thoughts on mozilla

FlightDeck, Mozilla Labs’ project to allow for easier creation of jetpacks, is close to launching its second alpha. Did you miss the first alpha? So did we.

The wiki page for the project shows that all deliverables are “done” and messaging is being worked on now, including a release announcement. When it’s live, FlightDeck will be available at builder.mozillalabs.com, a website that is now protected.

Myk Melez – a Labs engineer with the Mozilla Corporation – announced the availability of the Jetpack SDK 0.5. This latest versino adds quite a few new APIs to Jetpack, giving developers even more control over their jetpacks.

From the blog post:

• Tabs API – Provides easy access to tabs and tab-related events.
• Request API – Lets you easily make network requests.
• Load/unload reasons – Add-ons can now find out when they are being loaded for the first time after being installed or enabled and unloaded because they are being uninstalled or disabled.
• Localization API – Provides simple localization functionality. It makes it possible to retrieve localized versions of the strings in your code. And it doesn’t require you to solicit localizations from localizers or bundle localizations with your code, as the module retrieves them automatically from a web service based on the strings your code is using.
• Selection API – Provides a means to get and set current text/HTML selections as well as observe new selections.
• And in case you have not been following the latest Jetpack developments, we also launched Page Worker, Widget, Simple Storage and Private Browsing APIs in previous releases. A complete list of APIs can be found in the core library reference.

More information about Jetpack is available on its project page.

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.)

While most groups have submitted their ideas for sessions, lightning talks, and the science fair to the various private Google spreadsheets, a few groups have been publishing their ideas and proposals on the Mozilla wiki.

The first, the Mobile group, has published a list of sessions they’re proposing for the summit, as well as proposed lightning talks. Attendees of the Summit will likely get a chance to attend sessions on Mozilla’s mobile roadmap, writing and designing add-ons for Fennec, user experience on mobile, and how mobile fits in with Mozilla’s out of process project, Electrolysis.

The mobile group will also have a “keynote” which will feature Stuart Parmenter – Mozilla Corporation’s (MoCo) Director of Mobile Engineering – giving a general overview of all things mobile, including Fennec, Android, Meego, and Firefox Home, the new iPhone application.

The second group to publish their ideas and plans is the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), which have given a list of sessions and lightning talks they hope to present at the Summit. Among them are sessions on project communication, branch management in Bugzilla, the Mozilla web universe, growing the Mozilla community with Drumbeat, learning from non-Mozilla movements, and a general “participation” session.

The most interesting MoFo session looks to be one on exploring supporter and membership models for Mozilla, which MoFo is especially interested in as a way to raise funds. Membership at Mozilla could mirror that of the Apache Foundation, Gnome Foundation, or other open source non-profits.

The final group that has posted its plans on the Mozilla wiki is the Mozilla Labs Jetpack team. The Jetpack team has posted plans for one session that discusses Jetpack and the future of add-on development, mirroring a talk Myk Melez – Mozilla Labs engineer – is expected to give at the London MAOW the week prior. The group also has plans for three different lightning talks and a Science Fair booth to demo the Jetpack SDK and FlightDeck.

Additionally, the Jetpack team will be holding a Rocket Your Firefox add-on content and will announce winners at the closing dinner on July 9.

The Summit should be a fun and interesting event for those who attend. Hopefully more groups will publish their plans and ideas for the Summit to give outsiders a better look inside the event.

Mozilla Labs has launched a new Concept Series project called “Crowdsource Crowdsourcing.”

While the title may be a bit confusing, the idea is to create a new, more effective method of crowdsourcing. Currently, Mozilla Labs uses crowdsourcing in both its Design Challenge and Concept Series projects and has had a bit of success with its methods.

The project starts now, with a submission deadline of July 11th. The teams that are selected will kick off their projects on July 19th and finish them in mid-October.

The Mozilla Labs team has launched what is tentatively being called the “Secret” project, a “general-purpose cryptography API and implementation for JavaScript.”

The project – being driven by Justin Dolske, Dan Mills, and Brian Warner, all engineers at the Mozilla Corporation – is targeting a multitude of use cases. For example, Weave Firefox Sync, Account Manager, and even encrypted mail.

Given the early stages of the project, it’s still unclear whether Secret will make use of Mozilla’s own NSS or find another route to implement the cryptography API. Should the project wish to become truly general-purpose, it would have to bundle NSS instead of using the built-into-Firefox version so that other browsers could successfully use it.

In a Mozilla wiki post, David Ascher – CEO of Mozilla Messaging – quietly announces that the Raindrop project will be reseting. While there has yet to be any blog posts on the subject, it’s not at all a surprise.

Raindrop has suffered from a very slow adoption rate and a stagnant community, being mostly run by Mozilla Messaging employees, unlike other Mozilla Labs projects. A good portion of this is attributed to the amount of work it takes to setup a Raindrop installation as well as the “spread out” data model Raindrop uses.

As part of the reset, Raindrop will attempt to address these issues as well as the CouchDB scaling issues that Raindrop suffers from.

Given the speed which the Mozilla Messaging team works, it may be a while before a usable, beta-quality version of Raindrop is available.

To follow the Raindrop community better, check out their Community page on the Mozilla wiki.

Yesterday, Ragavan Srinivasan – project manager of Weave – announced the graduation of Weave Sync from Mozilla Labs. As part of this graduation, Weave Sync becomes Firefox Sync and joins the Firefox team so it can become integrated for Firefox 4.

One of the questions that arose from this was brought up by Robert Kaiser of the SeaMonkey Project. With a purely marketing change of name that now specifically calls out Firefox, what should other projects call “Firefox Sync” when incorporating it into their applications? In his blog post, no Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) employee speaks up to answer. However, Gervase Markham – a Mozilla Foundation employee and longtime community member – notes that his desire was for “Weave Sync” to stick with a more general name, along the lines of “Mozilla Sync.” It’s evident that this option wasn’t chosen for marketing reasons by the MoCo team.

As part of Mozilla Labs expanding Contacts experiment, Pascal Finette announced the latest design challenge, which is looking for design concepts that focus on identity in the browser. Or, at least address books in the browser.

The design challenge is open to submissions until July 5 and will open for voting shortly after that deadline. Head over to the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge website for more information.