Advancing Content: A Call for Trust, Transparency and User Control in Advertising |
Advertising is the Web’s dominant business. It relies on users for its success, and ironically fails to engage with them in a direct and honest way. We are advocates of the many benefits that commercial involvement brings to the development of the Internet – it is at our core and part of the Mozilla Manifesto. Advertising is one of those commercial activities, it fuels and grows the Web. But the model has lost its focus by failing to put the user at the center. We are calling initially on the advertising industry to adopt three core principles of trust, transparency and user control:
1) Trust: Do users understand why they are being presented with content? Do they understand what pieces of their data fed into the display decision?
2) Transparency: Is it clear to users why advertising decisions are made? Is it clear how their data is being consumed and shared? Are they aware and openly contributing?
3) Control: Do users have the ability to control their own data? Do they have the option to be completely private, completely public or somewhere in between?
We are re-thinking the model. We want a world where Chief Marketing Officers, advertising agency executives, industry groups and the advertising technology companies see the real benefits of a user-centric model. These three principles give us the ability to build a strong, long term and more valuable platform for everyone.
What are we doing?
Our intention is to improve the experience as a player within the ecosystem. We’ll do this by experimenting and innovating. All of our work will be designed with trust in mind. Tiles is our first experiment and we are learning a lot. Right now, we are showing users tiles from their “frecency” (recent and frequent sites), along with Mozilla information and suggestions and content labeled as sponsored. This experience is pretty basic but will evolve over time. Initial user interactions are positive. Users interacted with content labeled as sponsored that we placed in directory tiles 10x more than Mozilla-based content.
Our next step will be to give users more transparency and control. Our UP platform will eventually help to power tiles and will help determine which content is displayed to the user. The platform itself is innovative as it currently allows the interests data to sit client side, completely in the user’s control. The data can still be accessed there without us creating a dossier on the user, outside of the Firefox client.
We will then put the user first by building an interests dashboard (something that we are already working on) that offers users a way to easily change their interests or participation in enhanced content at any time. The dashboard provides a constant feedback loop with users and will work with all our enhanced content projects.
What can we promise?
We will continue to demonstrate that it’s possible to balance commercial interests with public benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon trust, transparency and control.
We can’t change the Web from the sidelines, and we can’t change advertising on the Web without being a part of that ecosystem. We are excited about this mission and we’re working hard to achieve our goals. Stay tuned for updates over the coming weeks.
If this resonates with and you have ideas or want to help, we’d love to hear from you by leaving comments below or by filling out this form.
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Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: Trust should be the currency |
At Mozilla, we champion a Web that empowers people to reach their full potential and be in control of their online lives. In my role at Mozilla this means advocating for products, policies and practices that respect our users and create trusted online environments and experiences. We believe trust is the most important currency on the Web – and when that trust is violated, the system fails.
I have been spending a lot of time with our Content Services team as they work on their new initiatives. Their first challenge is tackling the online advertising ecosystem. This is hard work but extremely important. Our core values of trust, transparency and control are just as applicable to the advertising industry as to any other, but they aren’t widely adopted there.
Today, online advertising is rife with mistrust. It is opaque for most users because the value exchange is not transparent. While it should be trust, the prevailing Web currency is user data – much of the content is free because publishers and websites generate revenue through advertising. At its core, this model is not new or unique, it is common in the media industry (e.g., broadcast television commercials and newspapers that are ad supported). To improve monetization, online ads are now targeted based on a user’s browsing habits and intentions. This isn’t a bad thing when done openly or done with consent. The problem is that this “personalization” is not always transparent, leaving users in the dark about what they have traded for their content. This breaks the system.
Our users and our community have told us – through surveys, comments and emails – that transparency and control matter most to them when it comes to online advertising. They want to know what is happening with their data; they want to control what data is shared, understand how their data is used and what they get for that exchange. They are willing to engage in the value exchange and allow their data to be used if they understand what happens next. Our users want trust (and not their data) to be the prevailing currency. We believe that without this shift in focus, users will limit access to their data and will block ads.
We want our users to not only trust us but to be able to trust the Web. We want to empower their choices and help them control their online experience. This is why we pioneered the Do Not Track (DNT) initiative. DNT relies on advertisers, publishers and websites to respect a user’s preference. Unfortunately, many participants in the online advertising ecosystem do not modify their behavior in response to the DNT signal. In this instance, user choice is not being respected. So, we must do more for the user and continue to innovate.
We are doing this by working within the ecosystem to create change. We are testing our new tiles feature in Firefox and working to ensure that it provides personalization with respect and transparency built in. We are building DNT and other user controls into the tiles experiments and working to establish these foundational elements with our partners. We are providing users with more information about their Web presence through Lightbeam, and will be testing new privacy initiatives that give users more control over the flow of their data. We want to bring relevant and personalized content to our users while empowering control that inspires trust.
We need to see a renewed focus of trust, transparency and control on the Web as a whole. We can all do better. We want to see more products and services (and not just in online advertising) developed with those ideals in mind. For our part, we will continue to do more to innovate and create change so that we deserve your trust.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/08/21/trust-should-be-the-currency/
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Aaron Klotz: Profile Unlocking in Firefox 34 for Windows |
Today’s Nightly 34 build includes the work I did for bug 286355: a profile unlocker for our Windows users. This should be very helpful to those users whose workflow is interrupted by a Firefox instance that cannot start because a previous Firefox instance has not finished shutting down.
Firefox 34 users running Windows Vista or newer will now be presented with this dialog box:
Clicking “Close Firefox” will terminate that previous instance and proceed with starting your new Firefox instance.
Unfortunately this feature is not available to Windows XP users. To support this feature on Windows XP we would need to call undocumented API functions. I prefer to avoid calling undocumented APIs when writing production software due to the potential stability and compatibility issues that can arise from doing so.
While this feature adds some convenience to an otherwise annoying issue, please be assured that the Desktop Performance Team will continue to investigate and fix the root causes of long shutdowns so that a profile unlocker hopefully becomes unnecessary.
http://dblohm7.ca/blog/2014/08/21/profile-unlocking-in-firefox-34-for-windows/
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Doug Belshaw: Some preliminary thoughts toward v2.0 of Mozilla's Web Literacy Map |
As we approach the Mozilla Festival 2014, my thoughts are turning towards revisiting the Web Literacy Map. This, for those who haven’t seen it, comprises the skills and competencies Mozilla and a community of stakeholders believe to be important to read, write and participate on the web. Now that we’ve had time to build and iterate on top of the first version, it’s time to start thinking about a v2.0.
The first thing to do when revisiting something like this is to celebrate the success it’s had: webmaker.org/resources is now structured using the 15 competencies identified in v1.1 of the Web Literacy Map. Each of those competencies now has an associated badge. We’ve published a whitepaper entitled Why Mozilla care about Web Literacy that features in which it features heavily. It’s also been used as the basis of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America’s new technology strategy, and by MOUSE in their work around Privacy. That’s just a few examples amongst the countless other times it’s been shared on social media and by people looking for something more nuanced than the usual new literacies frameworks.
Deadlines being what they are, the group that were working on the Web Literacy Map had to move a bit more quickly than we would have liked in the final stages of putting it together. As a result, although the 15 competencies are reasonably solid, we were never 100% happy with the description of the skills underpinning each of these. Nevertheless, we decided to roll with it for launch, made a few updates post-MozFest, and then ‘froze’ development so that others could build on top of it.
At the beginning of 2014, the Open Badges work at Mozilla was moved to a new non-profit called the Badge Alliance. As co-chair of the working group on Digital & Web Literacies, I’ve had a chance to think through web literacy from the perspective of a badged learning pathway with some of the people who helped put together the Web Literacy Map.
The feeling I get is that with version 2.0 we need to address both the issues we put to one side for the sake of expediency, as well as issues that have cropped up since them. I can name at least five (not listed in any order):
We’re generally happy with the 15 competencies identified in v1.1 of the Web Literacy Map, and we’ve built resources and badges on top of them. Version 2.0, therefore, is likely to be more about evolution, not revolution.
If you’ve got any thoughts on this, please do add them to this thread. Alternatively, I’m @dajbelshaw on Twitter and you can email me at doug@mozillafoundation.org
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Adam Lofting: Overlapping types of contribution |
TL;DR: Check out this graph!
The reason the MoFo Contributor dashboard we’re working from at the moment is called our interim dashboard is because it’s combining numbers from multiple data sources, but the number of contributors is not de-duped across systems.
So if you’re counted as a contributor because you host an event for Webmaker, you will be double counted if you also file bugs in Bugzilla. And until now, we haven’t known what those overlaps look like.
This interim solution wasn’t perfect, but it’s given us something to work with while we’re building out Baloo and the cross-org areweamillionyet.org (and by ‘we’, the vast credit for Baloo is due to our hard working MoCo friends Pierros and Sheeri).
To help with prepping MoFo data for inclusion in Baloo, and by generally being awesome, JP wired up an integration database for our MoFo projects (skipping a night of sleep to ship V1!).
We’ve tweaked and tuned this in the last few weeks and we’re now extracting all sorts of useful insights we didn’t have before. For example, this integration database is behind quite a few of the stats in OpenMatt’s recent Webmaker update.
The downside to this is we will soon have a de-duped number for our dashboard, which will be smaller than the current number. Which will feel like a bit of a downer because we’ve been enthusiastically watching that number go up as we’ve built out contribution tracking systems throughout the year.
But, a smaller more accurate number is a good thing in the long run, and we will also gain new understanding about the multiple ways people contribute over time.
We will be able to see how people move around the project, and find that what looks like someone ‘stopping’ contributing, might be them switching focus to another team, for example. There are lots of exciting possibilities here.
And while I’m looking at this from a metrics point of view today, the same data allows us to make sure we say hello and thanks to any new contributors who joined this week, or to reach out and talk to long running active contributors who have recently stopped, and so on.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adamlofting/blog/~3/n-vJuJzPryM/
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Pete Moore: Weekly review 2014-08-21 |
Highlights since last review
Goals for next week:
Bugs I created since last review:
Other bugs I updated since last review:
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Marco Zehe: Blog maintenance on Saturday |
On Saturday, August 23, starting at 9 AM GMT+02:00 (3 AM Eastern, midnight Pacific), this blog will undergo some much needed maintenance. Afterwards it will hopefully be faster, and also have a new theme. I’ll try to keep the interruption as brief as possible. But just in case, so you know. 
http://www.marcozehe.de/2014/08/21/blog-maintenance-on-saturday/
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Peter Bengtsson: Aggressively prefetching everything you might click |
I just rolled out a change here on my personal blog which I hope will make my few visitors happy.
Basically; when you hover over a link (local link) long enough it prefetches it (with AJAX) so that if you do click it's hopefully already cached in your browser.
If you hover over a link and almost instantly hover out it cancels the prefetching. The assumption here is that if you deliberately put your mouse cursor over a link and proceed to click on it you want to go there. Because your hand is relatively slow I'm using the opportunity to prefetch it even before you have clicked. Some hands are quicker than others so it's not going to help for the really quick clickers.
What I also had to do was set a Cache-Control header of 1 hour on every page so that the browser can learn to cache it.
The effect is that when you do finally click the link, by the time your browser loads it and changes the rendered output it'll hopefully be able to do render it from its cache and thus it becomes visually ready faster.
Let's try to demonstrate this with this horrible animated gif:
(or download the
screencast.mov file)
1. Hover over a link (in this case the "Now I have a Gmail account" from 2004)
2. Notice how the Network panel preloads it
3. Click it after a slight human delay
4. Notice that when the clicked page is loaded, its served from the browser cache
5. Profit!
So the code that does is is quite simply:
$(function() { var prefetched = []; var prefetch_timer = null; $('div.navbar, div.content').on('mouseover', 'a', function(e) { var value = e.target.attributes.href.value; if (value.indexOf('/') === 0) { if (prefetched.indexOf(value) === -1) { if (prefetch_timer) { clearTimeout(prefetch_timer); } prefetch_timer = setTimeout(function() { $.get(value, function() { // necessary for $.ajax to start the request :( }); prefetched.push(value); }, 200); } } }).on('mouseout', 'a', function(e) { if (prefetch_timer) { clearTimeout(prefetch_timer); } }); });
Also, available on GitHub.
I'm excited about this change because of a couple of reasons:
onmouseover triggering. So people on such devices don't "suffer" from this optimization. http://www.peterbe.com/plog/aggressively-prefetching-everything-you-might-click
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David Boswell: Quality over Quantity |
I was in Portland last week for a work week and Michelle recommended that I try the donuts at Blue Star. The blueberry donut was really great. The inside of the bakery was interesting too—right inside the doors was a big mural that said ‘Quality over Quantity’.
That turned out to be an good summary of the work week. We were checking in on progress toward this year’s goal to grow the number of active contributors by 10x and also thinking about how we could increase the impact of our community building work next year.
One clear take-away was that community building can’t be all about growth. Some teams, like Location Service, do need large numbers of new active contributors, but many teams don’t. For instance, localization needs to develop the active contributors already in the project into core contributors that can take on a bigger role.
For me, creating a draft framework that would give us more ways to support teams and communities was the most important thing we did—in addition to taking a great team photo :)
Growth is part of this framework, but it includes other factors for us to look at to make sure that we’re building healthy functional and regional communities. The health measures we think we should be focusing on next year are:
Having this more nuanced approach to community building will create more value because it aligns better with the needs we’re seeing across Mozilla. The growth work we’ve done has been critical to getting us here and we should continue that along with adding more to what we offer.
There is a video that Rainer just posted that has a story Chris Hofmann told at last year’s summit about one contributor that had a huge impact on the project. This is a great example of how we should be thinking more broadly about community building.
We should be setting up participation systems that let us help teams build long-lasting relationships with contributors like Scoobidiver as well as helping teams connect with large numbers of people to focus on an issue for a short time when that is what’s needed.
Moral of this story: Eat more donuts—they help you think :)
http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/quality-over-quantity/
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Vladimir Vuki'cevi'c: Updated Firefox VR Builds |
I’d like to announce the third Firefox Nightly build with experimental VR support. Download links:
This build includes a number of fixes to CSS VR rendering, as well as some API additions and changes:
hmd.setFieldOfView() now takes zNear and zFar argumentshmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect() returns the suggested render dimensions for a given eye; useful for WebGL rendering (see below)The DK2 Rift must be in Extended Desktop mode. You will also need to rotate the Rift’s display to landscape. If tracking doesn’t seem to be working, stop the Oculus service using the Configuration Tool first, then launch Firefox.
Many issues with CSS rendering were fixed in this release. As part of this, the coordinate space when in fullscreen VR is different than normal CSS. When in fullscreen VR mode, the 0,0,0 coordinate location refers to the center of the viewport (and not the top left as is regular in CSS). Additionally, the zNear/zFar values specified to setFieldOfView control the near and far clipping planes.
The coordinate units are also not rationalized with CSS coordinates. The browser applies a per-eye transform in meters (~ 0.032 meters left/right, or 3.2cm) before rendering the scene; tthus the coordinate space ends up being ~1px = ~1m in real space, which is not correct. This will be fixed in the next release.
Here’s a simple example of showing 4 CSS images on all sides around the viewer, along with some text. The source includes copious comments about what’s being done and why.
Known issues:
NOTE: This API will likely change (and become simpler) in the next release.
getRecommendedEyeRenderRect will return the rectangle into which each eye should be rendered, and the best resolution for the given field of view settings. To create an appropriately sized canvas, the size computation should be:
var leftRect = hmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect("left");
var rightRect = hmd.getRecommendedEyeRenderRect("right");
var width = leftRect.x + Math.max(leftRect.width + rightRect.x) + rightRect.width;
var height = Math.max(leftRect.y, rightRect.y) + Math.max(leftRect.height, leftRect.height);
In practice, leftRect.x will be 0, and the y coordinates will both be 0, so this can be simplified to:
var width = leftRect.width + rightRect.width;
var height = Math.max(leftRect.height, rightRect.height);
Each eye should be rendered into the leftRect and rightRect coordinates. This API will change in the next release to make it simpler to obtain the appropriate render sizes and viewports.
As before, issues are welcome via GitHub issues on my gecko-dev repo. Additionally, discussion is welcome on the web-vr-discuss mailing list.
http://blog.bitops.com/blog/2014/08/20/updated-firefox-vr-builds/
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Christian Heilmann: No more excuses – subtitle your YouTube videos |
I was just very pleasantly surprised that the subtitling interface in YouTube has gone leaps and bounds since I last looked at it.
One of the French contributors to Mozilla asked me to get subtitles for the video of the Flame introduction videos and I felt the sense of dread you get when requests like those come in. It seems a lot of work for not much gain.
However, using the YouTube auto captioning tool this is quite a breeze:
I just went to the Subtitles and CC tab and told YouTube that the video is English. Almost immediately (this is kind of fishy – does YouTube already create text from speech for indexing reasons?) I got a nice set of subtitles, time-stamped and all.
Hitting the edit button I was able to edit the few mistakes the recognition made and it was a simple process of listening as you type. I then turned on the subtitles and exported the SRT files for translation.
I was very impressed with the auto-captioning as I am not happy with the quality of my talking in those videos (they were rushed and the heartless critic in me totally hears that).
Of course, there is also Amara as a full-fledged transcribing, captioning and translation tool, but there are not many excuses left for us not to subtitle our short videos.
Let’s not forget that subtitles are amazing and not only a tool for the hard of hearing:
Go, hit that Subtitles tab!
http://christianheilmann.com/2014/08/20/no-more-excuses-subtitle-your-youtube-videos/
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Daniel Stenberg: The “right” keyboard layout |
I’ve never considered myself very picky about the particular keyboard I use for my machines. Sure, I work full-time and spare time in front of the same computer and thus I easily spend 2500-3000 hours a year in front of it but I haven’t thought much about it. I wish I had some actual stats on how many key-presses I do on my keyboard on an average day or year or so.
Then, one of these hot summer days this summer I left the roof window above my work place a little bit too much open when a very intense rain storm hit our neighborhood when I was away for a brief moment and to put it shortly, the huge amounts of water that poured in luckily only destroyed one piece of electronics for me: my trusty old keyboard. The keyboard I just randomly picked from some old computer without any consideration a bunch of years ago.
So the old was dead, I just picked another keyboard I had lying around.
But man, very soft rubber-style keys are very annoying to work with. Then I picked another with a weird layout and a control-key that required a little too much pressure to work for it to be comfortable. So, my race for a good enough keyboard had begun. Obviously I couldn’t just pick a random cheap new one and be happy with it.
That’s what they call it. It is even a Swedish layout, which among a few other details means it features a, "a and "o keys at a rather prominent place. See illustration. Those letters are used fairly frequently in our language. We have a few peculiarities in the Swedish layout that is downright impractical for programming, like how the {[]} – symbols all require AltGr pressed and slash, asterisk and underscore require Shift to be pressed etc. Still, I’v'e learned to program on such a layout so I’m quite used to those odd choices by now…
I want the cursor keys to be of “standard size”, have the correct location and relative positions. Like below. Also, the page up and page down keys should not be located close to the cursor keys (like many laptop keyboards do).
The page up and page down keys should instead be located in the group of six keys above the cursor keys. The group should have a little gap between it and the three keys (print screen, scroll lock and pause/break) above them so that finding the upper row is easy and quick without looking.
BackspaceI’m not really a good keyboard typist. I do a lot of mistakes and I need to use the backspace key quite a lot when doing so. Thus I’m a huge fan of the slightly enlarged backspace key layout so that I can find and hit that key easily. Also, the return key is a fairly important one so I like the enlarged and strangely shaped version of that as well. Pretty standard.
Further detailsThe Escape key should have a little gap below it so that I can find it easily without looking.
The Caps lock key is completely useless for locking caps is not something a normal person does, but it can be reprogrammed for other purposes. I’ve still refrained from doing so, mostly to not get accustomed to “weird” setups that makes it (even) harder for me to move between different keyboards at different places. Just recently I’ve configured it to work as ctrl – let’s see how that works out.
The F-keys are pretty useless. I use F5 sometimes to refresh web pages but as ctrl-r works just as well I don’t see a strong need for them in my life.
Numpad – a completely useless piece of the keyboard that I would love to get rid of – I never use any of those key. Never. Unfortunately I haven’t found any otherwise decent keyboards without the numpad.
The Func KB-460 is the keyboard I ended up with this time in my search. It has some fun extra cruft such as two USB ports and a red backlight (that can be made to pulse). The backlight gave me extra points from my kids.
It is “mechanical” which obviously is some sort of thing among keyboards that has followers and is supposed to be very good. I remain optimistic about this particular model, even if there are a few minor things with it I haven’t yet gotten used to. I hope I’ll just get used to them.
Based on my preferences and what keys I think I use, I figure an ideal keyboard layout for me could very well look like this:
I have decided to go further and “scientifically” measure how I use my keyboard, which keys I use the most and similar data and metrics. Turns out the most common keylog program on Linux doesn’t log enough details, so I forked it and created keyfreq for this purpose. I’ll report details about this separately – soon.
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2014/08/20/the-right-keyboard-layout/
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Byron Jones: happy bmo push day! |
the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:
discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.
http://globau.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/happy-bmo-push-day-108/
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Benjamin Kerensa: Mozilla and Open Diversity Data |
I have been aware of the Open Diversity Data project for awhile. It is the work of the wonderful members of Double Union and their community of awesome contributors. Recently, a Mozillian tweeted that Mozilla should release it’s Diversity Data. It is my understanding also that a discussion happened internally and for whatever reason a release of Mozilla’s diversity data did not entirely result although some numbers are available here.
Anyways, I’m now going to bring this suggestion up again and encourage that both Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation release individual diversity data reports in the form of some numbers, graphs and a blog post and perhaps a combined one of both orgs.
I would encourage other Mozillians to support the push for opening this data by sharing this blog post on the Social Media as an indicator of supporting Open Diversity Data publishing by Mozilla or by retweeting this.
I really think our Manifesto encourages us to support initiatives like this; specifically principle number two of our manifesto. If other companies (Kudos!) that are less transparent than Mozilla can do it then I think we have to do this.
Finally, I would like to encourage Mozilla to consider creating a position of VP of Diversity and Inclusion to oversee our various diversity and inclusion efforts and to help plan and create a vision for future efforts at Mozilla. Sure we have already people who kind of do this but it is not their full-time role.
Anyways that’s all I have on this…
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Mozilla Release Management Team: Firefox 32 beta7 to beta8 |
| Extension | Occurrences |
| cpp | 17 |
| js | 9 |
| h | 9 |
| ini | 2 |
| xul | 1 |
| xml | 1 |
| xhtml | 1 |
| webidl | 1 |
| py | 1 |
| mm | 1 |
| css | 1 |
| Module | Occurrences |
| content | 15 |
| js | 8 |
| browser | 8 |
| netwerk | 3 |
| toolkit | 2 |
| testing | 2 |
| dom | 2 |
| modules | 1 |
| mobile | 1 |
| editor | 1 |
| accessible | 1 |
List of changesets:
| Ryan VanderMeulen | Bug 1023472 - Disable test_bug935876.html on Android for perma-failing when pushed to a different chunk; a=bustage - 1764a68fe1ae |
| Ryan VanderMeulen | Bug 1054087 - Disable test_dom_input_event_on_htmleditor.html on Android 2.3 for perma-failing since the number of Android mochitest chunks was increased; a=bustage - ef94af3dd0ad |
| Jon Coppeard | Bug 999158 - Keep a spare chunk around to mitigate GGC OOM crashes on tenuring. r=terrence, a=lmandel - 97fd0156fdc2 |
| Ryan VanderMeulen | Bug 1026805 - Disable frequently-hanging mozapps tests on OSX. a=test-only - 76f7c4f771f5 |
| Matthew Noorenberghe | Bug 1054411 - Cancel the HTTP requests in browser_keywordSearch.js to avoid making network contact. r=adw, a=test-only - 6dec02f8d0ea |
| Florian Qu`eze | Bug 1048375 - browser_aboutHome.js intermittently causes external requests to snippets.mozilla.com. r=gavin, a=test-only - 8e09aad61a79 |
| Randell Jesup | Bug 1054166: Mirror Add/RemoveListener in Add/RemoveDirectListener r=roc a=abillings - 6a2810252cf8 |
| Simon Montagu | Bug 1037641 - Split SetDirectionFromChangedTextNode into TextNodeWillChangeDirection and TextNodeChangedDirection. r=ehsan, a=abillings - 9e94aa2f0ae7 |
| Brian Hackett | Bug 1053683 - Add overrecursion checks to FillInBMInfo. r=jandem, a=abillings - c6e134b4ed52 |
| Ed Lee | Bug 1039881 - Use an empty directory tiles data source pref before uplift [r=adw r=bholley a=lmandel] - 6790f9333fec |
| Wes Johnston | Bug 910893 - Don't disable the try again button. r=margaret, r=benb, a=lmandel - 7bb962c117df |
| Valentin Gosu | Bug 1045886 - Remove Cache directory from Android profiles. r=michal, a=lmandel - 07eb5ce30325 |
| Valentin Gosu | Bug 1045886 - Increase assertion count in test_bug437844.xul. a=test-only - c444cb84a78b |
| Jan de Mooij | Bug 1054359 - Add is-object check to IonBuilder::makeCallHelper. r=efaust, a=lmandel - f5bfa8f3434c |
| Jared Wein | Bug 1016434 - Backout Bug 759252 from Firefox 32 and Firefox 33 for causing blurry throbbers. a=lmandel - 3741e9a5c6ca |
| Jean-Yves Avenard | Bug 1045591 - Fix media element's autoplay for audio-only stream. r=cpearce, a=lmandel - f595bdcdbd1e |
| Alessio Placitelli | Bug 1037214 - Throw OOM to the script instead of aborting in FragmentOrElement::GetTextContentInternal. r=bz, a=lmandel - 353ade05d903 |
| Ed Morley | Bug 1026987 - Give the MOZ_DISABLE_NONLOCAL_CONNECTIONS error a TBPL-parsable prefix. r=froydnj, a=NPOTB - 92aead6bd5fb |
| Andrew McCreight | Bug 1039633 - Always try to set the ASan symbolizer in gtest runs. r=ted, a=test-only - e0e150f31ffe |
| Tooru Fujisawa | Bug 1053692 - Do not use optimized stub for spread call with many arguments. r=jandem, a=lmandel - 45953c4613d2 |
http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/32/2014/08/20/fx-32-b7-to-b8.html
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Andrew Overholt: “Bootcamp” talks on Air Mozilla |
Thanks to Jonathan Lin and Spencer Hui some of the talks that were presented at the recent “bootcamp” are appearing on Air Mozilla and more will do so as we get them ready. They’re all in Air Mozilla’s engineering channel: https://air.mozilla.org/channels/engineering/
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Gregory Szorc: Submit Feedback about Mercurial |
Are you a Mozillian who uses Mercurial? Do you have a complaint, suggestion, observation, or any other type of feedback you'd like to give to the maintainers of Mercurial? Now's your chance.
There is a large gathering of Mercurial contributors next weekend in Munich. The topics list is already impressive. But Mozilla's delegation (Mike Hommey, Ben Kero, and myself) would love to advance Mozilla's concerns to the wider community.
To leave or vote for feedback, please visit https://hgfeedback.paas.allizom.org/e/august-2014-summit before August 29 so your voice may be heard.
I encourage you to leave feedback about any small, big or small, Mozilla-specific or not. Comparisons to Git, GitHub and other version control tools and services are also welcome.
If you have feedback that can't be captured in that moderator tool, please email me. gps@mozilla.com.
http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2014/08/19/submit-feedback-about-mercurial
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Michael Kaply: Webconverger |
One of projects I've been working on is Webconverger. Webconverger is an open source Linux-based kiosk that uses a customized version of Firefox as the user interface.
Webconverger is a great choice if you are setting up a kiosk or digital signage. It can be quickly and easily deployed on any type of machine. It works especially well on legacy hardware because of its low resource requirements. It can even be installed onto a USB stick and simply plugged in to an existing machine.
The configuration for the kiosk is downloaded from a server allowing you to customize your kiosk remotely and it will pick up your latest changes. It has a full featured API that allows you to do things like customize the browser chrome or whitelist certain sites. Plus it even stays updated automatically if you choose by downloading the latest version in the background.
If you're looking for a kiosk or digital sign solution, I would definitely recommend checking it out. Go to Webconverger.com for more information or email sales@webconverger.com.
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Will Kahn-Greene: Input status: August 19th, 2014 |
High-level summary:
It's been a slower two weeks than normal, but we still accomplished some interesting things:
Landed and deployed:
Landed, but not deployed:
Current head: dc6e990
Most of that is in some state of half-done, so we're going to spend the next couple of weeks focusing on finishing things.
For details, see our GetInolved page:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webdev/GetInvolved/input.mozilla.org
If you're interested in helping, let me know! We hang out on #input on irc.mozilla.org and there's the input-dev mailing list.
We're in the process of doing a Personally Identifiable Information audit on Input, the systems it's running on and the processes that touch and move data around. This covers things like "what data are we storing?", "where is the data stored?", "who/what has access to that data?", "does that data get copied/moved anywhere?", "who/what has access to where the data gets copied/moved to?", etc.
I think we're doing pretty well. However, during the course of the audit, we identified a few things we should be doing better. Some of them already have bugs, one of them is being worked on already and the otehrs need to be written up.
Some time this week, I'll turn that into a project and write up missing bugs.
That's about it!
http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/mozilla/input_status_20140819
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Adam Lofting: Trendlines and Stacking Logs |
I was stacking logs over the weekend, and wondering if I had enough for winter, when it struck me that this might be a useful analogy for a post I was planning to write. So bear with me, I hope this works…
To be clear, this is an analogy about predicting and planning, not a metaphor for contributors* 
Trendlines can be misleading.
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We’re halfway through the year, and the log store is half full. The important questions is, ‘will it be full when the snow starts falling?‘
Well, it depends.
It depends how quickly we add new logs to the store, and it depends how many get used.
So let’s push this analogy a bit.
Before this year, we had scattered stacks of logs here and there, in teams and projects. Some we knew about, some we didn’t. Some we thought were big stacks of logs but were actually stacked on top of something else.
Setting a target was like building a log store and deciding to fill it. We built ours to hold 10,000 logs. There was a bit of guesswork in that.
It took a while to gather up our existing logs (build our databases and counting tools). But the good news is, we had more logs than we thought.
Now we need to start finding and splitting more logs*.
Switching from analogy to reality for a minute…
This week we added trendlines to our dashboard. These are two linear regression lines. One based on all activity for the year to-date, and one based on the most recent 4 weeks. It gives a quick feedback mechanism on whether recent actions are helping us towards to our targets and whether we’re improving over the year to-date.
These are interesting, but can be misleading given our current working practices. The trendline implies some form of destiny. You do a load of work recruiting new contributors, see the trendline is on target, and relax. But relaxing isn’t an option because of the way we’re currently recruiting contributors.
Switching back to the analogy…
Things happen because we go out and make them happen.
Hard work is the reason we have 1,800 Maker Party events on the map this year and we’re only half-way through the campaign.
There’s a lot to be said for this way of making things happen, and I think there’s enough time left in the year to fill the log store this way.
But this is not mathematical or automated, which makes trendlines based on this activity a bit misleading.
In this mode of working, the answer to ‘Are we on track for 2014?‘ is: ‘the log store will be filled… if we fill it‘.
As we move forward, and think about scale… say a hundred-thousand logs (or even better, a Million Mozillians). We need to think about log splitting machines (or ‘systems’).
Systems can be tested, tuned, modified and multiplied. In a world of ‘systems’ we can apply trendlines to our graphs that are much better predictors of future growth.
We should be experimenting with systems now (and we are a little bit). But we don’t yet know what the contributor growth system looks like that works as well as the analogous log splitting machines of the forestry industry. These are things to be invented, tested and iterated on, but I wouldn’t bet on them as the solution for 2014 as this could take a while to solve.
I should also state explicitly that systems are not necessarily software (or hardware). Technology is a relatively small part of the systems of movement building. For an interesting but time consuming distraction, this talk on Social Machines from last week’s Wikimania conference is worth a ponder:
Even if you’re splitting logs by hand, you can schedule time to do it. Plan each month, check in on targets and spend more or less time as required to stay on track for the year.
This boils down to a planning exercise, with a little bit of guess work to get started.
In simple terms, you list all the things you plan to do this year that could recruit contributors, and how many contributors you think each will recruit. As you complete some of these activities you reflect on your predictions, and modify the plans and update estimates for the rest of the year.
Geoffrey has put together a training workshop for this, along with a spreadsheet structure to make this simple for teams to implement. It’s not scary, and it helps you get a grip on the future.
From there, we can start to feed our planned activity and forecast recruitment numbers into our dashboard as a trendline rather than relying solely on past activity.
The manual nature of the splitting-wood-like-activity means what we plan to do is a much more important predictor of the future than extrapolating what we have done in the past, and that changing the future is something you can go out and do.
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*Contributors are not logs. Do not swing axes at them, and do not under any circumstances put them in your fireplace or wood burning stove.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adamlofting/blog/~3/WW6Yd2aGGeY/
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