This year ‘s Virtual All Hands (aka VirtuAllHands) was different from any other.

Some things were also familiar: plenaries, plenty of interesting conversations, new things to learn, and yes, even a bit of exhaustion. It was even possible to meet and chat with  other people, even if using your avatar using MozillaHubs! All in all, as we were assured by a Mozilla Rep veteran of numerous All-Hands, that although virtual, “it really feels like a real All Hands”.

During the VirtuAllHands, the  Mozilla Reps program organized four meetings each led by a Reps Council member.  These meetings focused on a review of history, and future challenges for three central issues: communication, ‘activities & campaigns’, and mentorship. The meetings uncovered many challenges, but also successes and progresses.

Two meetings were focused on communication –  the first led by Felipe and the second by Tim. Felipe and Tim spoke about the Reps Council’s existing work to improve communication and then led a discussion on the main communication challenges within the Reps program. The importance of clarity on communication tools and the location of information emerged, as well as a need to centralize and summarize information. The reps also underlined the importance of having clear mechanisms through which information and communications can flow between the organization, the reps and local  communities.

Our third meeting was led by Shina and Shahbaz and dealt with “activities & campaigns”. Shina led us through a presentation that can be used by the reps to guide community members on activities and campaigns available, then opened the floor for discussion. The conversation on the engagement of communities in activities and campaigns, shone some lights on the issues that reps often front. Reps talked about the importance of having locally relevant campaigns, challenges in keeping contributors engaged after a campaign has ended, as well as the need to improve the widespread communication of campaigns, and challenges in setting up events.

The last meeting was led by Faisal and focused on mentorship within the reps program. Faisal presented a brief history of the mentorship program, and led a discussion over its issues. Again the need for clarity emerged, as the reps discussed how mentors role and activities should be better defined and, in some areas, re-defined.

Thanks to you all for taking the time to participate, lead and organize these meetings. All the feedback collected during these discussions will be of crucial importance to focus our work going forward!

On behalf of the community development team:

Francesca and Konstantina

https://blog.mozilla.org/mozillareps/2020/07/17/mozilla-reps-at-the-virtuallhands-2020/

Thunderbird 78 is our newest ESR (extended-support release), which comes out yearly and is considered the latest stable release. Right now you can download the newest version from our website, and existing users will be automatically updated in the near future. We encourage those who rely on the popular add-on Enigmail to wait to update until the automatic update rolls out to them to ensure their encrypted email settings are properly imported into Thunderbird’s new built-in OpenPGP encrypted email feature.

Last year’s release focused on ensuring Thunderbird has a stable foundation on which to build. The new Thunderbird 78 aims to improve the experience of using Thunderbird, adding many quality-of-life features to the application and making it easier to use.

Compose Window Redesign

The compose window has been reworked to help users find features more easily and to make composing a message faster and more straightforward. The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for every address.

Dark Mode

Thunderbird’s new Dark Mode is easier on the eyes for those working in the dark, and it has the added benefit of looking really cool! The Dark Mode even works when writing and reading emails – so you are not suddenly blinded while you work. Thunderbird will look at your operating system settings to see if you have enabled dark mode OS-wide and respect those settings. Here are the instructions for setting dark mode in Mac, and setting dark mode in Windows.

Calendar and Tasks Integrated

Thunderbird’s Lightning calendar and tasks add-on is now a part of the application itself, which means everyone now has access to these features the moment they install Thunderbird. This change also sets the stage for a number of future improvements the Thunderbird team will make in the calendar. Much of this will be focused on improved interoperability with the mail part of Thunderbird, as well as improving the user experience of the calendar.

Account Setup & Account Central Updated

The Account Setup window and the Account Central tab, which appears when you do not have an account setup or when you select an existing account in the folder tree, have both been updated. The layout and dialogues have been improved in order to make it easier to understand the information displayed and to find relevant settings. The Account Central tab also has new information about the Thunderbird project and displays the version you are using.

Folder Icons and Colors Update

Folder icons have been replaced and modernized with a new vector style. This will ensure better compatibility with HiDPI monitors and dark mode. Vector icons also means you will be able to customize their default colors to better distinguish and categorize your folders list.

Minimize to Tray

Windows users have reason to rejoice, as Thunderbird 78 can now be minimized to tray. This has been a repeatedly requested feature that has been available through many popular add-ons, but it is now part of Thunderbird core – no add-on needed! This feature has been a long time coming and we hope to bring more operating-system specific features for each platform to Thunderbird in the coming releases.

End-to-End Encrypted Email Support

Thunderbird 78.2, due out in the coming months, will offer a new feature that allows you to end-to-end encrypt your email messages via OpenPGP. In the past this feature was achieved in Thunderbird primarily with the Enigmail add-on, however, in this release we have brought this functionality into core Thunderbird. We’d like to offer a special thanks to Patrick Brunschwig for his years of work on Enigmail, which laid the groundwork for this integrated feature, and for his assistance throughout its development. The new feature is also enabled by the RNP library, and we’d like to thank the project’s developers for their close collaboration and hard work addressing our needs.

End-to-end encryption for email can be used to ensure that only the sender and the recipients of a message can read the contents. Without this protection it is easy for network administrators, email providers and government agencies to read your messages. If you would like to learn more about how end-to-end encryption in Thunderbird works, check out our article on Introduction to End-to-end encryption in Thunderbird. If you would like to learn more about the development of this feature or participate in testing, check out the OpenPGP Thunderbird wiki page.

About Add-ons

As with previous major releases, it may take time for authors of legacy extensions to update their add-ons to support the new release. So if you are using add-ons we recommend you not update manually to 78.0, and instead wait for Thunderbird to automatically update to 78. We encourage users to reach out to their add-on’s author to let them know that you are interested in using it in 78.

Learn More

If we listed all the improvements in Thunderbird 78 in this blog post, you’d be stuck reading this for the whole day. So we will save you from that, and let you know that if you want to see a longer list of changes for the new release – check the release notes on our website.

Great Release, Bright Future

The past year has been an amazing year for Thunderbird. We had an incredible release in version 68 that was popular with our users, and laid the groundwork for much of what we did in 78. On top of great improvements in the product, we moved into a new financial and legal home, and we grew our team to thirteen people (soon to be even more)!

We’re so grateful to all our users and contributors who have stuck with us all these years, and we hope to earn your dedication for the years to come. Thunderbird 78 is the beginning of a new era for the project, as we attempt to bring our users the features that they want and need to be productive in the 2020s – while also maintaining what has made Thunderbird so great all these years.

Thank you to our wonderful community, please enjoy Thunderbird 78.

Download the newest release from our website.

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/07/whats-new-in-thunderbird-78/

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2020/07/16/mozilla-telemetry-in-2020-from-just-firefox-to-a-galaxy-of-data/

(This Post is for recording inside of Hubs via a laptop or desktop computer. Recording Hubs experiences from inside Virtual Reality is for another post.)

Minimum Requirements

Hardware

• A computer
• Internet connection
• Storage space to save recordings

Software

• Screen capture software
• Browser that supports Hubs

Hubs by Mozilla; the future of remote collaboration.

Accessible from a web browser and on a range of devices, Hubs allows users to meet in a virtual space and share ideas, images and files. The global pandemic is keeping us distant socially but Hubs is helping us to bridge that gap!

We’re often asked how to record your time inside of Hubs, either for a personal record or to share with others. Here I will share what has worked for me to capture usable footage from inside of a Hubs environment.

Firstly, like traditional videography, you’re going to need the appropriate hardware and software.

Hardware:

I have a need to capture footage at the highest manageable resolution and frames per second so I use a high powered desktop PC with a good graphics card and 32Gb of RAM. When I’m wearing my editor’s hat, I like to have the freedom to make precise cuts and the ability to zoom in on a particular part of the frame and still maintain image quality. However, my needs for quality  are probably higher than most people looking to capture film inside of Hubs and an average laptop is generally going to be perfectly fine to get decent shot quality.

A strong internet connection is going to be essential to ensure the avatar animations and videos in-world function smoothly on your screen. Also, a good amount of bandwidth is required if you plan on live streaming video content out of your Hubs space to platforms such as Zoom or Twitch.

This may be especially relevant during the pandemic lockdown, with increased usage/burden on home internet.

Next up is storage to record your video. I use a 5TB external hard drive as my main storage device to ensure I never run out of space. A ten minute video that is 1280x720 and 30fps is roughly about 1Gb of data so it can add up pretty quickly!

One last piece of hardware I use but is not essential is a good gaming mouse. This offers better tracking and response time, allowing for more accurate cursor control and ultimately smoother camera movement inside of Hubs.

Another benefit I gain is customizability. Adjusting tracking sensitivity and adding macro commands to the additional buttons has greatly improved my experience recording inside of Hubs.

Now that we have the hardware, let’s talk about software.

Software:

OBS (Open Broadcast Software) is open source and also free! This application allows video recording and live streaming and is a popular choice for capturing and sharing your streams. This is a great piece of software and allows you full control over both your incoming and outgoing video streams.

My need for the highest available capture has led me to use Nvidia’s Geforce experience software. This is an application that complements my Geforce GTX graphics card and gives me the ability to optimize my settings.

So now that we’re up to speed with the hardware and software, it’s time to set up for recording.

As I mentioned earlier, I set up my software to get the best results possible from my hardware. The settings you choose will be dependent on your hardware and may take some experimentation to perfect. I tend to run my settings at 1920x1080 and 60fps. It’s good practice to run with commonly used resolution scales and frames per second to make editing, exporting and sharing as painless as possible. 1280x720 @ 30fps is a common and respectable setting.

These frame sizes have a 16:9 aspect ratio which is a widely used scale.

Audio is pretty straightforward: 44.1kHz is a good enough sample rate to get a usable recording. The main things to note are the spatial audio properties from avatars speaking and objects with audio attached inside of Hubs. Finding a position that allows for clean and balanced sound is important. It can also be handy to turn off sound effects from the preferences menu. That way if it’s a chat-heavy environment, the bubble sounds don’t interrupt the speaker in the recording. Another option to isolate the speaker’s audio is to have the camera avatar mute everyone else manually before recording.

Before I hit record there are a few other things I like to set up. One is maximizing my window in the browser settings (Not surprisingly I use Firefox..) and another is choosing which user interface graphics are showing. Personally, I prefer to disable all my U.I. so all that is showing is the scene inside of Hubs. I do this by using the tilde (~) (hot) key or hitting camera mode in the options menu and then selecting hide all in the bottom right corner of the screen. The second option here is only available to people who have been promoted to room moderator so be sure to check that before you begin!

Additionally, there is an option under the misc tab to turn Avatars’ name tags on or off which can be helpful depending on your needs. It's a good rule of thumb to get the permission (or at least notify) those who will be in the space that you will be recording so they can adjust their own settings or name tag accordingly, but if it's not practicable to get individuals' permission, you may want to consider turning name tags off, just in case.

Once you get to this point it pretty closely resembles the role of a traditional camera operator. You’ll need to consider close-ups, wide shots, scenes and avatars, while maintaining a balanced audio feed.

Depending on the scene creator’s settings, you may have the option to fly in Hubs. This can open up some options for more creative or cinematic camera work. Another possibility is to have multiple computers recording different angles, enabling the editor to switch between perspectives.

And that's a basic introduction on how to record inside of Hubs from a computer! Stay tuned for how to set up recording your Hubs experience from inside of virtual reality.

Stay safe, stay healthy and keep on rockin’ the free web!

https://blog.mozvr.com/recording-inside-of-hubs/

Many of us spend multiple hours a day using the internet to do everyday things like watching videos, shopping, gaming and paying bills, all the way to managing complex work … Read more

The post No-judgment digital definitions: VPNs explained appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/vpns-explained/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/07/15/mozilla-puts-its-trusted-stamp-on-vpn/

If you use Treeherder on repositories that are not Try, you might have used the backfill action. The backfill action takes a selected task and schedules it nine pushes back from the selected task. You can see the original work here and the follow up here.

In the screenshot above you can see that the task mdaturned orange (implying that it failed). In the screenshot we can see that a Mozilla code sheriff has both retriggered the task four more times (you can see four more running tasks on the same push) and has backfilled the task on previous pushes. This is to determine if the regression was introduced on previous pushes or if the failure is due to an intermittent test failure.

The difference with the old backfill action is threefold:

1. The backfilled tasks include -bk in their symbol and group and it includes the revision of the originating task that was backfilled
2. The backfilled tasks schedule the same set of manifests as the starting task
3. The backfill action schedules a support action called backfill-task

Modified symbol for backfilled tasks

The modified symbol and group name for backfilled tasks is to:

1. Show that it is a backfilled task (rather than schedule by normal scheduling) and that it can have a modified set of manifests (see next section)
2. Show from which task it was backfilled from (by including the revision)
3. Group backfilled tasks together to make it clear that they were not scheduled by normal means

I’ve also landed a change on Treeherder to handle this new naming and allow to filter out normal tasks plus backfilled tasks.

Manifest-level backfilling

Point number two from the above list is what changes the most. Soon we will be landing a change on autoland that will schedule some test tasks with a dynamic set of manifests. This means that a task scheduled on push A will have a set of manifests (e.g. set X) and the same task on push B can have a different set of manifests (e.g. set Y).

The new backfill takes this into account by looking at the env variable MOZHARNESS_TEST_PATHS which contains the list of manifests and re-uses that value on backfilled tasks. This ensures that we’re scheduling the same set of manifests in every backfilled task.

Support actions

You can skip reading this section as this is more of an architectural change. This fixes the issue that backfilled tasks could not be re-run.

Backfilled tasks are now scheduled by a support action called backfill-task. If on Treeherder we filter by backfill tasks you can see both the initial backfillaction and the backfill-tasksupport action:

The action backfill has scheduled nine backfill-task and those are in charge of scheduling the mda task on that push.

Thanks for reading. Please file a bug and CC me if you notice anything going wrong with it.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/armenzg_mozilla/~3/ubpJL9Ftid0/new-backfill-action-26788d0db81a

Rapha"el gets a second gold star for noticing that the gcc runtime we include with every copy of TenFourFox (because we build with a later compiler) is not itself optimized for the underlying platform, because MacPorts simply builds it for ppc rather than one of the specific subtypes. So he built four sets of runtime libraries for each platform and I've integrated it into the build system so that each optimized build now uses a C/C++ runtime tuned for that specific processor family (the debug build is still built for generic ppc so it runs on anything). This is not as big an improvement as you might think because JavaScript performance is almost overwhelmingly dominated by the JIT, and as I mentioned, JavaScript is one of the few areas TenFourFox has tuned and tested to hell. But other things such as DOM, graphics, layout and such do show some benefit, and scripts that spend more time in the interpreter than the JIT (primarily short one-offs) do so as well. There are no changes in the gcc runtime otherwise and it's still the same code, just built with better flags.

This release also includes additional hosts for adblock and additional fonts for the ATSUI font blocklist, and will have the usual security updates as well. It will come out parallel with Firefox 68.11 on or about July 28.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/07/tenfourfox-fpr25b1-available.html

I wanted to play with the WireViz Python package, which makes pretty wire diagrams. Installation was pretty easy, just created a virtualenv and installed with pip:

pip install wireviz

Documentation is pretty limited, but looking through the tutorials and the data models you get a pretty good idea of what …

https://patrick.cloke.us/posts/2020/07/14/testing-wireviz/

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 a pull request. 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.

Check out this week's This Week in Rust Podcast

Updates from Rust Community

News & Blog Posts

• Announcing Rustup 1.22.1
• Lang team design meeting: path to membership
• Perspective on Rust Community Moderation
• Programming Servo: the bird’s-eyes view
• Faster Integer Parsing (Rust port)
• Learning Rust: Let's Build a Parser
• nnnoiseless: porting audio code from C to rust
• The Soul of a New Debugger
• String interners in Rust
• Target Feature vs Target CPU for Rust
• Rust and it's Orphan Rules
• Async Interview #8: Stjepan Glavina
• Using RabbitMQ in Rust
• Creating a custom target
• Statically Sized Higher-kinded Polymorphism
• Getting in and out of trouble with Rust futures
• Rust Analyzer Changelog #33
• IntelliJ Rust Changelog #126
• This Month in Rust OSDev (June 2020)
• Cross-compiling Rust from ARM to x86-64
• Writing Rust NIFs for Elixir With Rustler
• Geometric Constraint Solvers Part 1: Algebraic Expressions
• A View of Async Memory Access in Rust
• Building Canrun: A Statically Typed Logic Programming Library for Rust (Part 1)
• Hunting down a non-determinism-bug in our Rust Wasm build
• Implementing the Clipper Chip Cipher in Rust
• Linux Developers May Discuss Allowing Rust Code Within the Kernel
• Machine Learning in Rust and WebAssembly
• Moving from TypeScript to Rust/WebAssembly
• RSoC: Improving Drivers and Kernel - Part 1 (Largely io_uring)
• Rust and WebAssembly from Scratch: Hello World with Strings
• Rust for JavaScript Developers - Pattern Matching and Enums
• Rust is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language
• Some Learnings from Implementing a Normalizing Rust Representer
• Subclassing GTK Widgets in Rust
• [spanish] Rust es orientado a objeto?
• [audio] Fuzzing Rust with Shnatsel Podcast
• [video] Rust Loops Part 1: loop, break, continue
• [video] Hitting A Bug in the Rust Compiler - While Writing A Boring Link Checker
• [video] Two Sum Problem - Leet Code + Rust
• [video] Rust + WebAssembly - EdgeXR @ Netlight
• [video] Rust Meetup - Adding WASM Support to a Native Application (GameDev Edition)

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is nnnoiseless, a filter for audio noise removal ported from C.

Thanks to mmmmib for the suggestion!

Submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Call for Participation

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

• rust_gpiozero is looking for contributors

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

Updates from Rust Core

273 pull requests were merged in the last week

• shrink ParamEnv to 16 bytes
• stabilize const mem::forget
• typeck: adding type information to projection
• clippy: some accuracy lints for floating point operations
• correctly mark the ending span of a match arm
• only allow repr(i128/u128) on enum
• hide &mut self methods from Deref in sidebar if there are no DerefMut impl for the type
• only add CFGuard on windows-msvc targets
• add VecDeque::range* methods
• add read_exact_at and write_all_at to WASI's FileExt
• clippy: new lint: match_like_matches_macro
• Optimize is_ascii for str and [u8]
• arch: added f32 and f64 unaligned stores and loads from avx512f set
• hashbrown: add HashSet::drain_filter method

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

• 2020-07-14. Twelve revisions checked. Zero regressions. One improvement.

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

No RFCs were approved this week.

Final Comment Period

Every week the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

RFCs

No RFCs are currently in the final comment period.

Tracking Issues & PRs

• [disposition: merge] Remove trait LengthAtMost32
• [disposition: merge] Stabilize control-flow-guard codegen option
• [disposition: merge] Impl Default for ranges
• [disposition: merge] Tracking issue for core::{f32,f64}::consts::TAU

New RFCs

• Opt-in Stable Trait VTables

Upcoming Events

Online

• July 14. Dallas, TX, US - Dallas Rust - Second Tuesday
• July 16. Turin, IT - Rust Italia - Gruppo di studio di Rust
• July 27 - August 8. Rusty Days Virtual Rust Conference

North America

• July 15. Vancouver, BC, CA - Vancouver Rust - Rust Study/Hack/Hang-out night
• July 27. Durham, NC, US - Triangle Rustaceans - Project Night & Lightning Talks

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Rust Jobs

• Senior Software Engineer - Backend at LogDNA (Remote, US)
• Senior Security Engineer at LogDNA (Remote, US)
• Rust Engineer at Elektron (Gothenburg, Sweden)
• Open Source Engineer (Remote) at Embark Studios (Stockholm)
• Software Engineer (Remote) at Embark Studios (Stockholm)
• [dutch] Vacature software engineer (Rust / Python) at Dreamsolution (Netherlands)

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

Quote of the Week

Ownership in Rust is entirely a type system fiction.

— RalfJung

I'm not sure what is meant there. "ownership" in many languages is a very real thing to me.

– and ZiCog on rust-users

Thanks to Stephan Sokolow for the suggestions!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, and cdmistman.

Discuss on r/rust

https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2020/07/14/this-week-in-rust-347/

This is a cross-post of the official security advisory. The official post contains a signed version with our PGP key, as well.

The Rust Security Response Working Group was recently notified of a security issue affecting token generation in the crates.io web application, and while investigated that issue we discovered an additional vulnerability affecting crates.io API tokens.

We have no evidence of this being exploited in the wild, but out of an abundance of caution we opted to revoke all existing API keys. You can generate a new one at crates.io/me.

Overview

Until recently, API keys for crates.io were generated using the PostgreSQL random function, which is not a cryptographically secure random number generator. This means that in theory, an attacker could observe enough random values to determine the internal state of the random number generator, and use this information to determine previously created API keys up to the last database server reboot.

As part of the investigation for this, we also found that API keys were being stored in plain text. This would mean if our database were somehow compromised the attacker would be have API access for all current tokens.

Mitigations

We deployed a code change to production to use a cryptographically secure random number generator, and we implemented hashing for storing tokens in the database.

Exploiting either issue would be incredibly impractical in practice, and we've found no evidence of this being exploited in the wild. However, out of an abundance of caution, we've opted to revoke all existing API keys. You can generate a new API key by visiting crates.io/me. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jacob Hoffman-Andrews for responsibly disclosing the random number generator issue according to our security policy. Thanks to Si^an Griffin and Justin Geibel from the crates.io team for helping the Security Response WG addressing both of the issues. Thanks to Pietro Albini from the Security Response WG for coordinating the work on this vulnerability.

Timeline of events

All times are listed in UTC.

• 2020-07-11 17:43 - The issue is reported to security@rust-lang.org
• 2020-07-11 20:56 - The issue is acknowledged, the leads of the crates.io team are looped in
• 2020-07-11 23:48 - The issue is confirmed and a planned fix is agreed on
• 2020-07-13 08:00 - The development of the fix is started
• 2020-07-14 12:53 - The fix is tested on the staging environment
• 2020-07-14 19:03 - The fix is deployed, existing tokens are revoked, and the issue is disclosed publicly

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/07/14/crates-io-security-advisory.html

https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2020/07/13/improving-firefox-startup-time-with-the-abouthome-startup-cache/

https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2020/07/13/improving-firefox-startup-time-with-the-abouthome-startup-cache/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/07/13/password-security-part-ii/

As many web platform developer and Firefox users, I believe Mozilla’s mission is instrumental for a better Internet. In a recent Igalia’s chat about the Web Ecosystem Health, participants made the usual observation regarding this important role played by Mozilla on the one hand and the limited development resources and small Firefox’s usage share on the other hand. In this blog post, I’d like to explain an experimental idea we are launching at Igalia to try and make browser development better match the interest of the web developer and user community.

Igalia’s contribution to browser repositories

As mentioned in the past in this blog, Igalia has contributed to different part of Firefox such as multimedia (e.g.

Although commit count is an imperfect metric it is also one of the easiest to obtain. Let’s take a look at how Igalia’s commits repositories of the Chromium (chromium, v8), Mozilla (mozilla-central, servo, servo-web-render) and WebKit projects were distributed last year:

As you can see, in absolute value Igalia contributed roughly 3/4 to Chromium, 1/4 to WebKit, with a small remaining amount to Mozilla. This is not surprising since Igalia is a consulting company and our work depends on the importance of browsers in the market where Chromium dominates and WebKit is also quite good for iOS devices and embedded systems.

This suggests a different way to measure our contribution by considering, for each project, the percentage relative to the total amount of commits:

In the WebKit project, where ~80% of the contributions were made by Apple, Igalia was second with ~10% of the total. In the Chromium project, the huge Google team made more than 90% of the contributions and many more companies are involved, but Igalia was second with about 4% of the total. In the Mozilla project, Mozilla is also doing ~90% of the contributions but Igalia only had ~0.5% of the total. Interestingly, the second contributing organization was… the community of unindentified gmail.com addresses! Of course, this shows the importance of volunteers in the Mozilla project where a great effort is done to encourage participation.

Open Prioritization

From the commit count, it’s clear Igalia is not contributing as much to the Mozilla project as to Chromium or WebKit projects. But this is expected and is just reflecting the priority set by large companies. The solid base of Firefox users as well as the large amount of volunteer contributors show that the Mozilla project is nevertheless still attractive for many people. Could we turn this into browser development that is not funded by advertising or selling devices?

Another related question is whether the internet can really be shaped by the global community as defended by the Mozilla’s mission? Is the web doomed to be controlled by big corporations doing technology’s “evangelism” or lobbying at standardization committees? Are there prioritization issues that can be addressed by moving to a more collective decision process?

At Igalia, we internally try and follow a more democratic organization and, at our level, intend to make the world a better place. Today, we are launching a new Open Prioritization experiment to verify whether crowdfunding could be a way to influence how browser development is prioritized. Below is a short (5 min) introductory video:

I strongly recommend you to take a look at the proposed projects and read the FAQ to understand how this is going to work. But remember this is an experiment so we are starting with a few ideas that we selected and tasks that are relatively small. We know there are tons of user reports in bug trackers and suggestions of standards, but we are not going to solve everything in one day !

If the process is successful, we can consider generalizing this approach, but we need to test it first, check what works and what doesn’t, consider whether it is worth pursuing, analyze how it can be improved, etc

Two Crowdfunding Tasks for Firefox

As explained in the previous paragraph, we are starting with small tasks. For Firefox, we selected the following ones:

• CSS lab() colors. This is about giving web developers a way to express colors using the CIELAB color space which approximates better the human perception. My colleague Brian Kardell wrote a blog with more details. Some investigations have been made by Apple and Google. Let’s see what we can do for Firefox !

• SVG path d attribute. This is about expressing SVG path using the corresponding CSS syntax for example . This will likely involve a refactoring to use the same parser for both SVG and CSS paths. It’s a small feature but part of a more general convergence effort between SVG and CSS that Igalia has been involved in.

Conclusion

Is this crowd-funded experiment going to work? Can this approach solve the prioritization problems or at least help a bit? How can we improve that idea in the future?…

There are many open questions but we will only be able to answer them if we have enough people participating. I’ll personally pledge for the two Firefox projects and I invite you to at least take a look and decide whether there is something there that is interesting for you. Let’s try and see!

http://frederic-wang.fr/igalia-contribution-to-mozilla-and-open-prioritization.html

Previous options of the week.

--silent (-s) existed in curl already in the first ever version released: 4.0.

Silent by default

I’ve always enjoyed the principles of Unix command line tool philosophy and I’ve tried to stay true to them in the design and implementation of the curl command line tool: everything is a pipe, don’t “speak” more than necessary by default.

As a result of the latter guideline, curl features the --verbose option if you prefer it to talk and explain more about what’s going on. By default – when everything is fine – it doesn’t speak much extra.

Initially: two things were “spoken”

To show users that something is happening during a command line invoke that takes a long time, we added a “progress meter” display. But since you can also ask curl to output text or data in the terminal, curl has logic to automatically switch off the progress meter display to avoid content output to get mixed with it.

Of course we very quickly figured out that there are also other use cases where the progress meter was annoying so we needed to offer a way to shut it off. To keep silent! --silent was the obvious choice for option name and -s was conveniently still available.

The other thing that curl “speaks” by default is the error message. If curl fails to perform the transfer or operation as asked to, it will output a single line message about it when it is done, and then return an error code.

When we added an option called --silent to make curl be truly silent, we also made it hush the error message. curl still returns an error code, so shell scripts and similar environments that invoke curl can still detect errors perfectly fine. Just possibly slightly less human friendly.

But I want my errors?

In May 1999, the tool was just fourteen months old, we added --show-error (-S) for users that wanted to curl to be quiet in general but still wanted to see the error message in case it failed. The -Ss combination has been commonly used ever since.

More information added

Over time we’ve made the tool more complex and we’ve felt that it needs some more informational output in some cases. For example, when you use --retry, curl will say something that it will try again etc. The reason is of course that --verbose is really verbose so its not really the way to ask for such little extra helpful info.

Only shut off the progress meter

Not too long ago, we ended up with a new situation where the --silent option is a bit too silent since it also disables the text for retry etc so what if you just want to shut off the progress meter?

--no-progress-meter was added for that, which thus is a modern replacement for --silent in many cases.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/07/13/curl-ootw-silent/

Sustainability is not just about ticking a few boxes by getting your Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) inventory, adopting goals for reduction and mitigation, and accounting in shape. Any transformation towards sustainability also needs culture change.

In launching Mozilla‘s Sustainability Programme, our Environmental Champions are a key part of driving this organisational culture change.

Recruiting, training, and working with a first cohort of Environmental Champions has been a highlight of my job in the last couple of months. I can’t wait to see their initiatives taking root across all parts of Mozilla.

We have 14 passionate and driven individuals in this first cohort. They are critical amplifiers who will nudge each and every one us to incorporate sustainability into everything we do.

What makes people Champions?

“We don’t need hope, we need courage: The courage to change and impact our own decisions.”

This was among the top take-aways of our initial level-setting workshop on climate change science. In kicking off conversations around how to adjust our everyday work at Mozilla to a more sustainability-focused mindset, it was clear that hope won’t get us to where we need to be. This will require boldness and dedication.

Our champions volunteer their time for this effort. All of them have full-time roles and it was important to structure this process so that it is inviting, empowering, and impactful. To me this meant ensuring manager buy-in and securing executive sponsorship to make sure that our champions have the support to grow professionally in their sustainability work.

In the selection of this cohort, we captured the whole breadth of Mozilla: representatives from all departments, spread across regions, including office as well as remote workers, people with different tenure and job levels, and a diversity in roles. Some are involved with our GHG assessment, others are design thinkers, engineers, or programme managers, and yet others will focus on external awareness raising.

Responsibilities and benefits

In a nutshell, we agreed on these conditions:

Environmental Champions are:

• Engaged through a peer learning platform with monthly meetings for all champions, including occasional conversations with sustainability experts. We currently alternate between four time zones, starting at 8am CEST (UTC+2), CST (UTC+8), EDT (UTC-4), PDT (UTC-7), respectively to equally spread the burden of global working hours.
• Committed to spend about 2-5h each month supporting sustainability efforts at Mozilla.
• Committed to participate in at least 1 initiative a year.
• Committed to regularly share initiatives they are driving or participating in.
• Dedicated to set positive examples and highlight sustainability as a catalyst of innovation.
• Set up to provide feedback in their teams/departments, raise questions and draw attention to sustainability considerations.

The Sustainability team:

• Provides introductory training on climate science and how to incorporate it into our everyday work at Mozilla. Introductory training will be provided at least once a year or as soon as we have a critical mass of new champions joining us on this journey.
• Commits to inviting champions for initial feedback on new projects, e.g. sustainability policy, input on reports, research to be commissioned.
• Regularly amplifies progress and successes of champions’ initiatives to wider staff.
• May offer occasional access to consultants, support for evangelism (speaking, visibility, support for professional development) or other resources, where necessary and to the extent possible.

Curious about their initiatives?

We are just setting out and we already have a range of ambitious, inspiring projects lined up.

Sharmili, our Global Space Planner, is not only gathering necessary information around the impact of our global office spaces, she will also be leading on our reduction targets for real estate and office supplies. She puts it like this: “Reducing our Real Estate Footprint and promoting the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) is as straight-forward as it can be tough in practice. We’ll make it happen either way.”

Ian, a machine learning engineer, is looking at Pocket recommendation guidelines and is keen to see more collections like this Earth Day 2020 one in the future.

Daria, Head of Product Design in Emerging Technologies, says: “There are many opportunities for designers to develop responsible technologies and to bring experiences that prioritize sustainability principles. It’s time we unlocked them.” She is planning to develop and apply a Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool that will be used in decision-making around product design and development.

We’ll also be looking at Firefox performance and web power usage, starting with explorations for how to better measure the impact of our products. DOM engineer, Olli will be stewarding these.

And the behind the scenes editorial support thinking through content, timing, and outreach? That’s Daniel for you.

We’ll be sharing more initiatives and the progress they are all making as we move forward. In the meantime, do join us on our Matrix channel to continue the conversation.

The post Sustainability needs culture change. Introducing Environmental Champions. appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/07/13/sustainability-needs-culture-change-introducing-environmental-champions/

Bonjour `a tous et `a toutes, this is episode 53 of your favorite and only Firefox graphics newsletter. From now on instead of peeling through commit logs, I will be simply gathering notes sent to me by the rest of the team. This means the newsletter will be shorter, hopefully a bit less overwhelming with only the juicier bits. It will also give yours-truly more time to fix bugs instead of writing about it.

Lately we have been enabling WebRender for a lot more users. For the first time, WebRender is enabled by default in Nightly for Windows 7 and macOS users with modern GPUs. Today 78% of Nightly users have WebRender enabled, 40% on beta, and 22% on release. Not all of these configurations are ready to ride the trains yet, but the numbers are going to keep going up over the next few releases.

WebRender

WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for the web written in Rust, currently powering Firefox‘s rendering engine as well as Mozilla’s research web browser Servo.

Ongoing work

• Part of the team is now focusing on shipping WebRender on some flavors of Linux as well.
• Worth highlighting also is the ongoing work by Martin Str'ansk'y and Robert Madder to switch Firefox on Linux from GLX to EGL. EGL is a more modern and better supported API, it will also let us share more code between Linux and Android.
• Lee and Jim continue work on WebRender’s software backend. It has had a bunch of correctness improvements, works properly on Windows now and has more performance improvements in the pipeline. It works on all desktop platforms and can be enabled via the pref “gfx.webrender.software”.

Performance

One of the projects that we worked on the last little while has been improving performance on lower-end/older Intel GPUs.

• Glenn fixed a picture caching issue while scrolling gmail
• Glenn fixed some over-invalidation on small screen resolutions.
• Glenn reduced extra invalidation some more.
• Dzmitry switched WebRender to a different CPU-to-GPU transfer strategy on Intel hardware on Windows. This avoid stalls during rendering.

Some other performance improvements that we made are:

• Nical reduced CPU usage by re-building the scene a lot less often during scrolling.
• Nical removed a lot of costly vector reallocation during scene building.
• Nical reduced the amount of synchronous queries submitted to the X server on Linux, removing a lot of stalls when the GPU busy.
• Nical landed a series of frame building optimizations.
• Glenn improved texture cache eviction handling. This means lower memory usage and better performance.
• Jeff enabled GPU switching for WebRender on Mac in Nightly. Previously WebRender only used the GPU that Firefox was started with. If the GPU was switched Firefox would have very bad performance because we would be drawing with the wrong GPU.
• Markus finished and preffed on the OS compositor configuration of WR on macOS, which uses CoreAnimation for efficient scrolling.

Driver bugs

• Dzmitry worked around a driver bug causing visual artifacts in Firefox’s toolbar on Intel Skylake and re-enabled direct composition on these configurations.

Desktop zooming

• Botond announced on dev-platform that desktop zooming is ready for dogfooding by Nightly users who would like to try it out by flipping the pref.
• Botond landed a series of patches that re-works how main-thread hit testing accounts for differences between the visual and layout viewports. This fixes a number of scenarios involving the experimental desktop zooming feature (enabled using apz.allow_zooming=true), including allowing scrollbars to be dragged with desktop zooming enabled.
• Timothy landed support for DirectManipulation preffed off. It allows users to pinch-zoom on touchpads on Windows. It can be enabled by setting apz.windows.use_direct_manipulation=true

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2020/07/10/moz-gfx-newsletter-54/

Over the last three plus years, Julie Hanna has brought extensive experience on innovation processes, global business operations, and mission-driven organizations to her role as a board member of Mozilla Corporation. We have deeply appreciated her contributions to Mozilla throughout this period, and thank her for her time and her work with the board.

Julie is now stepping back from her board commitment at Mozilla Corporation to focus more fully on her longstanding passion and mission to help pioneer and bring to market technologies that meaningfully advance social, economic and ecological justice, as evidenced by her work with Kiva, Obvious Ventures and X (formerly Google X), Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory. We look forward to continuing to see her play a key role in shaping and evolving purpose-driven technology companies across industries.

We are actively looking for a new member to join the board and seeking candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.

The post Thank you, Julie Hanna appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/07/09/thank-you-julie-hanna/

Mozilla, Atlassian, and Shopify yesterday filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Van Buren v. U.S. asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider implications of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for online security and privacy.

Mozilla’s involvement in this case comes from our interest in making sure that the law doesn’t stand in the way of effective online security. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was passed as a tool to combat online hacking through civil and criminal liability. However, over the years various federal circuit courts have interpreted the law so broadly as to threaten important practices for managing computer security used by Mozilla and many others. Contrary to the purpose of the statute, the lower court’s decision in this case would take a law meant to increase security and interpret it in a way that undermines that goal.

System vulnerabilities are common among even the most security conscious platforms. Finding and addressing as many of these vulnerabilities as possible relies on reporting from independent security researchers who probe and test our network. In fact, Mozilla was one of the first to offer a bug bounty program with financial rewards specifically for the purpose of encouraging external researchers to report vulnerabilities to us so we can fix them before they become widely known. By sweeping in pro-security research activities, overbroad readings of the CFAA discourage independent investigation and reporting of security flaws. The possibility of criminal liability as well as civil intensifies that chilling effect.

We encourage the Supreme Court to protect strong cybersecurity by striking the lower court’s overbroad statutory interpretation.

The post Laws designed to protect online security should not undermine it appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2020/07/09/laws-designed-to-protect-online-security-should-not-undermine-it/