…for their help in significantly mitigating the problems we were having with running out of memory when linking Firefox with Profile-Guided Optimization using Microsoft Visual C++. (If we’d have had to turn off PGO due to this problem, that would have made Firefox’s performance on Windows significantly worse.) Ted has the write-up.
Currently, Firefox Nightly makes all plugins click-to-play. Except that it doesn’t – the latest version of Flash is exempt and I, like a good net citizen, have the latest version. I disabled Flashblock in order to test CTP… is there any way of getting CTP on ALL, as in all, plugins except by re-enabling Flashblock? Do Flashblock and CTP interact well?
It seems there is no money in the email client space.
Some of the finest minds at Mozilla were unable to make Thunderbird financially self-supporting, having tried several methods, and now an Indigogo campaign to raise $100K for the Geary email client, with support from Bytemark and CiviCRM and with publicity on TechCrunch, has not met its target (they reached just over half the total). I have no inside insight into what’s going on at Postbox, but their last major release was in November 2011, most changes since then have been bug fixes, and most of their recent blog posts have been about price reductions or ways to get it cheaper.
Is it simply that webmail is good enough for most people?
One new feature of the MPL 2.0 is that it allows you (without dual-licensing) to incorporate MPL 2.0 files into a larger project licensed under the GNU GPL or LGPL.
We’ve written a document to help developers who want to incorporate MPL 2.0 code into (L)GPL-licensed projects. It explains what to do with the boilerplate, and how best to respect the intention of upstream developers.
Niche, but useful if you’re in that niche :-)
[Update: changed links so each shows events in the office's local timezone, rather than GMT.]
Mozilla’s wonderful Workplace Resources team are maintaining public calendars for the events going on at each Mozilla Space. If you live near one of these, you might want to keep an eye on it. Each has a .ics feed linked from the bottom corner. (Note that not all these calendars may be in use yet; they are proactively created for each space as it comes into existence.)
I want to build a web-based tool to help people in Mozilla answer the question “Who Owns What?” Questions like: who’s in charge of Layout? Who runs Persona? Who do I talk to about the Thunderbird feed reader?
The data source would be the Module Owners list, which was carefully designed to be machine-readable in its source format. Compared to most databases, it’s a very small amount of data indeed.
The UI would, I hope, be a single search box, which would return one or more complete entries from the list which had a textual match, with the match highlighted.
This seems to me like it’s a very standard database-backed website, of the type that people build every day. I’m sure there are tools and frameworks out there which will do much of the heavy lifting for me, including a decent search system with some sort of intelligence to it.
Can the Mozilla community tell me what I should be using? An install of this software will need to be supported by Mozilla IT. Is Bedrock the right tool for the job?
User interface input also welcomed.
[This post was pre-recorded.]
Today, March 31st, is the logical anniversary of three significant beginnings, all of which are wonderful.
Firstly, it’s the logical anniversary of the start of Mozilla. There are several significant dates here – the organization itself was created on February 23rd – but historically we have always remembered the day at the end of Code Rush, the day when the source code became available to the public – March 31st 1998, 15 years ago today. Because that’s the primary way we do what we do – we make great open source software and give it to people. And while the software that was released that day may not have been great in many ways (we threw a lot of it out some time later), it had the seeds of greatness within it. We’ve come a long way from there to Firefox OS, and we should pause and recognise our achievement.
Secondly, it’s the logical anniversary of my engagement to Ruth – a seed which has flowered into a happy marriage and two lovely sons. We got engaged on Easter Sunday 2010 (which, that year, was 4th April) and so we like to celebrate at Easter each year.
And no post about today would be complete without recognising that Easter Day is, of course, the logical anniversary of the day Jesus rose from the dead. The Easter story is how he does what he does – he provides salvation, hope and joy for all who come to him, by dying in their place and rising from the dead, conquering death. In doing so he also planted a seed, which has now grown into a worldwide church, hundreds of millions strong.
So all in all, a great day, and hopefully one which will be marked by peace and harmony. Happy Easter!
Mozilla recently joined OASIS, in order to take part in some work on the PKCS#11 cryptography standard which is being hosted there. So if any Mozillian has an interest in anything else OASIS are doing, we now have the capability to get you involved.
So if we roll with it, and take our time, then we’ll live forever. After all, it’s our wonderwall.
On February 27th, I blogged my intention to produce a 5-minute Popcorn short on communications in Mozilla. I got most of it done before other exciting events intervened (3 days early :-) so there has been a small delay but now I have a version 0.1 to share with you. Please comment with improvements.
It has a number of known issues:
Feel free to remix it and fix any or all of these things; that’s the beauty of Popcorn Maker!
While making it, I found several bugs/made several suggestions for enhancement in Popcorn, which were gratefully accepted by the developers.
Yay for open source :-)
I am proud to announce the release of version 1.3 of the Bugzilla REST API. This maintenance release has a bug fix or two, and fully supports the version of Bugzilla 4.2 which has just been deployed on bugzilla.mozilla.org. For smooth interaction with BMO, you should be using this version.
The installation of BzAPI 1.1 on api-dev.bugzilla.mozilla.org will go away in 4 weeks, on 4th April. There is a limit to the number of old versions we can support on the server, particularly as the older ones can put a larger load on Bugzilla and may not work correctly. Please use either the /1.3 or the /latest endpoints. Now that BzAPI has been stable for some time, tools which earlier rejected using the /latest endpoint may want to reconsider.
Kudos to k0s and sinemetu1, the current maintainers of mozregression, an idiot-proof script for helping you find the regression range for a bug. Give it two dates, and it automatically downloads and runs a nightly and, when you exit, asks you whether the bug is present or not and downloads another build accordingly, until you have a 24 hour window identified. And then it says “do you want to compile some code to narrow it down even more?”. Awesome.
The WaSP has closed its doors, with a post titled “Our Work Here Is Done“:
Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.
If by the web you mean “the desktop web”, then things are undeniably much better than they used to be. But what about the mobile web? Opera just shifted to WebKit precisely because the vision of Tim and the Web Standards Project is not a reality. Did they notice that happening?
They later go on to almost say the opposite:
The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems.
When was it not, in the end, up to developers? It’s always been up to the developers, and it was the case that the WaSP helped them. Seemingly no more.
I also saw this news on the same day that Lawrence Mandel posted a call for help with the numerous problems we are having due to people coding mobile websites which assume “Android”. That needs to change, and you can help. Is Mozilla now the flag bearer for web standards? Former WaSPers, join us and help out :-)
This, I would suggest, is a sign of success. Firstly, it’s more people (to add to the 22 major companies on stage at MWC) who think our OS is good enough to compete and ship. Secondly, they are doing it without abusing our trademarks. Third, this is what open source is all about. We hope they’ll come and join our community and help make the code better. (And we need to work to make sure that’s easy for them to do.)
I note their screenshots are pretty hacked together, though; has no-one told them Boot2Gecko doesn’t use a hardware Back button or Search button? :-)
(Thanks to nukeador for the link.)