cutting-edge after a substance universally synonymous with old, dilapidated and broken down?
paperelectron: Rust is as close to the bare metal as you can get.
On /r/programming.
Submit your quotes for next week!
This Week in Rust is edited by: nasa42, llogiq, and brson.
https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2016/07/19/this-week-in-rust-139/
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Karl Dubost: [worklog] Edition 027. Tracking protection and a week of boxes. |
Tracking protection is an interesting beast. A feature to help users but users think the site is broken. I guess it's something similar to habits. If you put a mask on your face and you have forgotten about it, you may be surprised that people do not want to talk to you.
Progress this week:
Today: 2016-07-19T11:32:54.030052 316 open issues ---------------------- needsinfo 5 needsdiagnosis 76 needscontact 20 contactready 41 sitewait 168 ----------------------
You are welcome to participate
(a selection of some of the bugs worked on this week).
display:table and max-height having a different behavior in Chrome and Firefox, maybe something related to a known issue. To be confirmed. the contain property, which indicates that the element’s subtree is independent of the rest of the page.
If I understand, this seems like something which would answer many of the complaints we hear from Web developers about CSS isolation. Specifically the layout term: contain: layout.
This value turns on layout containment for the element. This ensures that the containing element is totally opaque for layout purposes; nothing outside can affect its internal layout, and vice versa.
Implemented in Blink. I didn't find an issue on WebKit project (Safari). I didn't find a bug in Mozilla Bugzilla either. Can I use?. Probably no.
Otsukare!
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Air Mozilla: Introducing Mozilla Tech Speakers |
Havi Hoffman introduces the Mozilla Tech Speakers Series.
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Christian Heilmann: A great time and place to ask about diversity and inclusion |
There isn’t a single day going by right now where you can’t read a post or see a talk about diversity and inclusiveness in our market. And that’s a great thing. Most complain about the lack of them. And that’s a very bad thing.
It has been proven over and over that diverse teams create better products. Our users are all different and have different needs. If your product team structure reflects that you’re already one up against the competition. You’re also much less likely to build a product for yourself – and we are not our end users.
Let’s assume we are pro-diversity and pro-inclusiveness. And it should be simple for us – we come from a position of strength:
I should say yet, because automation is on the rise and even our jobs can be optimised away sooner or later. Some of us are even working on that.
For now, though, we are in a very unique position of power. There are not enough expert workers to fill the jobs. We have job offers thrown at us and our hiring bonuses, perks and extra offers are reaching ridiculous levels. When you tell someone outside our world about them, you get shocked looks. We’re like the investment bankers and traders of the eighties and we should help to ensure that our image won’t turn into the same they have now.
If we really want to change our little world and become a shining beacon of inclusion, we need not to only talk about it – we should demand it. A large part of the lack of diversity in our market is that it is not part of our hiring practices. The demands to our new hires make it very hard for someone not from a privileged background or with a degree from a university of standing to get into our market. And that makes no sense. The people who can change that is us – the people in the market who tick all the marks.
To help the cause and make the things we demand in blog posts and keynotes happen, we should bring our demands to the table when and where they matter: in job interviews and application processes.
Instead of asking for our hardware, share options and perks like free food and dry cleaning we should ask for the things that really matter:
I’ve added these questions to a repo on GitHub, please feel free to add more questions if you find them.
FWIW, I started where I am working right now because I got good answers to questions like these. My interviews were talking to mixed groups of people telling me their findings as teams and not one very aggressive person asking me to out-code them. It was such a great experience that I started here, and it wasn’t a simple impression. The year I’ve worked here now proved that even in interviewing, diversity very much matters.
Photo Credit: shawncplus
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting, 18 Jul 2016 |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20160718/
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Mozilla WebDev Community: Extravaganza – July 2016 |
Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to talk about the work that we’ve shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by!
You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, or view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla. Or just read on for a summary!
The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library.
First up was pmac, who shared the news that Basket, email newsletter subscription service, has switched to using Salesforce as the backend for storing newsletter subscriptions. In addition, the service now has a nifty public DataDog metrics dashboard showing off statistics about how the service is performing.
Next was giorgos, who shared status.mozmar.org, a status page listing the current status of all the services that Engagement Engineering maintains. The status board pulls monitoring information from Dead Man’s Snitch as well as New Relic‘s application and Synthetics monitoring. The app runs a worker using AWS Lambda that pulls the information and writes it to a YAML file in the repo‘s gh-pages branch, and the status page itself reads the YAML file via JavaScript to build the display.
ErikRose stopped by to share more cool things that shipped in DXR this month:
Special thanks to intern new_one and contributors twointofive and abbeyj. Also special thanks to MXR for being shut down due to security bugs and allowing DXR to flourish in its wake.
Erik also brought up Fathom, an experimental framework for extracting meaning from webpages. Fathom allows you to write declarative rules that score and classify DOM nodes, and then extract those nodes from a DOM that it analyzes.
This month we shipped the 1.0 version of Fathom, as well as a 1.1 release with a bug fix for Firefox support as well as an optimization fix. It’s available as an NPM module for use as a library.
The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else.
Last up was pmac again, who wanted to mention that the Mozilla Engagement Engineering team is hiring a Senior Web Developer and a Site Reliability Engineer. If you’re interested in working at Mozilla, click those links to apply on our careers site!
If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you!
See you next month!
https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2016/07/18/extravaganza-july-2016/
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Chris H-C: Units and Data Follow-Up: Pok'emon GO in the United Kingdom |
Hit augmented-reality mobile gaming sensation Pok'emon GO is now available in the UK, so it’s time to test my hypothesis about searches for 5km converted to miles in that second bastion of “Let’s use miles as distance units in defiance of basically every other country”:
Results are consistent with hypothesis.
(( Now if only I could get around how the Google Play Store is identifying my Z10 as incompatible with the game… ))
:chutten
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Mozilla Addons Blog: A Better Add-on Discovery Experience |
People who personalize Firefox like their Firefox better. However, many people don’t know that they can, and for those who know it isn’t particularly easy to do. So a few months ago, we began rethinking our entire add-on discovery experience—from helping people understand the benefits of personalization, to making it easier to install an add-on, to putting the right add-on in front of people at the right time.
The first step we’ve taken towards a better discovery experience is in the redesign of our Add-on Discovery Pane. This is typically the first page users see when they launch the Add-on Manager at about:addons.
Add-on Discovery Pane before Firefox 48
We updated this page to target people who are just getting started with add-ons, by simplifying add-on installation to just one click and using clean images and text to quickly orient a new user.
It features a tightly curated list of add-ons that provide customizations that are easy for new users to understand.
Add-on Discovery Pane starting with Firefox 48
We started with a small list and collaborated with their developers to ensure the best possible experience for users. For future releases, we will refresh the featured content on a more frequent basis and open up the nomination process for inclusion.
Our community of developers create awesome add-ons, and we want to help users discover them and love their Firefox even more. In the coming months, we are going to continue improving the experience by making recommendations that are as uniquely helpful to users as possible.
In the meantime, this first step toward improving the Firefox personalization experience will land in Firefox 48 on August 1, and is available in Firefox Beta now. So download Firefox Beta, go to about:addons and give it a try! (You can also reach this page by going to the Tools menu and choosing “Add-ons”). We would love to hear your feedback in the forums.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/18/a-better-add-on-discovery-experience/
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Kartikaya Gupta: Bitcoin mining as an ad replacement? |
The web as we know it basically runs on advertising. Which is not really great, for a variety of reasons. But charging people outright for content doesn't work that great either. How about bitcoin mining instead?
Webpages can already run arbitary computation on your computer, so instead of funding themselves through ads, they could instead include a script that does some mining client-side and submits the results back to their server. Instead of paying with dollars and cents you're effectively paying with electricity and compute cycles. Seems a lot more palatable to me. What do you think?
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Dustin J. Mitchell: Chapter in 500 Lines or Less |
I wrote a chapter in the latest book in the “Architecture of Open Source Applications”, “500 Lines or Less”.
The theme of the book is to look in detail at the decisions software engineers make “in the small”. This isn’t about large-scale system design, community management, or working on huge codebases (like, say, Firefox). Nor is it about the design and implementation of “classic” computer science algorithms that a student might learn in school. The focus is in the middle ground: given a single real-world problem, how do we approach solving it and implementing the solution in an elegant, instructive form?
My chapter is on distributed consensus. I chose the topic because I was not already familiar with it, and I felt that I might produce a more instructive result if I experienced the struggles of solving a novel problem first-hand. Indeed, distributed consensus delivered! Building on some basic, published algorithms, I worked to build a practical library to provide distributed state to an application. In the process, I ran into issues from data structure aliasing to livelock (Paxos promises not to reach more than one different decisions. It does not promise to reach more than zero!)
The line limit (500 lines) was an interesting constraint. Many of my attempts to work around fundmantal issues in distributed consensus, such as detecting failed nodes, quickly ran hundreds of lines too long. Where in a professional setting I might have produced a library of many thousands of lines and great complexity. Instead, I produced a simple, instructive implementation with some well-understood limitations.
The entire book is available for reading online, or you can buy a PDF or printed copy. All proceeds go to charity, so please do consider buying, but at any rate please have a look and let me know what you think!
I haven’t yet read the other chapters, aside from a few early drafts. My copy is being printed, and once it arrives I’ll enjoy reading the remainder of the book.
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Mozilla WebDev Community: Auto-generating a changelog from git history |
At Mozilla we share a lot of open source libraries. When you’re using someone else’s library, you might find that an upgrade breaks something in your application — but why? Glancing at the library’s changelog can help. However, manually maintaining a changelog when building features for a library can be a challenge.
We’ve been experimenting with auto-generating a changelog from commit history itself and so far it makes changelogs easy and painless. Here’s how to set it up. These tools require NodeJS so it’s best suited for JavaScript libraries.
First, you need to write commit messages in a way that allows you to extract metadata for a changelog. We use the Angular conventions which specify simple prefixes like feat: for new features and fix: for bug fixes. Here’s an example of a commit message that adds a new feature:
feat: Added a `--timeout` option to the `run` command
Here’s an example of a bug fix:
fix: Fixed `TypeError: runner is undefined` in the `run` command
The nice thing about this convention is that tools such as Greenkeeper, which sends pull requests for dependency updates, already support it.
The first problem with this is a social one; all your contributors need to follow the convention. We chose to solve this with automation by making the tests fail if they don’t follow the conventions
https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2016/07/15/auto-generating-a-changelog-from-git-history/
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Air Mozilla: Webdev Beer and Tell: July 2016 |
Once a month web developers across the Mozilla community get together (in person and virtually) to share what cool stuff we've been working on in...
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Writing an opt-in UI for an extension |
Our review policies for addons.mozilla.org (AMO) require transparency when it comes to an add-on’s features and how they might affect a user’s privacy and security.
These policies are particularly relevant in cases where an add-on includes monetization features that are unrelated to its main function. For example, a video downloader add-on could include a shopping recommendation feature that injects offers from commercial websites. In cases like this, to be listed on AMO the feature would need to be opt-in. Opt-in means the add-on needs to present to the user the option to enable the feature, with a default action of keeping it disabled.
We’re often asked for examples of add-ons that do this, so I decided to create a sample WebExtension for this purpose. You can find the code on GitHub, and the built and signed example can be downloaded here.
The extension implements two opt-in prompts:
(If you don’t recognize the dark theme in the screenshots, it’s because I’m using Firefox Developer Edition—currently Firefox 49—for testing.)
An add-on would normally implement one prompt or the other. Opening a new tab has the advantage of getting the user’s attention right away, and has more room for content. The main disadvantage is that it can annoy users and feel too pushy. The pop-up approach is more user-friendly because it appears when the user is ready to engage with the add-on and is better integrated with the add-on UI. However, it wouldn’t work if the add-on doesn’t include buttons.
This example is completely minimal, hence the almost complete lack of styling. However, it includes the elements that AMO policies deem necessary:
autofocus="true" to the Cancel button, which can be clearly seen in the popup screenshot.Hitting the Return key in either case, or closing the opt-in tab should be assumed to mean that the user is choosing not to accept the feature (the tab closing case isn’t implemented in this example to make it easier to test). The example uses the storage API to keep track of two flags: one that indicates the user has clicked on either button, and one that indicates if the user has enabled the feature or not. After the opt-in is registered as shown, the tab won’t show up again, and the content changes to something else.
Note: I couldn’t find a way to look at the extension’s storage in the developer tools (I suppose it’s not implemented yet). You can clear the storage to reset the state of the extension by deleting the browser-extension-data folder in the profile.
Remember that sneaking in unwanted features is bad for your users and your add-on’s reputation, so make sure you give your users control and give them clear information to make a decision. Happy coding!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/15/writing-an-opt-in-ui-for-an-extension/
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Mozilla Reps Community: Rep of the Month – May 2016 |
Please join us in congratulating Konstantina Papadea as Rep of the Month for May.
Konstantina is a long-time Mozilla Reps from Greece. Additionally she is also responsible for the budget and swag requests in the Reps program.
In the past months Konstantina has helped out with organizing and chairing the Reps weekly call together with Ioana. That means that they are weekly in contact with many mozillians to find new interesting topics and prepare the agenda and the notifications. Further she is helping the Council with the formation of the Review Team we are implementing. This was already announce here and will give council more time to spend on mission and strategy. She became a mentor and will help inspire the new people applying for the program.
Please don’t forget to congratulate her on Discourse!
https://blog.mozilla.org/mozillareps/2016/07/15/rep-of-the-month-may-2016/
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Anthony Hughes: Reducing the NVIDIA Blacklist |
We recently relaxed our graphics blocklist for users with NVIDIA hardware using certain older graphics drivers. The original blocklist entry blocked all versions less than v8.17.11.8265 due to stability issues with NVIDIA 182.65 and earlier. We recently learned however that the first two numbers in the version string indicate platform version and the latter numbers refer to the actual driver version. As a result we were inadvertently blocking newer drivers on older platforms.
We have since opened up the blacklist for versions newer than 8.15.11.8265 (Win XP) and 8.16.11.8265 (Vista/Win7) via bug 1284322, effectively drivers released beyond mid-2009.This change only exists on Nightly currently but we expect it to ride the trains unless some critical regression is discovered.
If you are triaging bugs and user feedback, or are engaging with users on social media, please keep an eye out for users with NVIDIA hardware. If the user does have NVIDIA hardware please have them check the Graphics section of about:support to confirm if they are using a driver version that was previously blocked. If they are try to help them get updated to the most recent driver version. If the issue persists, have them disable hardware acceleration to see if the issue goes away.
The same goes if you are a user experiencing quality issues (crashes, hangs, black screening, checkerboarding, etc) on NVIDIA hardware with these drivers. Please make sure your drivers are up to date.
In either case, if the issue persists please file a bug so we can investigate what is happening.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Thank you for your help!
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