I just filled in descriptions for a load of mailing lists which didn't have them. Please check that the description of lists you care about matches reality. If not, let me know.
One more reason for my "No Facebook Applications" rule...
Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton that used her middle name "Whitney."
My stuff for people organizing Firefox parties now has its own page. Do drop by and pick up code and resources for livening up your party :-)
The long-awaited Bugzilla reorganization of classifications, products and components is going to happen... soon. We don't have an exact date yet, but it's going to be in the next couple of weeks (d.v.) and we want to give people as much warning as possible. There's no "good" time to do this, but just after a release and before things get into full flow again is a better time than most. Hence the immediacy.
We have a plan and an order of execution (yes, go on, laugh at my use of the "temp" directory).
It's been nine months since the plan has been updated. However, reopening the plan for yet another round of discussion may cause us to miss this window. So the idea is that we execute the plan as it is now, and then a week or two later, have a second round, which can incorporate both fixes to the original plan and new things people have thought of or which have come up since the last update, and which we can get agreed in that time.
So, if you have additions to the plan, hold your fire. If there are things we are going to do which we should now not do, let us know. In other words, the plan is open for removals but not additions.
Impact
We will do our best to fix up charts and saved searches with the new names, but because of the way Bugzilla works we can't guarantee this in all cases (e.g. complex searches with boolean charts). So once we're done, everyone will need to check that their searches still do what they think they do.
We will be updating the "last changed date" on affected bugs. This is required to avoid possible data corruption. If you think this will cause you a problem, please let us know - but please don't start doing mass bug changes to "mark old bugs" without checking with us first.
Currently, there is no plan to add a comment for each change.
It looks like we weren't the only people breaking the Interweb yesterday: a lot of people were watching Tiger Woods at the US Open. That can't have helped...
10,722,518 download as I write. Awesome.
The venue for the Firefox 3 Launch Party, London has a big screen. I want to do some Mozilla-related eye candy which can run during the party. And perhaps other party hosts do too.
There was an early mozilla.party (this one?) where they did a cool super-fast green-screen scrolling syntax-highlighted code thing. I have written this script (Perl; requires enscript; run it in your top-level Mozilla directory), which produces a similar effect, and anyone is welcome to use it. I've also used Flickr Downloadr to download the T-Shirt photoset, and can make a slideshow out of those. But it would also be nice to have some Firefox-based cool web tech demos.
Anyone got any good ideas? Ideally, animated stuff that will run and run.
30 minutes to go until launch! :-)
Update: Anyone who wants to run the Download Counter full-screen on a 1024x768 machine (like my laptop) may appreciate this Greasemonkey userscript.
I have released an updated version of my language coverage data - its home is now a web page rather than a blog post.
Among the new features are:
Thank you to everyone who gave me useful feedback. Please let me know of any further improvements I could make, within the general parameters of the method.
Ever start composing an email, bug comment or something else in a web page, switch to another app or page to find something out, and then get lost and end up looking through loads of tabs to find the one you were typing in? (For me, this seems particularly a problem when using Bugzilla.)
How about an extension which enabled a key combo which immediately switched you to the last tab in which you typed in a <textarea>? When you've finished your research/other task, just press that button and bang, there you are.
The Firefox 3 Launch Party, London will be in the function room of the Shooting Star pub near Liverpool Street station, from 7pm next Thursday the 19th of June. See the party page for details. There's a big screen to which computers can be attached, so bring your laptop with cool demos and other stuff. Please sign up if you are coming. See you then!
For my non-Mozilla readers, given that Mozilla people will know about this already:
Firefox 3 is due for release next Tuesday, and we are attempting to set a Guiness World Record for most copies of a bit of software downloaded in 24 hours. Head over to the pledge site, pledge to download, and then, when Tuesday comes, do so! Firefox 3 rocks - here's a load of reasons why.
Note: this isn't the full picture; some people have been very helpful in pointing out stuff I've missed. Please continue to send in feedback, and I'll post an updated version in a couple of days.
I have been attempting to figure out what percentage of the net population will get the upcoming Firefox 3 (June 17th!) in their native language ("heart language"). We're doing 48 different localizations. I've attempted this before, but I have been limited by the quality of data available. No-one seems to have good statistics on the language breakdown of the net population.
So, I've taken net population figures for each country (232 of them; that number seems high, but I guess they have a generous definition of 'country') from the CIA World Factbook, and split them up by the language split in that country. This assumes, therefore, that the distribution of the net population in a country is in the same proportion to the languages spoken there. I'm sure for some countries that's a bad assumption, but I still think the resulting data is better than what I had before.
Here's a snapshot of the spreadsheet (.ods). Headline figures:
| Category | Count | % Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Firefox 2 | 44 | 87.7% |
| Firefox 3 | 45 | 88.1% |
| Firefox 2 and 3 together | 48 | 89.2% |
| L10n projects with CVS access | 63 | 93.7% |
| All localizations found, including unofficial | 61 | 92.6% |
| IE 7 | 77 | 97.6% |
Methodological notes: Many figures estimated. Unknown speakers allocated proportionally among the languages for which there is a figure. I don't mean to insult anyone - if I've overlooked your localization, I apologise. Void where prohibited. Blame Canada.
OK, now the questions:
It looks like the implementation of HTML5 <video> in Firefox will use the native system media framework (DirectX, QuickTime, GStreamer) rather than come with any built-in codecs.
This decision has certain implications for cross-OS web video interoperability. There are very few or no formats that Windows, Mac and free Linux all can and do support.
So a Firefox codec downloader might be a good addition to core Firefox. Like the plugin finder, when it encountered media using a codec which it could not read, it would ask a codec finder service if a codec was available, but then instead of installing a browser-specific plugin it would install the codec at OS level.
So if a Windows user came across an Theora file, Firefox would (ideally) say something like "I can't play this - get codec?". If the user said yes, Firefox would go away, download DirectX Theora and Vorbis codecs, install them at OS level, and then start playing the video via DirectX as normal. As a side-effect, players like Windows Media Player would also gain the ability to play Theora, because it uses DirectX too.
Similarly, if a Linux user came across an MPEG4 file, a similar thing could happen (if the necessary licensing agreements were in place). There are trickier issues with binary compatibility here, but perhaps they could be overcome if the data in the codec finder service were well-maintained.
This would be a great aid to smoothing the user experience for all sorts of video on the web, and helping content authors publish without worrying too much that some people couldn't play their format. Chris Double (the <video> guy) told me he liked the idea, but didn't have time to code it. Do any of you? Or do you know anyone who cares about web video interoperability who does?
We've just published version 2.0 of the Mozilla Committer's Agreement[0] (PDF), which used to be the CVS Contributor Form. This is the document everyone signs in order to get permission to check in to our repositories. There's a FAQ about the new version. Among the changes are:
We would like all existing Committers to sign a copy of the new agreement. Details of what to do are in the FAQ, but if you are coming to the Firefox Summit, there'll be an opportunity there and we'd actually prefer it if you wait. Less hassle all around.
If you aren't coming, there's no rush at the moment, so add it to your ToDo list. After the Summit (which is at the end of July) we'll be chasing people who haven't filled one in yet.
If people have questions, they can email me, or start a discussion in mozilla.governance.
[0] Yes, we had the apostrophe discussion. My current view is that it's each copy is an agreement for a single committer, and so the apostrophe goes before the S.
After several months of development, version 2.0 of the mozilla.org Licence Policy has just been published. All code added to our repositories needs to comply with the policy. It also attempts to document the current licensing status of all the code that we maintain. There shouldn't be anything surprising in there, but if there is, or you see a mistake, let me know.
Recently, a flaw was discovered in the version of OpenSSL shipped with certain Debian and Ubuntu systems, such that they generated only a very limited number of different, and predictable, keys. This has the potential to affect both SSH and SSL keys.
It would therefore be rather a big problem if any root certificates in our root store were generated on systems with weak RNGs - because attackers could then forge certificates for any website, and Firefox would trust them. Fortunately, we have ascertained that this is not the case.
We are continuing to investigate other ways that this problem may impact Firefox and the secure web, and what can be done about it.
The Mozilla project has a long and distinguished history of holding global distributed parties to celebrate major events in the project's life, including at the South Pole.
I'm pleased to say that we are doing this again - mozillaparty.com is now open for business, for booking parties to celebrate the release of Firefox 3 and also Mozilla's 10th anniversary. There are 183 at the time of writing; last time, we got up to 389, so it would be good to have even more than that.
When's a good day? shaver suggests July 1st, but then he's Canadian. The London party will be June 19th. Sign up now!