thoughts on mozilla

Over the weekend, Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.6 as a “chemspill” release to increase the amount of time Firefox waits before terminating an unresponsive plug-in. The release happened in spite of close to a million beta testers of Firefox 3.6.4, which theoretically would have caught such issues.

After Firefox 3.6.4 shipped, several users noted problems when playing Farmville. Specifically, Adobe Flash would “crash” because of a 10 second timeout. Ultimately, Mozilla fixed this issue by simply updating the timeout to 45 seconds, a simple change, but one that required shipping a release ASAP.

Meanwhile, Firefox 3.6.7 (formerly 3.6.6 before this chemspill release) code froze last Friday night. The release is intended to fix security issues prior to BlackHat and Defcon this year as well as fix issues in the new Crash Protection feature. One wonders how Mozilla was able to even notice many issues in Crash Protection a mere three days before code freeze, outside of this major Farmville problem.

Mozilla continues to plow forward with its plan to add many features from Firebug to Firefox. Yesterday, Rob Campell – an engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced the availability of “Inspector Milestone 0.5 Preview,” a series of experimental builds that incorporate his work on a Style panel and DOM panel, which will soon be built-in to Firefox 4.

Previously, David Dahl – an engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced his piece of the “Inspector” puzzle: a built-in web console.

As more of these features become part of Firefox, Firebug will become a tool used for hardcore web developers instead of a go-to for every web developer.

Download the preview builds here.

Alex Faaborg – a user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – blogged last night about the move from “tabs on bottom” to “tabs on top” in Firefox 4. In the video Faaborg made, he outlines a number of reasons why this change makes sense and one drawback from it.

Specifically:

1. The conceptual model makes more sense with tabs on top.
2. “App” tabs, coming in Firefox 4, are more logical when a user doesn’t see the browser UI.
3. More and more of Firefox’s UI will be moving to tabs instead of windows. Examples include Preferences, the Add-ons manager, and Downloads.
4. Notifications can be tab-modal and not app-modal, something that’s challenging with tabs on bottom when such notifications will block other tabs.

The one drawback Faaborg mentions is that the distance a user has to move their mouse increases considerably. Mozilla intends to study this in their betas using TestPilot, which will soon be built-in.

To watch Faaborg’s entire video, head over to YouTube.

Proposed a while ago and first mentioned in the Firefox 4 slides, TabCandy is a new user interface experiment that attempts to organize your workflow. As its homepage states, “[t]hink Exposé meets Spaces done right.”

The progress on TabCandy is still in its infancy and the project will likely get renamed before shipping in a final version of Firefox, but the basics are there. The Firefox project page for TabCandy has quite a few mockups as well as a prototype extension available for download.

TabCandy is being designed and championed by Aza Raskin, a user interface designer for the Mozilla Corporation.

For quite a bit of information on TabCandy work, be sure to check out its Etherpad.

Frédéric Wenzel – a web developer with the Mozilla Corporation – published a post about the work behind the Firefox Input project, which recently shipped its 1.0 release and is now available publicly.

The Firefox Input project, as we’ve covered before, will give users an easier way to submit feedback (either good or bad) and give everyone else an easier way to see what people think. Submissions are only available to users of the yet-unshipped Firefox 4 beta. When it ships, users will be directed to the site to give feedback instead of to Hendrix.

Work is already underway on the next version of Firefox Input and the design and requirements are expected to be set by July 13.

As Mozilla buckles down on shipping its first beta of Firefox 4, the Firefox team has posted the first “Theme Roadmap,” a look at what Firefox has accomplished in a specific area and where it should go.

The Privacy & User Control roadmap gives a quick overview of Mozilla’s work on Firefox 1, 2, and 3.5 as well as where it intends to go for Firefox 4. To wit:

Local Disk Privacy

• extend privacy control to plugins
• locally encrypt passwords and form data by default
• token/client certificate support for authentication / sync

Online Privacy

• analyse use cases for third party cookies, choose better defaults
• auto-expiring cookies
• put behavioural tracking in user’s control (opt-in)
• reduce browser signature in UA header and other inspectible APIs
• continue to invest in web infrastructure that solves desired use cases while putting control in user’s hands

User Interface changes to enhance user control

• consolidate site permissions into single manager
• provide actionable controls per-site

Some of the future roadmaps that have yet to be published include Search, Social, Web Apps, and Performance.

As for specific product roadmaps, Mozilla has maintained a Firefox 4 beta page for some time. It includes quite a bit of information on what the first Firefox 4 beta will look like, including the inclusion of Test Pilot as an option when installing. Of course, the page discussing this is on Mozilla’s private intranet and no bug has been filed to track the work, so we’re left to guessing what this means.

(Psst. Speaking of Firefox 4, if you want a sneak peak of the pages that will go live on mozilla.com with the beta, they’re right here.)

(We’re recovering from a slight loss of internet, so pardon the excess of posts.)

Two days ago, Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6.4 to users around the world.

Firefox 3.6.4 – which shipped 83 days after Firefox 3.6.3 – is a release that has been plagued with delays due to its inclusion of a brand new feature, Crash Protection.

Crash Protection is Mozilla’s first foray into making Firefox multi-process. Firefox 4 will likely include full multi-process for tabs, plug-ins, and extensions. In this first implementation, Firefox is protected from some plug-in crashes on two of its three supported platforms. According to the FAQ:

Crash protection is the name of the Firefox capability based on Gecko’s out of process plugins technology. It first shipped in Firefox 3.6.4 for Windows and Linux only, running Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime and Microsoft Silverlight in a separate process called plugin-container.

During this release, a lot was learned about shipping new features in what have traditionally been stability and security updates. Christian Legnitto, a project manager with the Mozilla Corporation, intends to give a talk at the Mozilla Summit 2010 discussing what was learned.

The next release of Firefox will be version 3.6.6, skipping 3.6.5 so that the mobile version of Firefox can use it. The release will be set to fix problems with the new Crash Protection as well as fix security issues before the popular BlackHat and Defcon conferences at the end of the July.

Marco Bonardo – a engineer who works for the Mozilla Corporation – is working on a new project that will replace the online, Google-hosted Firefox start page with an offline version. The final changes should take place in Firefox 4 and will likely include more than a simple search box.

Bonardo’s work also includes the creation of a “Home” tab, which will link to this page.

Firefox 3.6.4, which saw a seventh release candidate this week, had potential to ship today, but due to some necessary crash analysis, the release may get pushed into next week.

As reported at the product planning meeting yesterday, an investigation into crash statistic irregularities is causing Mozilla to re-evaluate if they should ship Firefox 3.6.4. Analysis of the data is taking place now and anyone can follow along live using Mozilla’s Etherpad installation.

Several other releases have been delayed due to Firefox 3.6.4 including Firefox 3.5.10, Thunderbird 3.0.5, and Thunderbird 3.1, though the Thunderbird team may choose to ship without a final Firefox 3.6.4 release.

Update: Firefox 3.6.4 has indeed been delayed until next week. Thunderbird 3.0.5, however, will ship today or tomorrow.

In our weekly roundup post, we briefly mentioned the following:

The Firefox “Input” project, slowly moved forward. Its goal is to organize all of the feedback mechanisms, into one location.

Of course, this project had yet to be officially announced, thought much of its work has been happening in public wikis and meetings.

In a post to the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, Aakash Desai – a QA engineer at the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) – officially announced the “Input” project and its future. The plan was met with some resistance, notably from the SeaMonkey community which had yet to be informed that a feature they were using (“Report a Broken Website”) was being removed. Robert Kaiser – Project Manager for the SeaMonkey Project – finally conceded that he didn’t care and a little warning was better than none at all.

Yes, let’s leave it at that, the warning still came in before it actually happened, so I guess we’ll should [sic] fine in the end anyhow.

Outside of the smallest amount of conflict, the thread moved a bit off-topic as discussion of changes to the user-agent came into play. Such changes have been heatedly discussed in the past for various reasons and no changes have been made.

However, work is now underway to improve “fingerprinting” of individual users using a variety of methods. A few weeks ago, Dan Witte – a MoCo platform engineer – wrote a fairly detailed wiki page on fingerprinting and a few changes that could be made to improve it. Notably:

Remedies: remove the last point digit in the Firefox and Gecko versions, and the Gecko build date; for Linux, remove distribution and version; possibly remove CPU. Windows is actually the least unique since the OS version string only identifies the major version (e.g. XP), and by far the majority of users are on it.

Remove language and “Firefox” as well?

Such changes would be fairly significant and likely won’t go uncontested. But in the name of privacy, this is one fight worth having.