November 2007 Archives

Nice catch Paul!

Much more from Mike Shaver.

Window Snyder, Mozilla Security Chief responds too.

Mike Schroepfer has even more.

(and yes!, I'm steamed by this but resisting the urge to hurl bombs.)

I'm live again, and taking your questions.

update: OK. We're done. Thanks to everyone that came and participated today.

I wasn't able to make it to Jeremiah's conversation with Mozilla folks this morning but I got a chance to say hi later in the day and I think he's got some good insight. Check out his report on today's happening for more.

Mitchell Baker's also got up a great post today on how she sees the Mozilla Landscape in 2008.

My favorite part of her post, and something I want to play a big role in?

3. Mozilla is inserting openness and transparency to industry activities beyond the software we ship. We're using the voice that Firefox gives us to show how information, standards, software, data, security, organizations and online life in general can be more open, more understandable and more influenced by individual action.

Actually, I like everything she's saying. Give it a read, and if you haven't, subscribe to Mitchell's blog.

If you're interested in keeping up with how Mozilla's doing, you're gonna want to subscribe to John Lilly's Mozilla blog category (the other categories are great, too.)

His most recent post, Mozilla & Firefox Market Share is as good an introduction as any, but do subscribe to his feed 'cuz there's more there and definitely more coming.

The most exciting bit of information for me in John's post today? That we've doubled our userbase in the last year. And what's really cool about that is how much growth we're seeing outside of the US -- especially in South America, and Asia.

Mozilla is truly a global project. Thanks to the dramatically increasing strength in numbers, this global Mozilla community is going to have even more opportunity in the coming years to improve the Internet and to improve peoples lives.

Digg John's post

update: and for those of you (like me,) who like to play around with the raw data, here's a csv file that corresponds to the average daily users in the last year that John charted at his post.

update Experiment concluded for now.

This special, extended, Air Mozilla Live broadcast will feature guests from the Creative Commons, as they get ready to celebrate their 5th anniversary; the Mozilla application team, sharing expertise in extension development; and the Mozilla Mobile Platform team, discussing Mozilla's mobile goals, target platforms, and next steps.

Join us, this Wednesday for our live community discussion and "call-in" show.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Melissa Reeder, Mark Finkle, Dave Townsend, and Christian Sejersen.
When: Wednesday, November 28, from 14:00:00 - 15:30:00 PST (UTC -8.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
  
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
  
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.
  

I could have sworn that I already linked to the Mozilla Metrics blog but I don't see it in the archives so here it is again.

The data and analysis that I'm most excited about right now is outlined at the Firefox's Funnel Factor blog post.

Our crack team of metricists, (metricians?) Ken Kovash and Alex Polvi, have been studying the Firefox adoption process and have determined that we have an adoption rate of 28%. So, for every 100 users that successfully downloaded Firefox, 28 of them were Firefox users 30 days later.

If this rate has been constant and the fall-off after 30 days is negligible (two big ifs,) then our 445M downloads so far would yield about 125M active Firefox users.

But what about other sources besides downloads from mozilla.com? The 5-10M(?) Linux desktops that shipped with Firefox as the default browser? The downloads that come from download.com or tucows.com? Bittorrent? Other sources?

Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.

What's going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery and malware lists -- the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing and Attack sites. If the profile has very outdated or no local lists, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down these rather large lists in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.

I suspect this is the problem that's being reported here, here, and here.

This problem is due to the change in the "SafeBrowsing Protocol" which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you're on Firefox 2, this isn't going to affect you.

The work-around for this problem is for us to throttle it on the server side. We're working on that now and I'll post an update as soon as I've got confirmation that it's taken care of.

update: And it should be fixed now -- 1:06 PM PDT (UTC -8)

Deanna and I share a 1997 Honda Accord that gets about 25 miles per gallon. Last night, filling up the car with gas at our corner Shell station, the receipt broke $60 for the first time.

$4.00/gallon gas may not seem extreme to some of you outside the US, but it's pretty steep here. So why is it so high? Is this gouging because they can, or are the "wholesale" costs really going that high for local gas stations. If that's the case, then why the disparity between prices here and elsewhere in the state/country?

Deb's doing some awesome work getting the about:mozilla newsletter going. This is gonna be huge for us. With so much happening in greater Mozillaland, it's going to be really helpful to have an editor putting together a sort of one-stop-shop for Mozilla contributors trying to keep up.

Head over to dria.org and read all about it.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for your testing pleasures. This is the most thoroughly tested beta we've ever shipped. It's also available in 20 languages, a record for us for a Beta release.

You're gonna find that it's not only fast, nimble, and featureful, but such an advance from Firefox 2 that you won't want to go back.

There's lots new in this release that needs a good going over by a few hundred thousand beta testers. So, if you find problems, we're looking for your feedback so that we can get things into even better shape for Beta 2.

Ryan Paul, over at Ars Technica gives the context that was missing in the initial reports on the Firefox release schedule and bug triage.

Mike Shaver and Mike Schroepfer both did a much better job of clearing up the confusion than I did with my "horseshit" post.

Matt Asay, over at c|net's The Open Road quotes from both Mikes and seems much relieved.

If you had concerns about Mozilla's release process, maybe reading Matt's post will be some comfort.

Mike Shaver has a very informative post up for those of you not deeply involved in the development of Firefox but want to understand what drives our development and release process better.

The only issue I have with shaver's post is that he didn't use the word "horseshit" anywhere in it :-)

Got questions about Mozilla, Firefox, the Open Web, me? Join us right now, live at Ask Asa Live on Justin.tv.

I'll be broadcasting and answering your questions for the next few hours. Stop in and say hi.

update: Thanks to everyone that showed up. It was a lot of fun and I learned quite a bit from those in attendance. I look forward to next week's conversation.

Things move fast in Mozilla-land.

A long time ago, I was responsible for building and organizing Mozilla's QA and testing community but that hasn't been my primary area for about 6 years. After QA, I was mostly focused on project and release management work with drivers@mozilla.org. It was during that time that Blake, Dave, Ben, Bryner, and I created and launched the Firefox project. As a new project with a mostly new group of contributors I was QA, project management, release management and several other roles. As Firefox 1 neared ship, Blake and I took responsibility for building and coordinating Mozilla's Open Source Marketing community and that was my focus for the first couple of years of Firefox, but that too is long over. After the marketing community work, I moved on to more broad-based community building and was involved across the different functional areas of the Mozilla project, and finally abandoned any pretense of being useful to the drivers@mozilla.org and the QA and testing teams. But now, that's also no longer my primary focus.

Today, and for the last few months, I'm working with a group called Evangelism. Mike Shaver leads the team and he's just put up a great post explaining what this team does.

I've adjusted my business cards appropriately and they now say "Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel & Storyteller @ Mozilla"

For those of you who want to know more about what I'm up to, or what Mozilla is up to, stop in tomorrow afternoon (Pacific) to Ask Asa Live on justin.tv and I'll do my best to provide answers.

There are a number of blog posts out there, presumably based on the same Gregg Keizer article, that are claiming "Mozilla Won't Fix 80% of Firefox 3.0’s Bugs"

That claim is simply horseshit. We've already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we're discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues we wanted to get fixed for Firefox 3.

update While I do think that the the article's headline was over the top, I didn't mean this to come off as rude as it now reads to me. Reading a couple of the comments here I see that I wasn't setting a very good example with the tone of my post. Sorry about that, and sorry Gregg (if you're reading this) for those comments that I unintentionally inspired.

I wasn't actually reacting to Gregg's article so much as a few blog posts I read that referenced Gregg's article -- or even just the headline. The headline, which I think is wrong in several ways, got a lot of pickup and a number of people who know considerably less about Mozilla than Gregg got my ire up with their commentary.

Shaver's just posted more on memory. It's a great read for those wanting to understand more of why measuring and dealing with memory usage isn't as simple as it sounds.

Stuart's doing some great work tracking down memory usage issues and has mined some great data that points at memory fragmentation as an issue to be investigated and addressed.

For the next couple of hours, I'll be answering your questions live at Ask Asa Live. Registration's required for the chat but there's no email confirmation required so it's easy. Also, if you want to ask a question here, I'll check in for questions and answer them on the air.

That's it. We're done. Thanks to everyone that showed up and participated. I'll probably be back the same time next Friday.

Not quite the birthday, actually, but it has been three years since the release of Firefox 1.0.

Firefox's real day of birth was actually April 1st of 2002 with the first mozilla/browser check-in.

But even that doesn't tell the whole story since the overwhelming majority of Firefox's code actually came into public existence with the first landings of NGLayout and the XPFE back in October of 1998.

Once again, though, that would leave out some of the great code we still use in Firefox that was originally made public with the release of the Mozilla source code on March 31st of 1998.

Still, to really be complete, you'd probably have to go back even a couple years earlier to the find code for NSPR, NSS, SpiderMonkey, and other bits around the codebase which still live today in Firefox.

So, happy birthday to Firefox 1.0, but it's sure been a lot bigger effort than just the last three years.

Stuart blogged today about two very cool extensions that you're gonna want to check out. The first is PrintPDF. It makes it so easy to print a page to PDF. The second is RAMBack which is the beginnings of a RAM reporting, and cleanup utility that will help us diagnose more of our memory usage issues. Check them out over at pavlov.net.

Those of you who remember the early days of Firefox and our, how shall we say, issues around naming, will probably find this amusing.

If you're a Dexter fan, check out composer Rolfe Kent's site for the Dexter theme and more. I think a cut from Dexter theme would make a great ringtone.

Hey there. I'm available live right now, 3PM Pacific, for the next hour or two to answer your questions about Mozilla, Firefox, the Open Web, etc. Click the embed to join the conversation.

update: done. thanks to everyone that showed up.

A few people have been asking, so I thought I'd respond here where others can see it. No, I don't think Mozilla has anything to do with the Wal-Mart $200 gPC and I don't think Google has anything to do with it either. It does sound interesting though, a linux-based PC with Firefox and a bundle of Google web programs.