... is what we need now. So let me give a brief summary of what's happening with me work-wise.

Last year I fully divested my direct reports. No more management work to do, yay! I think they probably all ended up with a better manager than they had.

I've been involved in a lot of different projects and a lot of helping other people get their work done. In between I managed to carve out a few things of my own:

• I built reftests for async panning to try to stem the tide of regressions we were encountering there. Unfortunately that's not quite done because most of those tests aren't running on TBPL yet.
• I worked on CSS scroll snapping with an intern. Unfortunately the spec situation got bogged down; there's an impasse between us and Microsoft over the design of the CSS feature, and Google has decided not to do a CSS feature at all for now and try to do it with JS instead. I'm skeptical that will work will, and looking forward to their proposal, but it's taking a while.
• I landed an implementation of the CSS OM GeometryUtils interface, described in hacks.mozilla.org blog posts here and here. This fixes a functionality gap in the Web platform and was needed by our devtools team. Almost everything you would need to know about the CSS box geometry of your page is now easy to get.
• Lately I've been doing work on rr. People are trying to use it, and they've been uncovering bugs and inconveniences that Chris Jones and I have been fixing as fast as we can. Terrence Cole used it successfully to help fix a JS engine bug! I'm using it a lot myself for general-purpose debugging, and enjoying it. I want to spend a few more days getting some of the obvious rough edges we've found filed off and then make a new release.

Looking forward, I expect to be working on making our async scrolling fully generic (right now there are some edge cases where we can't do it), and working on some improvements to our MediaStreamGraph code for lower latency video and audio.

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/getting-back-to-work.html

... is perhaps futile. A lot of what I have to say has already been said. Yet, in case it makes a difference:

• Almost all Mozilla staff supported keeping Brendan Eich as CEO, including many prominent LGBT staff, and many made public statements to that effect. A small number of Tweeters calling for him to step down got all the media attention. The narrative that Mozilla staff as a group "turned against Brendan" is false. It should go without saying, but most Mozilla staff, especially me, are very upset that he's gone. I've known him, worked with him and fought alongside him (and sometimes against him :-) ) for fourteen years and having him ripped away like this is agonizing.
• The external pressure for Brendan to step down was the primary factor driving the entire situation. The same issue exploded in 2012 but there was less pressure and he got through it. No doubt Mozilla could have handled it better but the narrative that blames Mozilla for Brendan's departure misses the big picture. Boycotting Mozilla (or anyone for that matter) for cracking under intense pressure is like shooting a shell-shocked soldier.
• As a Christian, Mozilla is as friendly a workplace as any tech organization I've known --- which is to say, not super friendly, but unproblematic. Because of our geographic spread --- not just of headcount, but of actual power --- and our broad volunteer base I think we have more real diversity than many of our competitors. The narrative that Mozilla as a group has landed on one side of the culture war is false, or at least no more true than for other tech organizations. In fact one thing I've really enjoyed over the last couple of weeks is seeing a diverse set of Mozilla people pull together in adversity and form even closer bonds.

I'll also echo something else a lot of people are saying: we have to fix Internet discourse somehow. It's toxic. I wrote about this a while back, and this episode has made me experience the problem at a whole new level. I'll throw one idea out there: let's communicate using only recorded voice+video messages, no tweets, no text. If you want to listen to what I have to say, you have to watch me say it, and hopefully that will trigger some flickers of empathy. If you want me to listen to you, you have to show me your face. Want to be anonymous, do it the old-fashioned way and wear a mask. Yeah I know we'd have to figure out searchability, skimmability, editing, etc etc. Someone get to work on it.

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/fighting-media-narratives.html

For the good of the Internet, Someone needs to write an SSL library in Rust. Who would be up to such a task?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/CHOpC0RLS5Q/

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows XP. For web developers, this meant much rejoicing as we are finally rid of the yoke that is Internet Explorer 6 and can now use all the cool things HTML5, CSS3 and other tech has to offer. Right? Maybe.

When I started web development my first real day-to-day browser was IE4 and then Netscape Navigator Gold moving on to Netscape Communicator 4. I saw the changes of IE5, 5.5 and finally IE6. I was pretty blown away by the abilities IE6 had. You had filters, page transitions, rotation, blurring, animation using marquee and even full-screen applications using the .hta extension. In these applications you had full JScript access to the system, you can read and write files, traverse folders and much more. Small detail: so had attackers as the security model wasn’t the best, but hey, details…

None of this was a standard, and none of it got taken on by other browsers. That probably wasn’t possible as features of browsers were the main differentiator and companies protected their USPs.

IE was never and will never be just a browser: it is an integral part of the operating system itself. For better or worse, Microsoft chose to make the web consumption tool also the file browsing and document display tool. Many of the very – at that time – futuristic features of IE6 were in there as they were needed for Powerpoint-style presentations.

That’s why the end of XP is a light at the end of the tunnel for all those suffering the curse that is IE6. Many users just didn’t bother upgrading their browser as what the OS came with was good enough.

A cracker’s paradise

Of course we now have a security problem: not all XP installs will be replaced and the lack of security patches will result in many a hacked server. Which is scary seeing that many ATMs run on XP and lots of government computers (the UK government alone spent 5.5m GBP on getting extended support for XP as moving on seems to be hard to do with that many machines and that much red tape). XP and IE6 weren’t a nuisance for web developers – they are a real threat to internet security and people’s online identity for a long time now.

The fast innovator in a closed environment dilemma

You can say what you want about IE6 - and it has been a running joke for a long time – having it and having it as the nemesis of web standards based browsers (Opera, Netscape6 and subsequently Firefox) taught us a lot. Having a browser that dared to dabble with applications in HTML years before the W3C widget spec or Adobe Air was interesting. Having a browser in the operating system that naturally was the first thing people clicked to go online helped the internet’s popularity. It didn’t help the internet as a whole though.

The big issue of course was that people didn’t upgrade and the OS didn’t force-upgrade the browser. This meant that companies had a fixed goal to train people on: if it works in IE6, it is good enough for us. That’s why we have hundreds of large systems that only work in IE. Many of those are enterprise systems: CRM, Asset management, Ticketing, CMS, Document management – all these fun things with lots of menus and trees and forms with lots of rules.

Nobody likes using these things. People don’t care for them, they just see them as a necessary thing to do their job and something created by magical hairy pixies called the IT department. When you don’t like something but need to use it any change in it is scary, which is why a lot of attempts to replace these systems with more user-friendly and cross-platform systems is met with murmurings or open revolt. I call this the Stockholm syndrome of interfaces: I suffered it for years, so I must like it, right? All the other stuff means more work.

Back to the browser thing though: The issue wasn’t IE6, the issues were its ubiquity, an audience that wasn’t quite web savvy yet and didn’t crave choice but instead used what was there, and Microsoft’s tooling centering around creating amazing things for IE first and foremost and maybe a fallback for other browsers. The tools locked into IE6 were most of the time not created by web developers, but by developers of .NET, classic ASP, Sharepoint and many other – great – tools for the job at hand. Everything seemed easy, the tools seemed far superior to those that cover several targets and when you stayed inside the ecosystem, things were a breeze. You didn’t even have to innovate yourself – you just waited until the platform added the next amazing feature as part of the build process (this even happened at awesome events that only cost your employer and means you can get an awesome T-Shirt to boot). Sound eerily familiar to what’s happening now in closed platforms and abstracted developer tools, doesn’t it? Look – it’s the future, now – if you use platform x or browser y.

What should we take away from this?

Which brings me to the learning we should take away from these years of building things for a doomed environment: browsers change, operating systems change, form factors change. What we think is state-of-the-art and the most amazing thing right now will be laughable at best or destructive to innovation at worst just a year ahead.

And it is not Microsoft’s fault alone. Microsoft have seen the folly of their ways (OK, with some lawsuits as extra encouragement) and did a great job telling people to upgrade their systems and stop targeting OldIE. They understand that not every developer uses Windows and made testing with virtualisation much easier. They are also much more open in their messaging about what standards new IE supports. If they understand this, we should, too.

Here are the points we should keep in our heads:

• Bolting a browser into an operating system makes it harder to upgrade it – you see this now in Android stock browsers or iOS. Many of the amazing features of HTML5 need to be poly-filled, not for old IE, but for relatively new browsers that will not get upgraded because the OS can’t get updated (at times on hardware that was $500 just a few months ago)
• Building software for the current state of the browser is dangerous – especially when you can’t trust the current state to even be stable. Many solutions relying on the webkit prefix functionality already look as silly as a “if (document.layers || document.all) {}” does.
• Stop pretending you can tell end users what browser to use – this is sheer arrogance. Writing software means dealing with the unknown and preparing for it. Error handling is more important than the success case. Great UX is invisible – the thing just works. Bad error handling creates unhappy users and there is nothing more annoying than being on a pay-by-the-minute connection in a hotel to be told I need to use another browser or update mine. Stop pretending your work is so important people have to change for you if all you need to do is being more creative in your approach.

There are only a few of us unlucky enough to have to support IE6 in a pixel-perfect manner right now. The death of XP wasn’t the big liberation we really needed. And by all means it should not mean that you write web apps and web sites now that rely on bleeding edge technology in newer browsers without testing for it. This will never go away, and it shouldn’t. It makes us craftsmen, it keeps us on the ball. We need to think before we code, and – to me – that is never a bad idea.

The rules did not change:

• HTML is king – it will display when everything else fails, it will perform amazingly well.
• Progressive Enhancement means you write for now and for tomorrow – expect things to break, and plan for it, and you can never be surprised.
• Browser stats are fool’s gold – who cares how many people in Northern America who have a certain statistics package installed use browser x or browser y. What do your end-users use? Optimise for form factors and interaction, not for browsers. These will always change.
• Writing for one browser helps that one in the competition with others, but it hurts the web as a whole – we’re right now in a breakneck speed rat-race about browser innovation. This yields a lot of great data but doesn’t help developers if the innovations vanish a few versions later. We have jobs to do and projects to deliver. There is not much time to be guinea pigs
• Real innovation happens when we enhance the platform – we need WebComponents in the browsers, we need WebRTC in browsers, we need a more stable Offline and Local Storage solution. What we don’t need is more polyfills as these tend to become liabilities.

So, RIP XP, thanks for all the hardship and confusion that made us analyse what we do and learn from mistakes. Let’s crack on with it and not build the next XP/IE6 scenario because we like our new shiny toys.

http://christianheilmann.com/2014/04/09/on-windows-xp-and-ie6/

http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/pyvideo/status_20140409

How much does the world need Mozilla? A useful, if uncomfortable, thought experiment is to consider what the world would be like without Mozilla.

Consider the world of Web standards. Microsoft doesn't contribute much to developing new Web features, and neither does Apple these days. Mozilla and Google do. Google, per Blink's own policy (mirroring our own), relies on feedback and implementation by other browser vendors, i.e. usually us. If you take Mozilla out of the equation, it's going to be awfully hard to apply the "two independent implementations" test for new Web features. (Especially since Webkit and Blink still have so much shared heritage.) For example it's hard to see how important stuff like Web Audio, WebGL and WebRTC would have become true multi-vendor standards without us. Without us, most progress would depend on unilateral extensions by individual vendors. That has all the downsides of a single-implementation ecosystem --- a single implementation's bugs become the de-facto standard; the standards process, if there even is one, becomes irrelevant; and even more power accrues to the dominant vendor.

In the bigger picture, it would be dangerous to leave the Web --- and the entire application platform space --- in the hands of three very large US corporations who have few scruples and who each have substantial non-Web interests to protect, including proprietary desktop and mobile platforms. It has always been very important that there be a compelling vendor-neutral platform for people to deploy content and apps on, a platform without gatekeepers and without taxes. The Web is that platform ---- for now. Mozilla is dedicated to preserving and enhancing that, but the other vendors are not.

Mozilla has plenty of faults, and lots of challenges, but our mission is as important as ever ... probably more important, given how computing devices and the Internet penetrate more and more of our lives. More than ever, pursuing our mission is the greatest good I can do with the talents God has given me.

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/mozilla-matters.html

http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/dev/pagekite

[read entire article]

http://farmdev.com/thoughts/104/how-to-protect-against-heartbleed-and-other-vulnerabilities/

http://farmdev.com/thoughts/103/ramblings/

Open badges: they are so tantalizing to so many people, so full of possibility. They appear to offer so many solutions to so many different problems. They encourage us to look at old problems with new eyes. And precisely because of their dynamism, their precious novelty, we occasionally find ourselves overwhelmed with the hope that they’ll solve all of the problems. Everything.

This, my friends, this is precisely what’s at issue with introducing badges to our current social structure: recognizing that there are problems with existing acknowledgement and recognition systems. Problems that have not been adequately addressed. We need to crack that nut wide open as we begin to figure out how badges might change the game. We need to figure out what works and what’s worth saving in this new badge world. We need to look hard at the wicked problems that they might at least influence.

The issues most often raised about badges—accessibility, injustice, value, meaning, and rigor—are not necessarily about badges themselves but instead are rooted in wicked problems, the larger systemic social, political, and economic issues that surround learning and recognition. When viewed from this perspective, it’s obvious that badges are not a panacea. So, let’s be realistic in our discussions about the ability of badges to solve all issues of access, fairness, and equity: nothing so far has solved those issues and badges alone won’t do it, either. This is a known known; let’s not waste time arguing this point. Instead, let’s wrestle mightily with the all-too-familiar feeling of impotence when discussing any possible inroad to wicked problems. Because discuss them we must.

On the plus side of this discussion, here’s a tiny sample of what badges can do. They can provide markers of social and professional possibilities, they can acknowledge varying degrees of expertise in social skills, they can indicate job skills compatibility, they can evidence a variety of important learning experiences including capturing prior learning, they can demonstrate continued professional engagement, they can represent vastly different company and brand values, and perhaps most importantly, they can provide important and meaningful personal insight.

So for now, while we’re building this ecosystem together, let’s hold tight to that thing with feathers—our sense of hope, our sense of possibility—for when seeking change, particularly systemic change, odd though it may feel and sound to outsiders, optimism is a feature not a bug.

 

—

If you’re reading this and nodding your head, you might also appreciate this related post from Badge Alliance Executive Director, Erin Knight: More Beefs

Much more soon. carla [at] badgealliance [dot] org

 

Tagged: badges, identity, learning, mozilla, Open badges, openbadges, politics, tools, wicked problems

http://carlacasilli.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/open-badges-wicked-problems-and-that-thing-called-hope/

The number of changeset has decreased (23 for beta6 compared to 43 for beta5). This is a good sign as we approach from the release date of 29. In this release, some top crashes have been fixed and some last bugs for Australis has been address.

• 23 changesets
• 55 files changed
• 435 insertions
• 704 deletions

By extensions:

Extension	Occurrences
cpp	12
js	10
css	8
h	7
ini	6
html	4
mm	2
xul	1
xml	1
json	1
jsm	1
inc	1

By modules:

Module	Occurrences
browser	19
js	13
dom	6
widget	5
content	5
toolkit	2
gfx	2
modules	1
layout	1

List of changesets:

Tim Nguyen	Bug 989449 - fix menu-button dropmarker corners to have border-radii on Windows 7, Vista and XP. r=mikedeboer, a=sylvestre. - bc6c34299b03
Tim Nguyen	Bug 980339 - Remove border-radius from add-on manager on Windows 8. r=mikedeboer, sr=Unfocused, a=sylvestre. - cb7f81834560
Mike de Boer	Bug 991072: fix zoom percentage label to be centered in any toolbar. r=mconley, a=sylvestre. - 3e69377c027a
Gijs Kruitbosch	Bug 946595 - High contrast themes on Windows 8 shouldn't be considered the default theme in CSS, r=jimm, a=sylvestre. - 250d63775815
Boris Zbarsky	Bug 976920 - Mostly back out Bug 932322 for now; only define the unforgeable properties on the window object itself. r=jst, a=sledru - aecbb562466a
Robert Strong	Bug 982448 - Some fxmetro pref's still being left behind with values without --enable-metro in the mozconfig. r=bbondy, a=sledru - 6f0ad6b259ca
Jan de Mooij	Bug 983709 - Simple branch patch for uplift. r=hv1989, a=sledru - 81285325c7db
Jon Coppeard	Bug 986864. r=sfink, a=sledru - e6b88dfe88cd
Phil Ringnalda	Bug 986760 (with a dash of 989101 added in) - disable browser_UITour3.js on Linux for excessive failures and lack of action taken toward fixing them. a=test-only - 6c1da25749a0
Matthew Noorenberghe	Bug 990384 - Define tabToolbarNavbarOverlap to reduce magic numbers in CSS for the overlap between the tabs and nav-bar. r=mconley a=sylvestre - a2fccb7d55f7
Matthew Noorenberghe	Bug 878436 - Update Lion Fullscreen window styling offsets to avoid themes shifting position. r=timdream a=sylvestre - 4d27870d3fdc
Matthew Noorenberghe	Bug 990387 - Toolbar buttons on the TabsToolbar appear below the nav-bar border with a theme. r=dao a=sylvestre - 81075b35ee13
Matthew Noorenberghe	Bug 973855 - [Australis] Include browser-bottombox in the customization mode padding. r=jaws a=sylvestre - 75c7e2c98e0c
Jan Beich	Bug 948946 - Use private-browsing indicator with GTK theme on non-Linux as well. r=MattN a=sylvestre - f7faeaf19dfa
John Daggett	Bug 975460 - disable async font loader on OSX 10.6 (beta/aurora). r=smichaud,mkato a=sylvestre - 79c61c6f632d
Joel Maher	Bug 987892 - Clear up oranges for deBug mochitest-browser-chrome jobs on Mozilla-Beta. r=armenzg a=test-only - 13bf6fe8df1f
Benjamin Bouvier	Bug 969203 - Take out non strictly commutative Float32 functions. r=sstangl, a=sledru - 7e9b33204db9
Bobby Holley	Bug 980537 - Only store FakeBackstagePass instances in mThisObjects. r=khuey, a=sledru - 9933fa36efa5
Mike Kaply	Backing out Bug 889085 (dddfd63f1414, f8c14bd80676) due to regression Bug 987783. r=roc, a=sledru - 51e5b0ec21b3
Garrett Robinson	Bug 971341 - Fix infinite tab loading due to missing characters in CSP's path regexes. r=sstamm, a=lsblakk - fe5d67aa5366
Shane Caraveo	Bug 992398 - Fix domain for cdn deployment of directory site. r=gavin, a=sledru - ea5b3027bb42
Karl Tomlinson	Bug 990794 - Crash on ovrfl in SharedBuffer::Create(). r=roc, a=sledru - 51a84afe085d
Karl Tomlinson	Bug 990794 - Crash on ovrfl in AllocateAudioBlock. r=roc, a=sledru - 004a7c15d761

r= means reviewed by
a= means uplift approved by

Previous changelogs:

• Firefox 29 beta 4 to beta 5
• Firefox 29 beta 3 to beta 4
• Firefox 29 beta 2 to beta 3

http://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/2014/04/08/changes-firefox-29-beta5-to-beta6

The last 2 weeks I have gone head first into a world of resolving some issues with our mochitest browser-chrome tests with RyanVM, Armen, and the help of Gavin and many developers who are fixing problems left and right.

There are 3 projects I have been focusing on:

1) Moving our Linux debug browser chrome tests off our old fedora slaves in a datacenter and running them on ec2 slave instances, in bug 987892.

These are live and green on all Firefox 29, 30, and 31 trees!  More work is needed for Firefox-28 and ESR-24 which should be wrapped up this week.  Next week we can stop running all linux unittests on fedora slaves.

2) Splitting all the developer tools tests out of the browser-chrome suite into their own suite in bug 984930.

browser-chrome tests have been a thorn in the side of the sheriff team for many months.  More and more the rapidly growing features and tests of developer tools have been causing the entire browser-chrome suite to fail, in cases of debug to run for hours.  Splitting this out gives us a small shield of isolation.  In fact, we have this running well on Cedar, we are pushing hard to have this rolled out to our production and development branches by the end of this week!

3) Splitting the remaining browser chrome tests into 3 chunks, in bug 819963.

Just like the developer tools, we have been running browser-chrome in 3 chunks on Cedar.  With just 7 tests disabled, we are very green and consistently green. 

 

 

While there are a lot of other changes going on under the hood, what will be seen by next week on your favorite branch of Firefox will be:

• ‘dt’ jobs for opt, and ‘dt1', ‘dt2', ‘dt3' jobs for debug
• ‘bc’ job will turn into ‘bc1', ‘bc2', ‘bc3'
• much faster turnaround times on bc tests (62 minutes is the slowest right now, the rest are averaging ~20 minutes/job)
• less random orange cluttering up results

 

http://elvis314.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/polishing-browser-chrome-coming-to-a-branch-near-you-soon/

This weekend, I’ll be leading a Webmaker Training for the National Citizens Service (NCS). NCS is an organization in the UK that provides learning opportunities for young people living in England and Northern Ireland – young people who are encouraged to lead positive change within their communities. For the first time ever, NCS has invited graduates from their programs to become Digital Champions, a group of people who will lead social action projects and spread web literacy skills in their local communities. This is the Teaching Kit we’ll be using to guide us during the event. Let me tell you why I’m SO EXCITED to be doing this:

This is the first official “Webmaker Training”

I run trainings all the time, but they’re always one-offs, offshoots, and truncated versions of my dream learning scenario. In 2013 we ran two prototypes – a live training for Mozilla Reps called Training Days and an online training called Teach the Web, both were hugely successful. My dream learning scenario combines these two initiatives. I think a blended-learning program that is open, inclusive, and pedagogically sound – something that helps people teach the culture, mechanics, and citizenship of the Web – is what a Mozilla professional development program should be. Why? Because open.

The NCS has been great to work with

I expect the young people who participate in the NCS Community are amazing as well. The partnership started when one of our Sr Directors, the fantastic Paula Le Dieu, opened a conversation with some folks at the NCS to explain that Mozilla isn’t just a technology company, and the Web is not just a delivery mechanism for content. She talked to them about what it truly means to be part of the Open Community and our values resonated. We were asked if we could teach some of the values and skills around openness and web literacy while overlapping with NCS values around social action, personal responsibility and leadership. Spoiler Alert: Yeah, we totally can and will! I’m truly excited to share what I love about the open source community with the NCS Digital Champions, while helping them level up their social and technical skills. I’m excited to hear their ideas, push them to think bigger, and introduce them to the support networks on the web. I’m excited to learn from them. As an educator, I view the goals of this partnership (and future partnerships centered on Training) as being less about specific skills and more about big brained theories of education that say things like “You are educated when you can confidently and empathetically participate in society and the world.”

The Digital Champions will help us grow

Last year, the Training Days graduates and the Teach the Web participants ran hundreds and hundreds of events, spreading Webmaker and digital skills. Our community's honesty, participation and drive has made Webmaker what it is today. The 42 NCS Digital Champions are committing to running their own Maker Parties later this year. They’re also committing to spreading web literacy within their local communities and among their peers in the NCS community. We’ll be inviting them to become mentors within our online training initiatives. In May, we’ll be inviting any and every one to participate in an online learning experience that will help you teach the web and become part of the open community. I’m hoping that this weekend seeds enough interest for the NCS Digital Champions to want to play around with the new and improved Training content and discussion platform*.

It's going to be fun!

People who know me, know that I don't really get invested in things that don't entertain me. One of the reasons I love teaching is because I think it’s fun. It's fun to watch people learn, see what people make, share ideas and talk about stuff. I even think it’s fun to watch myself fail at relating to people. It’s fun to learn about myself, other people, the world, technology…Our agenda has random, fun activities (ahem) that are designed to get people moving, thinking and growing. I’m enthusiastic about what I do, and enthusiasm is contagious. So, yeah, it’s going to be fun for everyone involved. All of this means more people will become web literate, more people will spread openness, more people will champion the values we have. *If YOU’RE interested in helping made the online components of Webmaker Training better, help us test them!

http://www.zythepsary.com/techie/training-with-friends/

Ya se encuentra con nosotros la versi'on 1.15 del Add-on SDK. Descargar Add-on SDK 1.16.

Seg'un el blog de los Add-ons de Mozilla, esta liberaci'on menor tiene como objetivo Este lanzamiento tiene como objetivo proveer compatibilidad con Firefox 29 y el uso de las nuevas APIs que provee Australis.

Con Australis el uso de botones se ampliar'a y se le podr'an a~nadir paneles, frames, barras de herramientas. Algunas de estas caracter'isticas no est'an presentes en Firefox 29 pero si en la versi'on 30.

Tambi'en se han solucionado varios como:

• Bug 958609 – “Add-on SDK 1.15 es incompatible con Python 2.7.6''
• Bug 944951 – “bootstrap.js debe remover la adici'on del recurso: URIs al cargar”

Para conocer otros detalles, pueden leer las notas de liberaci'on.

Antes de descargar el Add-on SDK 1.16 recuerda que puedes contribuir a la mejora de este reportando bugs, mirando el c'odigo para que contribuyas dando tus soluciones o simplemente dejar tu impresi'on sobre esta nueva versi'on.

http://firefoxmania.uci.cu/disponible-el-add-on-sdk-1-16/

A good day to get awesome news from Mozilla, like another day I am checking my email every morning. The awesome news is my OpenX Quiz app is featured on Firefox Marketplace, this application...

http://oonlab.com/openx-quiz-is-featured-on-firefox-marketplace-awesome.onto

This weekend, North America Mozilla Reps gathered in the not-so-sunny Portland, Oregon. We worked from the Portland Office during the weekend, where we collaborated on plans for North America for the next six month period. We also tackled a number of topics from websites and refined our priority cities which will help us be more successful in moving forward in our mission to grow contributors in North America.

We were very fortunate to have some new people participate this time round including Lukas Blakk, Janet Swisher, Larissa Shapiro, Joanna Mazgaj, Robby Sayles, Prashish Rajbhandari, Tanner Filip, Dan Gherman and Christie Koehler. It was excellent to have a larger group because this brought ideas from people who see things through different lenses.

All in all, I feel we tackled a lot more work this time than our previous meetup last year in San Francisco and we decided to have our next meetup in Portland again. One of my favorite activities during the meetup was a diversity activity that Lukas led us in that many of us hope to do with our own communities.

We closed off the meetup with a trip to the Ground Kontrol Arcade and Bar where there were many games of Pac Man and Dance Dance Revolution.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BenjaminKerensaDotComMozilla/~3/VgfzycjaCeE/north-america-reps-meetup

The curse

When Brendan Eich stepped in as a CEO, Mozilla and him were immediately faced a storm demanding his resignation because of his political opinions. To the best of my knowledge, none of those responsible for the storm were employees of the Mozilla Corporation and only 4 or 5 of them were members of the Mozilla Community (they were part of the Mozilla Foundation, which is a different organization).

When Brendan Eich resigned from his position as an employee of Mozilla, Mozilla was immediately faced by a storm assuming that Brendan Eich had been fired, either because of his opinions or as a surrender to the first storm.

Both storms are still raging, fueled by angry (and dismayed and saddened) crowds and incompetent news reporting.

We will miss Brendan. We have suffered and we will continue suffering from these storms. But we can also salvage from them.

The blessing

Think about it. We are being criticized by angry crowds. But the individuals who form these crowds are not our enemies. Many of them care deeply about Freedom of Speech and are shocked because they believe that we are extinguishing this freedom. Others care primarily about equality, an equality that can seldom be achieved wherever there is no Freedom of Speech.

Freedom of Speech. This is one of the core values of Mozilla, one of the values for which we have been fighting all these years.

We are being criticized by some of the people who need us most. They are our users, or our potential users, and they are getting in touch with us. Through Facebook, through Twitter, through the contribute form, through the governance mailing-list, through our blogs, or in real life discussions.

Some will say that we should ignore them. Some will be tempted to answer anger with anger and criticism with superiority.

Do neither. They are our users. They deserve to be heard.

We should listen to them. We should answer their concerns, not with FAQs or with press releases, but with individual answers, because these concerns are valid. We should explain what really happened. We should show them how Mozilla is largely about defending Freedom of Speech through the Open Web.

So please join the effort to answer the angry crowds. If you can, please reach out to media and the public and get the story out there. If only one person out of a hundred angry users receives the message and decides to join the community and the fight for the open web, we will have salvaged a victory out of the storm.

http://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/a-curse-and-a-blessing/

Firefox Nightly sudah pada tahukan? ok gak usah basah-basahan lagi karena kita semua sudah tahu kalau Nightly itu versi untuk para Q&A dan Developer. Well, postingan ini sederhana karena lagi sendiri tidak ada yang...

http://oonlab.com/pasang-firefox-nightly-di-igos-nusantara-fedora.onto

http://featherweightmusings.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-very-rough-few-thoughts-on.html

First, let’s start with this: if you want to know what’s really been happening at Mozilla, you should read this blog post, written by a fellow Mozilla Corporation employee. It’s got details from staff meetings, internal discussions, public meetings, and more, and it’s the most accurate representation of the truth of the past two weeks you’ll find anywhere.

Next, let’s recall my previous post, and I will re-iterate that I strongly favor the nationwide legalization of gay marriage, and that I disagree with Brendan on this issue (while also strongly defending his right to hold his opinion as long as he keeps it out of Mozilla business, which he always did).

Now, let’s get into what I personally want to say about the last few days.

In March of 2006, I was the father of a baby girl less than a year old, and had just been let go by my employer—a game development company in Southern California, for whom I was doing Mac programming. Despite a previous arrangement, they decided they wanted me to relocate, which I wasn’t interested in doing. So we parted ways. My old friend David Miller had been working at Mozilla on the Bugzilla project (and doing IT work) for a while, and he suggested I apply for a job as a Mac programmer at Mozilla Corporation.

When Mozilla got wind that I had spent years as a technical writer, I found myself instead interviewing for a job on the developer relations team as a writer for the Mozilla Developer Center site. On April 3, 2006, I started working for Mike Shaver, alongside Deb Richardson, as a technical writer.

I joined Mozilla as someone that didn’t use Firefox. Heck, I didn’t even like Firefox. I also didn’t give a rat’s ass about open source software; indeed, I generally looked down on it across the board as inherently inferior.

I would never have dreamed that someday I would consider myself part of a “community” of Mozilla users. I was not someone that would be a Mozillian. I walked the walk and acted the part, generally, but if you read through my early blog posts, you’ll find clues that I was just in it for the paycheck.

Fast forward to March of 2014. I’m days shy of my eighth anniversary as a Mozilla employee, and I find myself a changed person. I’m an ardent fan of Mozilla and its mission. It’s important to me. It means something to me. It’s part of who I am. I feel every sting when something goes wrong, and exalt in every win Firefox and Mozilla achieves.

I’m not blindly faithful, no. I have my doubts now and again, about specific initiatives or projects, and goodness knows I’m not afraid to say so. I have a well-earned reputation as a bit of a complainer. When I’m troubled, I tend to say so (usually at length). But Mozilla’s mission is my mission: to bring the open Web to everyone, to do it well, and to be sure that everyone knows how to build upon its potential.

I’ll admit: when Brendan was selected as CEO, I was surprised. I had been quite certain that Jay Sullivan would become our permanent CEO, after a long and successful “interim CEO” run. When Brendan was announced, I was somewhat puzzled. Not because of his political beliefs, but because Jay was already in place, doing a good job, and had long experience in more “business management” roles, rather than just “project management” roles.

But I quickly got behind Brendan. As a technical wizard and cofounder of Mozilla (having saved the Mozilla project form the dying embers of what was left of Netscape within the AOL behemoth), Brendan knew and loved the project more than anyone else. Who better than to lead us into the technical challenges that lie ahead? With Li Gong as our new COO to help him, we were in great hands.

Then everything went straight to hell in the media. Taking bits of reality (yes, Brendan donated in favor of Prop. 8, and yes, he didn’t apologize for doing so, and yes, a scant handful of employees tweeted that they wanted him to resign), the press and social media turned reality into some kind of hyper-reality, in which a few basic facts were tossed into a blender with a healthy dose of bullshit and a little wishful thinking on their part.

Soon, we were in the midst of a crisis, with the voices of reason so overwhelmed by outright nonsense that they couldn’t be heard. Several of us tried. We failed. Brendan, overwhelmed by the waves of negative press and outright hate mail he was getting, gave up and resigned. The mob won, and Mozilla lost its founding father.

The press (including the Wall Street Journal) is reporting that Brendan was pushed out by the board. This is not true. Mozilla’s board of directors begged and pleaded for him to stay with us in some capacity. He declined.

Let’s be clear: Brendan Eich left Mozilla because a virtual mob got whipped up into a frenzy and harassed him and Mozilla until he felt the best way to serve Mozilla was to leave. Brendan quit his job because he felt that leaving the organization he loved was better than watching it be dragged down into a cesspool of bullshit.

This situation arose because one man—a key member of Mozilla’s technology team and its community as a whole—exercised his legal civil right to donate money to an unpopular cause (and one that is now, thankfully, a lost cause). That’s the real tragedy here.

But we’ll figure out how to move on. We will mourn for a time. We will do some soul-searching. And then we will get our hands firmly planted back onto the tiller, tack into the wind, and continue our journey. Because we are Mozilla.

Updated at 3:53 PM EDT on April 6, 2014: I got a couple of corrections recommended to me by email, so I applied them above. My apologies for overstating a couple of points in my 3 AM drama mode.

http://www.bitstampede.com/2014/04/06/standing-strong-and-staying-mozillian/