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.

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.

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.

Tony Chung, a Manager in the Quality Assurance (QA) group at the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), announced an updated QMO (quality.mozilla.org) website.

The update brings a slightly refreshed UI which includes links to popular social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter) and removes much of the features that existed on QMO since its inception. Most notably, forums have been completely removed from the site, which is now built on WordPress instead of Drupal. The Events section has also been revamped and appears much less powerful than its prior incarnation.

One of the improvements in the new site is its organization of “teams” across the QA space. The added focus guides community members to an appropriate group where they can contact for more information.