The Monday Project Meeting

https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20180430/

The web should be open to everyone, a place for unbridled innovation, education, and creative expression. That’s why Firefox fights for Net Neutrality, promotes online privacy rights, and supports open-source … Read more

The post Working for Good: Metrofiets Cargo Bikes appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/metrofiets-cargo-bikes/

Twice a year, Mozilla gathers employees, volunteers, and assorted hangers-on in a single place to have a week of planning, working, and socializing. Being as distributed an organization as we are, it’s a bit rare to get enough of us in a single place to generate the kind of cross-talk and beneficial synergistic happenstances that help us work smarter and move in more-or-less the same direction. These are our All Hands events.

They’re a Pretty Big Deal(tm).

So here you are, individual contributor or manager, staff or volunteer, veteran or first-timer. With all these Big Plans, what are we littler folk to do to not become overwhelmed?

I have some tips.

Before You Go

Set up a mail folder/label for relevant email: You’ll be getting some email with details about where you should be, what you should be doing, and when. Organizing these into one place is helpful for reference, so come up with a label (maybe “201807-sanfran” or “mozsf2” or “fogzilla” or something) and organize those emails as they come in.

Act on those emails immediately: If they contain instructions or an announcement that bookings or registration is now open… then do that thing right then. Do not file the email and forget. Do the thing while you are looking at that email. Only then should you file that email and get back to where you were in your brain. If you absolutely can’t just then (have to synchronize with family or what-have-you), put a calendar reminder in that repeats every weekday until you handle it.

Do not upgrade Nightly: You’re running Nightly, right? You’ll be travelling through a land of uncertain connectivity, and the last thing you want is to use it downloading a multi-MB Nightly update that might have accidentally disabled Captive Portal Detection. If it works, keep your Nightly build until you’re certain you have the bandwidth to download a new one. All else fails, keep it until you get back.

Make sure your laptop is in shape: My laptop is often neglected in favour of its Desktop comrade: updates may be pending, credentials may have expired, the source code checkouts might be weeks old, and there may have even been a new version of Mozilla Build released since the last time I tried to compile Firefox. With luck, while at an All Hands you won’t have to compile Gecko on a laptop in your hotel… but we make our own luck, we who are prepared. Prepare your laptop.

Prepare your family: If you don’t live alone, you’ll have non-mozilla prepwork to do. Spouse and kids or roomates and pets, there are lifeforms who normally expect to see you that won’t. Clear the family schedule for the week you’re gone, and do as much preparation ahead of time as you can. Laundry, meal planning, groceries, sitters, dog walkers, even lawn services are things you can arrange to lighten the load that your absence will place on those around you. Even if you’re bringing them with you.

While You’re There

Do not fear missing out: You will not be able to attend both Boardgame Night and your team dinner. There will be karaoke parties you won’t get to, or be invited to. This is fine. This is expected. This is unavoidable when you have so many people disorganizing so many things simultaneously. So don’t fret about it. Prioritize.

Say no: Speaking of prioritizing: prioritize for yourself. You may very well be operating as a Level 100 You for hours at a time. So many people to talk to, so many talks and social events to organize, deliver, and attend… No. You don’t have to stay the entire length of the party. You don’t even have to go. If you feel yourself fading, get out while you have the strength. Regroup. Find a quiet corner or go to sleep early… At my first All Hands, I napped on both Wednesday and Thursday. And I wasn’t even in a different timezone. It really helped.

Wash your hands: Lots. Before meals. After meals. You’ll be talking, working, eating, and otherwise hanging out with a thousand of your closest coworkers. It’s probably your best bet for not catching mozflu, and it’s definitely your best bet to not transmit it.

After You’re Back

Consider taking a day: Generally speaking you’ll be flying back on Saturday and returning to work on Monday. Depending on distance to travel, available flight times, and cancellations, this may result in only a few hours between stumbling through your door and stumbling back to work. Consider booking that Monday off (or, honestly, if your trip back was heinous, don’t even book it off. Just take it. Get some sleep. Work can wait until Tuesday.)

Check in: If you live with family, you haven’t seen them for a week. Even if you brought them with you, you’ve been in meetings and talks and stuff most hours. Check in with them. Get up to speed on what’s been happening in their lives while you’ve been away.

Get excited for the next one: Even immediately back from an All Hands, it’s still only six months to the next one. Take stock of what you liked and what you didn’t like about this one. Rest up, and try not to get impatient :)

:chutten

(( Great minds think alike, because Seburo recently wrote a Wiki article covering even more excellent tips for All Hands events. Check that out, too! ))

https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/mozilla-all-hands-tips/

Content on the web is powerful. It enables us to learn new things, discover different perspectives, stay in touch with what’s happening in the world, or just make us laugh. Making sure that stories like these—stories that are worth your time and attention—are discoverable and supported is central to what we care about at Pocket.

It’s important for quality content like this to thrive—and a critical way it’s funded is through advertising. But unfortunately, today, this advertising model is broken. It doesn’t respect user privacy, it’s not transparent, and it lacks control, all the while starting to move us toward low quality, clickbait content.

We believe the Internet can do better. So earlier this year, we started to explore a new model and showed an occasional sponsored story in Pocket’s recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Starting today, we’re expanding this work further—now Firefox Nightly and Beta users may also see these sponsored stories. We’re preparing for this feature to go fully live in May to Firefox users in the US with the Firefox 60 release.

What You Can Expect from Us

When we started this experiment, we said that the platform we’re trying to create needs to be one that respects user privacy and puts control back into your hands. Meaning, it must deliver:

• Personalization, without sacrificing privacy. All personalization happens on the client-side, without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with others. (Read more about how we protect your privacy here.)
• Quality. Rewards valuable content, worthy of your time. Not just clicks.
• Control. If you see a story you’re not a fan of, you can hide it. Or you can disable sponsored content altogether. (Read how to do that here.)
• Transparency. As an open organization, all code in Firefox is open source and we’re open about all of our products and policies. (You can see exactly what data we collect, or more importantly, don’t collect)

This first bullet is a critical part of what we set out to prove. We’ve come to accept a premise around advertising today that users need to trade their privacy and data in exchange for personalized, high quality experiences. Our experiments over the last few months have proved that this isn’t true. We are indeed able to create personalized sponsored content that provides value to users without jeopardizing their privacy. This is an exciting result because it promises to create a more user-centered model for supporting content on the web.

We have a lot more to do and we’re excited about the opportunity to make the web a better, healthier place.

 

The post A Privacy-Conscious Approach to Sponsored Content appeared first on Future Releases.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy-conscious-approach-to-sponsored-content/

Just wanted to give a quick update on some things that have been happening with the metrics graphics since I stepped up to help with maintainership a few months ago:

• Hamilton’s back as co-maintainer! This has been especially helpful as he understands much of the historical context of metricsgraphics better than I do.
• We’ve merged in a large number of small fixes and improvements into the codebase, thanks to myself and a number of other contributors. Special shout-out to Thomas Champagne, who has contributed a large number of nifty new features.
• We moved the project from Mozilla to its own organization on github. This feels like a much better way forward for a project which is supposed to be useful far outside the bounds of Mozilla, and hopeful makes contributors feel more like the first-class citizens of the project that they actually are.
• We have a GSOC intern! As part of the Mozilla GSOC, Yunhao Zheng is going to be working on adding rich brushing/zooming support to Metrics Graphics, which should be quite useful for visualizing complex data in projects like Perfherder (Project outline, Yunhao’s proposal)

https://wlach.github.io/blog/2018/04/metricsgraphics-movements?utm_source=Mozilla&utm_medium=RSS

https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2018/04/30/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-2018/

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 7 beta 3 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). This version includes some last-minute tuning to garbage and cycle collection frequency, a couple more hosts for basic adblock, and (the big change) a major fix to DOM keyboard events which caused some sites to fail to respond to keyboard input (like this Applesoft BASIC implementation in JavaScript -- thanks Martin Kuka&ccaron for the more easily debugged test case). There are also some additional security fixes and there will be a few more prior to release on or about May 8.

For FPR8 the original plan was to get a decent implementation of CSS grid support working, but same-site cookies have risen in priority as they are now being required as a security measure on many sites including one I personally use frequently. If there is time left once that particular major upgrade is functional, I will then work on CSS grid and (as it slowly progresses) native date-time pickers. The FAQ is also dreadfully out of date, so I'll be spending some time on that too.

The Raptor Talos II (check it out if you haven't seen the Talos' unboxing) is now under my desk with the DEC Alpha 164LX, Silicon Graphics Fuel, MDD G4 and of course the Quad G5. Unfortunately to make room for the Talos in the KVM, a system had to be sacrificed: my old and now largely unused Core2Duo Mac mini running 10.6. It has been relegated to the server-storage room while I think about what to do with it. I got Fedora 28/kernel 4.16 booting on the Talos, but there are still issues with the discrete GPU, and the fans still roar like a SpaceX launch. (Also, Firefox 59 crashes on bootup on POWER9, but that's not Raptor's fault. Guess I have my work cut out for me.) Fortunately, Raptor's technical support team has come through with new firmware for the Radeon card and it looks like there is a BMC update on the way to address the ventilation issues, so we'll see how far we get with those. A full review will follow once I have the system in daily-driver condition.

Yes, dear reader, this is what it feels like to live on the bleeding edge of technology.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/04/tenfourfox-fpr7b3-available.html

Content on the web is powerful. It enables us to learn new things, discover different perspectives, stay in touch with what’s happening in the world, or just make us laugh. Making sure that stories like these—stories that are worth your time and attention—are discoverable and supported is central to what we care about at Pocket.

It’s important for quality content like this to thrive—and a critical way it’s funded is through advertising. But unfortunately, today, this advertising model is broken. It doesn’t respect user privacy, it’s not transparent, and it lacks control, all the while starting to move us toward low quality, clickbait content.

We believe the Internet can do better. So earlier this year, we started to explore a new model and showed an occasional sponsored story in Pocket’s recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Starting today, we’re expanding this work further—now Firefox Beta users may also see these sponsored stories. We’re preparing for this feature to go fully live in May to Firefox users in the US with the Firefox 60 release.

What You Can Expect from Us

When we started this experiment, we said that the platform we’re trying to create needs to be one that respects user privacy and puts control back into your hands. Meaning, it must deliver:

• Personalization, without sacrificing privacy. All personalization happens on the client-side, without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with others. (Read more about how we protect your privacy here.)
• Quality. Rewards valuable content, worthy of your time. Not just clicks.
• Control. If you see a story you’re not a fan of, you can hide it. Or you can disable sponsored content altogether. (Read how to do that here.)
• Transparency. As an open organization, all code in Firefox is open source and we’re open about all of our products and policies. (You can see exactly what data we collect, or more importantly, don’t collect)

This first bullet is a critical part of what we set out to prove. We’ve come to accept a premise around advertising today that users need to trade their privacy and data in exchange for personalized, high quality experiences. Our experiments over the last few months have proved that this isn’t true. We are indeed able to create personalized sponsored content that provides value to users without jeopardizing their privacy. This is an exciting result because it promises to create a more user-centered model for supporting content on the web.

We have a lot more to do and we’re excited about the opportunity to make the web a better, healthier place.

 

The post A Privacy-Conscious Approach to Sponsored Content appeared first on Future Releases.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy-conscious-approach-to-sponsored-content-2/

Displaying HTTP headers for a URL on the screen is one of those things people commonly use curl for.

curl -I example.com

To help your eyes separate header names from the corresponding values, I've been experimenting with a change that makes the header names get shown using a bold type face and the header values to the right of the colons to use the standard font.

Sending a HEAD request to the curl site could look like this:

This seemingly small change required an unexpectedly large surgery.

Now I want to turn this into a discussion if this is good enough, if we need more customization, how to make the code act on windows and perhaps how an option to explicitly enable/disable this should be named.

If you have ideas for any of that or other things around this feature, do comment in the PR.

The feature window for the next curl release is already closed so this change will not be considered for real until curl 7.61.0 at the earliest. Due for release in July 2018. So lots of time left to really "bike shed" all the details!

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/04/28/would-you-like-some-bold-with-those-headers/

This post is being written in TenFourFox FPR7 beta 3. More about that in a day or two, because today a big container arrived at my P.O. box. I had to put the rear seats down to get it into my 2018 Honda Civic Si Sedan.

The Raptor Talos II (see my previous posts for more) arrives in an 80-pound box. It's a good thing I already had mesh put in for my hernia surgery because I needed it today, by golly. No complaints about the packaging as the unit came very well protected. Gorgeous wife unwillingly positioned for scale (she is 5'4"); the computer is lengthwise and rather longer than your typical tower system:

Inside the accessory box were the keys, footsies, extra header and SATA cables, the recovery DVD for the firmware (with manual), printed QR codes to get public keys for verification, power cables, and the parts removed from the case to install my BTO options described below.

The computer is in an otherwise off-the-shelf Supermicro CSE-747 (hah!) EATX chassis. It's kind of a boring look, but it does have 11 slots, 8 hard disk bays and two 5.25" bays. On the rear here are dual redundant 1400W (!) power supplies, an honest-to-goodness RS-232 serial port, two GigE ports (top is shared with the "Baseboard Management Controller" service processor), two rear USB 3.0 ports and a VGA video port.

But there is some special branding, though I wouldn't have minded some fun case graphics myself:

The chassis is lockable and has excellent ventilation, though the design isn't really all that interesting. I'm thinking of removing the front badge and then doing something like I did for my DEC Alpha 164LX.

An LG Blu-ray drive is included. Take that, Steve Jobs.

It's serial number 12! (I was order 8 originally, in August 2017.)

Well, let's crack it open. Remove the two retention screws from the rear of the case (I would have rather had thumbscrews here) and pop out and lift the side case lever to remove the side door, exposing the interior of the machine. I put the computer on its side here for these photographs.

This AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 is a factory-installed option ...

... as well as the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe storage unit and the Microsemi PM8068 SAS 3.0 controller. This will drive the front bay RAID. They are also BTO options.

This SATA controller connects to the optical drive. One of the four DIMM banks is visible. I had 32GB of ECC RAM factory-installed (as two 16GB sticks).

The Supermicro SAS747TQ backplane comes from the factory ready to go connected to the optional Microsemi. I'll be making a Fry's run soon to populate the front bays.

Yuuuuuuge processor heatsinks. You'll need a 5/32" hex driver (Raptor sells one, but my trusty Bondhus #13109 seems to work). They came pre-installed and visually inspected good. This unit has two four-core Sforza POWER9 CPUs at 3.1/3.7 GHz with 90W TDP.

It's even louder than the Quad G5 when it starts, if you can imagine that. The most current firmware supposedly addresses the fan volume but it's still intolerably loud especially compared to the G5 when it's idle. We'll see how it behaves once I get an operating system on it.

Up in Petitboot. No operating system is installed. That's your job!

Right now the firmware is up to date, though I would be remiss not to try to rebuild it from scratch at some point to personally audit it (since the NSA is probably all upin my bidness now for having purchased the thing). I was able to get into the BMC and talk to it from the G5 and all of the hardware seems to be in working order. However, I haven't had much success with actually booting it because I have and want to use my discrete AMD GPU, meaning I'll preferentially need to find a distro with Linux 4.16 or later. (I could use something earlier if I really wanted to, but it would require some jumping through hoops with a serial terminal that I don't really feel like doing right now.) Fedora 28 seems the best bet for getting something working, and then we can see where we're at as other distros catch up.

I'll post progress reports on the Talos as I actually make progress; I'm mostly just excited to finally have it in my hands. This is a heck of a system with quality parts, built to do real work, and my first impression is that the $7200 I dropped on it has gone to good use.

Meanwhile, more about FPR7b3 a little later this weekend. It's mostly a feature and tuneup release, all good stuff.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/04/unboxing-talos-ii-its-here.html

Thank you to everyone who submitted extensions to the Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge!

Our judges reviewed more than 100 submissions and have selected the finalists for each prize category. Now, it’s time for the add-on community to vote for the winners. Use Firefox Beta or Firefox Developer Edition and take these extensions for a test drive (many of the APIs used are not yet available on Firefox 59, the current release), then vote for your favorites here. (And hey, if you really love an extension, maybe consider writing a review?)

Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. PDT on April 29, 2018. Winners will be announced on May 8, 2018.

Your finalists are…

Best Tab Manager/Tab Organizer

• Session Sync
• Tip Tab
• Tabby Window Tab Manager
• Session Boss

Best Dynamic Theme

• Midnight Lizard Quantum
• Weatherlicious
• Window on Earth
• Native Dark
• Envify

Best Extension for Games & Entertainment

• Web Invaders
• Find the Fox
• Worldwide Radio
• YouTabMan
• Mouse Pet

« Vote Now »

The post Vote for the Winners of the Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/27/vote-for-the-winners-of-the-firefox-quantum-extensions-challenge/

https://blog.mozvr.com/this-week-in-mixed-reality-issue-04/

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/04/27/an-alias-based-formulation-of-the-borrow-checker/

dylanwh:

New Features: Comments are remembered if you cancel an edit or navigate away from the bug page, and private comments are more obviously private.

release tag

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

• [1450325] Update email templates with instructions for unsubscribing from all emails
• [1451599] Checkbox for agreement terms at create account page should be on the left side
• [1438205] Preserve comments in progress across page reloads
• [1452531] PhabBugz code should add allow visibility to reviewers when creating custom…

View On WordPress

https://mozilla-bteam.tumblr.com/post/173331645478

https://blog.mozilla.org/l10n/2018/04/26/localization-workshop-in-kolkata-november-2017/

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.

https://air.mozilla.org/reps-weekly-meeting-20180426/

Today I’m going to walk you through creating a simple Web Thing using an inexpensive off-the-shelf ESP8266 board.

The power of web things comes from their ability to connect the digital world of web pages with the physical world of things. We recently released the Things Framework, a collection of software intended to make it easy to create new web things. The relevant library for this example is the webthing-esp8266 library, which makes easy it to connect Arduino-programmed ESP8266 boards with the Web of Things. We hope that this lowers the barrier to creating compelling experiences with our gateway and the Web Thing API.

The first step in our journey is to install the Arduino IDE and its ESP8266 board support. Visit Adafruit’s ESP8266 documentation for a very detailed walkthrough of setting up. At the end of setup, you should have an Arduino IDE installed that has the ESP8266WiFi, ESP8266mDNS, and ESP8266WebServer libraries available.

Now that we have all the prerequisites out of the way, let’s get to the fun part. The webthing-esp8266 library works by assembling a collection of components that come together to expose the Web Thing API. The main coordinator is the WebThingAdapter which keeps track of a ThingDevice that in turn has an assortment of ThingProperties.

The WebThingAdapter knows how to speak the Web of Things API with our Gateway and handles all the translation necessary for the Gateway to discover and interact with the ThingDevice. The ThingDevice represents the physical object we want to put on the web. In a simple case, this may be a few LEDs. Once we get more complex, this could be a quadcopter, an OLED display, or even a Tesla coil. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s step through a basic example which exposes the ESP8266’s built-in LED.

To start, create a new sketch in the Arduino IDE. Now that we have a place to write code, we need to include all the libraries this sketch uses. These are ESP8266WiFi and WiFiClient for connecting to our WiFi network, Thing for creating Web-of-Things-compatible objects, and WebThingAdapter for translating these objects into a web server.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

The next step is to configure the constants we’re using. These are ssid for our WiFi network’s name, password for its password, and lampPin for the pin of the LED we want to control.

const char* ssid = "......";
const char* password = "..........";

const int lampPin = LED_BUILTIN;

Now we get to specify what kind of web thing we’re creating. First, we create the adapter, which sets the name of the board. If you want to have multiple ESP8266 boards on the same network, you’ll need to make sure their names are unique.

WebThingAdapter adapter("esp8266");

Then we need to specify the ThingDevice we want to have on our gateway. In this case, we want to expose the LED as a dimmableLight called “My Lamp” which will allow us to turn it on and control its brightness from the gateway.

ThingDevice lamp("lamp", "My Lamp", "dimmableLight");

Next we define the properties we want the ThingDevice to have. A dimmableLight needs two properties: “on” and “level”.

ThingProperty lampOn("on", "Whether the lamp is turned on", BOOLEAN);
ThingProperty lampLevel("level", "The level of light from 0-100", NUMBER);

In the start of our setup function we initialize the LED, connect to our WiFi network, and turn on the Serial port for debugging.

void setup() {
  pinMode(lampPin, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(lampPin, HIGH);
  analogWriteRange(255);

  Serial.begin(115200);
  WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA);
  WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
  Serial.println("");

  // Wait for connection
  while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
    delay(500);
    Serial.print(".");
  }

  Serial.println("");
  Serial.print("Connected to ");
  Serial.println(ssid);
  Serial.print("IP address: ");
  Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());

With that boilerplate out of the way, we can tie together our ThingProperties, ThingDevice, and WebThingAdapter. The lamp needs to know that it owns the lampOn and lampLevel properties, while the adapter needs to know that the lamp exists.

  lamp.addProperty(&lampOn);
  lamp.addProperty(&lampLevel);
  adapter.addDevice(&lamp);
  adapter.begin();
  Serial.println("HTTP server started");
}

In our continuously running loop function we first update the adapter so it can handle talking to the gateway or any other Web of Things clients. Next, we update the light based on the property values. Note that we take the 0-100 brightness level and map it from 255-0 because the brightness of the ESP8266’s built-in LED is inverted.

void loop() {
  adapter.update();
  if (lampOn.getValue().boolean) {
    int level = map(lampLevel.getValue().number, 0, 100, 255, 0);
    analogWrite(lampPin, level);
  } else {
    analogWrite(lampPin, 255);
  }
}

Our sketch is done! If you upload this to your ESP8266 you should be able to see the “My Lamp” thing in your gateway’s Add Things list. You can then click to turn the LED on and off, or click on the “splat” icon to control its brightness level.

You can also control your web thing directly by issuing HTTP requests to http://esp8266.local/. For example, you can use this curl command to turn the LED on from the terminal.

curl -X PUT http://esp8266.local/things/lamp/properties/on -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"on":true}'

This is just the beginning of what you can do with the Web Thing API. If you’d prefer working in a higher-level language, check out our other web thing examples. If you think on/off and level aren’t cool enough on their own, we also support string properties!

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/04/making-a-web-thing-on-the-esp8266/

https://blog.mozvr.com/introducing-hubs-a-new-way-to-get-together-online/

Today, Mozilla is sharing an early preview of an experiment we are calling “Hubs by Mozilla”. Hubs is an immersive social experience that is delivered through the browser. You simply click on a web link to begin interacting with others inside virtual reality.

Late last year we announced the creation of a team focused on enabling social experiences using Mixed Reality and the open web. This is one of many experiments we’ll be sharing from that work. Using the web as a platform provides people with better choices and greater access. People shouldn’t have to be locked in to a specific platform or device. They should be able to connect and engage with the web wherever it expands. It is challenging work, and there is still much to do, but we are excited to share our progress with you. Starting today, we are opening up our latest Mixed Reality experiment, Hubs, to anyone that would like to give it a try.

There are other teams and companies out there that are building social VR experiences. What makes Hubs different? Well, Hubs is…

Built for the Browser

When we announced Firefox Reality earlier this month, we reinforced our stance that the web provides the best future for virtual and augmented reality (or “Mixed Reality”). This technology is at tipping point. If we want to continue to bring immersive experiences into the mainstream, we need to be laser focused on removing friction for the user. The technology needs to step out of the way, and the experiences need to take center stage.

With Hubs, you can create a room with a single click. You can then share and access that room with a URL. No app store. No gatekeepers. No installation process. Just click and you are there.

Built for Every Device

Because we are using web standards (WebVR and eventually WebXR) to deliver this content, we are able to support every single Mixed Reality headset. Every. Single. One. You can enjoy this experience with advanced hardware such as an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive, or you can use alternatives such as a Daydream or cardboard viewer. You can even use your desktop or mobile phone if you don’t have access to any VR hardware. Everyone can come together and communicate with each other in this online social space. The experience will progressively scale to make use of the hardware that is available to you.

Built for Privacy

Ensuring your privacy when meeting others in Mixed Reality is a guiding principle for our work. You can take a look at our privacy policy here. We want to shape a future for Mixed Reality where users feel safe, and that means we need to create create tools, options, and features that empower users to control how their identity is represented in this new medium. We’ll have more to share soon about the work we are doing to protect your privacy in Mixed Reality. We also built this experience with open source software that anyone can view and contribute to.

Built for Scaling

The experience that is available today is an experiment, but the technology that powers it can be extended in exciting ways. In the coming months we will continue to release new tools and features, as we learn together through use and iteration. This includes kits to create your own custom spaces, powerful avatar and identity options, integrations with existing communications tools, and more.

—

We are excited about the future of Hubs and the potential for social VR experiences, but we need your help to test this and make it better. Check out the link below to try it out. Play with it. Share it. Break it. Contribute to it. If you are looking for even more details, then check out the blog post on our Mixed Reality blog. We’d love to get your feedback as we build this together.

Try Hubs – a WebVR experiment from Mozilla Mixed Reality

The post Enabling Social Experiences Using Mixed Reality and the Open Web appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/26/enabling-social-experiences-using-mixed-reality-and-the-open-web/

http://fitzgeraldnick.com/2018/04/26/how-does-dynamic-dispatch-work-in-wasm.html