Stephen Donner's Weblog

Need help testing SUMO 1.0.1 (support for Firefox 3.5, basically)

WebDev QA would appreciate your help in testing the SUMO 1.0.1 release (so far, only two resolved-fixed bugs):

1.0.1

The fixes are aimed at supporting Firefox 3.5 detection on the SUMO (Firefox Support
) website.

Thanks!

(Contact me at stephend@mozilla.com or comment in the bug.)

Need some help testing AMO 5.0.4 changes

Krupa and I are a little nervous about bug 441739, so if you're interested in helping us, file any bugs you see as blocking that bug; we'll also be taking a look at this probably Monday, but would love more help.

The changes are to the experimental-override functionality (logged in vs. logged out, etc.); for more information about what to test, see Bug 441739, comment 42

Thanks!

Want to help Mozilla better-test a few of our key web properties?

Got IE 8 and want to help out Mozilla (you don't have to like IE!)?

We're looking for people to help us test IE 8 support across a few key Mozilla properties; we're starting with:

* mozilla.com
* addons.mozilla.org
* spreadfirefox.com
* support.mozilla.com
* blog.mozilla.com

If you would, please let us know of any bugs you find while using IE 8 on any of these sites.

To file a bug, please just file a bug in the same component as above, and add a blocks dependency.

Thanks! (If you've already looked at a site, please let me know how it was.)

For more info, contact me at stephend@mozilla.com

A sincere welcome to Krupa Raj, Mozilla's 2nd webdev QA engineer :-)

All -

Without trying to make her blush and get all embarrassed and stuff, I'd like to extend a sincere welcome to our new webdev qa contractor Krupa Raj, who comes to us from Livescribe (check it out, that pen is pretty amazing!) and HP.

She's got really solid QA chops, and is a great addition to our slowly-but-ever-so-surely burgeoning webdev QA team :-) (We're still just two people, for those of you in the community who don't know!)

She's right now shadowing me on all my projects, and co-attending my meetings, so that's a lot to hit her with right away, but she's doing great.

Again, welcome!

Thanks for private browsing, Ehsan

Thanks again, Ehsan.

I just wanted to publicly thank Ehsan Akhgari for implementing the Private Browsing mode in what will be the next version of Firefox.

That feature was almost dropped, when he took it, then drove it to completion.

Great, great stuff; a beacon of the kind of community involvement we really love and appreciate here @ Mozilla -- he's also localized AMO for us, and I think done RTL support on SUMO, too (if not, Ehsan, we could use your help on the 1.0 release!)

(Others worked really hard on it too, like mconnor and faaborg, among others; didn't mean to down-play their involvement, but he deserves special attention since he took such initiative.)

More web fail, this time of the didn't-provision-enough-commit-bandwidth variety

Customer-support bots FTL

I was having problems loading http://www.playphone.com (it was returning HTTP 500, Internal Server Error), so I decided I'd report it to the company in the "quickest way possible" (ahem): live chat.

Below is the actual transcript of that rather unsuccessful session, which just goes to demonstrate that live help is really, really appreciated :-)

-------
An agent will be with you shortly. We appreciate your patience. While you wait feel free to begin typing your question.
Thank you for patiently waiting. You are currently at position number 1 in the queue. We will be with you shortly.
You have been connected to Noemi J.
Noemi J: Hello,Stephen. Thank you for contacting mobile support. My name is Noemi, how may I help you?
Stephen Donner: Hi there
Noemi J: How are you doing today?
Stephen Donner: your homepage is giving me HTTP 500 internal server errors
Stephen Donner: http://s5.tinypic.com/jj3ayv.jpg
Noemi J: May I have your mobile number, please?
Stephen Donner: I already entered that; why do you need it?
Stephen Donner: I'm not a customer yet
Stephen Donner: just reporting to you that your homepage doesn't work
Noemi J: I am apologies for your inconvinient , How you would like me to help you today?
Stephen Donner: Report this error to the webmaster / server op / IT team?
Stephen Donner: did you see the error?
Noemi J: I am apologies we can not see any error if you don't identify the phone number, and model of your phone? I will try to help you what exactly is what you tryin to to ?
Stephen Donner: I'm not using a phone!
Stephen Donner: http://s5.tinypic.com/jj3ayv.jpg
Stephen Donner: it's a web browser
Stephen Donner: firefox 3.0.6, to be exact
Stephen Donner: I'm loading your homepage
Stephen Donner: and it gives the error that I've screenshotted in the URL, above
Stephen Donner: it's an internal server error, which means it's not Firefox's fault
Noemi J: Thank you, one minute while I look up the information requested.
Noemi J: May I have your mobile number, please?
Stephen Donner: omg
Noemi J: Hello,Stephen. Thank you for contacting mobile support. My name is Noemi, how may I help you?
Stephen Donner: are you serious?
Stephen Donner: are you a bot?
Noemi J: We are continually working to obtain new exciting content and hope that you will come back and visit us in the near future for your media content needs. Thank you for choosing PlayPhone as your media content provider.
Stephen Donner: hello?
Thank you for contacting PlayPhone. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

7 facts about Stephen Donner -- you probably want to skip this post with your feed reader

Well, it had to happen; I've been tagged by the omnipresent Tomcat and the always-hip and hilarious djst, both of whom give me way too much street cred by claiming I'm, "the WebMonster !" and "QA superstar, excellent writer, and great friend," respectively--none of which (sadly) are true. Also tagging me was Clint, who spoke the truth when he wrote that I "need(s) to blog more".

So, here goes; as an aside, something about this is oddly reminiscent of email chain letters, but I digress.

(Oh, and here, as a preface, are the rules.)

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

7 (largely useless) facts about myself:

1. Although born in Port Huron, Michigan on our family's furlough from dad's work as a radio-tower/studio engineer for TWR, I grew up as a missionary kid (mk, for short) in both Mbabane, Swaziland and Pinetown, South Africa (in that order). As part of this, I attended a South African school, in which I was forced to attempt to learn Afrikaans, a language of which I can only remember enough to count to 10. I also wore a uniform... I believe we left in 1983, and I grew up learning the hardships of apartheid, and its accompanying white South-African police brutality, as well as internal, tribal violence.
2. I've been working intermittently on Mozilla either as a volunteer or a paid employee in various capacities since 1998; still love it to this day, of course.
3. I can't stand the smell and shape of shrimp (which gets in the way of me wanting to taste it).
4. I pride myself in having pretty eclectic musical tastes; my friends--most of whom were in band/jazz band with me--were the same way. I still don't like most country to this day (it's the vocals, I've come to realize), but I dig Southern rock.
5. I was diagnosed as having a mitral valve prolapse when I was just 15--something which, when I think about it too much (at all?) scares me perhaps more than it should. I've been told by my doctor that it could also be responsible for increased anxiety.
6. I'm a workaholic; if you've worked with me at all, though, you might already know that. Really need to get some semblance of a work/life balance going and keep it up.
7. Only 7? I'm starting to enjoy this probably more than I should, given that I was so reluctant to do it all, in the beginning. Growing up, I wanted to be a:
* fireman
* policeman
* audio-recording engineer
* Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (yes, yes, I know!) I even had my parents cough up the $14k to attend the Clark Computer Career Institute in Braintree, MA (now called "The Career Institute of American International Colleges").
* writer -- still do; in fact, I graduated with a BA in English from IUSB in hopes of bettering my skillset in that very area. Maybe someday I'll marry my love of writing and computers in something that can be both satisfying and rewarding (financially). Until then, I really don't mind testing software...

So, that's it for now; tag, you're it:

(1) morgamic -- you've already been tagged by Tomcat, and because I want to read you write about other things than sports
(2) ss -- because something has to pull you away from your gripping Gossip Girls episode(s)
(3) clouserw -- just 'cuz
(4) marcia -- because you probably should blog more too
(5) lorchard -- you're from Michigan, the first bug we worked on was ever-the-epic one, and you're part of webdev (much love!) -- I wanted to tag Laura, but was too late.
(6) mikeal -- because I emphatically stated in #qa how lame I thought this was, so here's my just-dessert
(7) fligtar -- just nominating him might make him angry
(8) rdoherty -- addendum; how could I forget Ryan??

(I think bhearsum might be right in his closing remark, BTW.)

Odd Google Suggest...

If you type "spread firefox url:wiki.mozilla.org", Google Suggest proffers, "Did you mean: google.com".

No, I didn't; really!

Cool Download Day progress widget, by Ehsan Akhgari

Many thanks to Ehsan for the awesome widget, below!

How you can help prevent [insert QA team member name here] from losing his/her mind, while all the while making Firefox 3 better

There's a voluminous amount of QA work remaining for Firefox 3--both for its beta(s?) and its 3.0 release; even though I'm immersed in it daily, I still find it hard to not only prioritize, but even to capture what work remains. I'm going to make a feeble attempt to encapsulate said work, but I'm quite positive I'll fail in some way :-P Still, here goes...

How can you help?

1. Write or clean up Litmus testcases. Although the current setup of Litmus requires Admin status to edit (add/delete) testcases, you can still write them if they're not clearly stated enough in the bug. In tandem with an "in-litmus?" flag, it can be very helpful to ensure test coverage.

Write:

List of requested testcases for Firefox 3.

In the query above, I've excised "Open" bugs simply because that *should* mean the feature/bug fix isn't yet implemented; that doesn't mean, of course, that test coverage around it isn't needed; it's just a prioritization. (Semi-colons ftw!)

Clean up:

Most-unclear testcases

Recently unclear testcases

Ready to start? Create an account!

2. Run Litmus testcases. It should be self-explanatory, but we're looking for users running nightly builds of Firefox 3 to help us track its level of quality and feature implementation. By running *any* accurate test and submitting your valuable feedback, you help us get a clearer picture of when and if something has regressed, or, in general, how stable a given feature set is (based on its tests, though, so coverage varies by each area's level of test-completeness.)

Recent test failures--there are more such links on the footer of Litmus.

3. Verify Resolved FIXED Firefox 3 bugs.

4. Flag bugs as needing Litmus testcases. In each Firefox 3 bug, there should be a flag called "in-litmus" with four states: 1) empty, 2) ?, 3) -, and 4) +.

If you think a fixed bug (including those in the "VERIFIED" state) needs a manual testcase, select "?" from the "in-litmus" dropdown. Feel free to sprinkle liberally, but please exercise common sense; in addition to bugmail spam (which is all fine and good), for those of us whom run queries and write testcases, the time spent determining whether a testcase is indeed needed should be a no-brainer.

That said, the current list we have is by no means comprehensive, and, although it takes time to parse through the current list of testcases covered and match them with the request, it's well worth it to have more comprehensive coverage.

5. Stop by #qa on irc://irc.mozilla.org if you have further questions; we'd love to have folks helping out with any of these areas!

Thanks!

The original Thunderbird bug!

I was reading some of my old entries here, and found the _original_ Thunderbird bug; i.e. the bug that began the work which eventually transformed Mozilla MailNews into what's now known as Thunderbird.

Historic.

Mozilla Web-Development QA would love your help!

Every day, I go to work for a company for which I truly enjoy working; I'd like to take a moment to relate some of my experiences, and petition you to consider applying, especially in the Web Development and QA departments.

Mozilla is described by nearly everyone within its walls as "organic," a somewhat-difficult term to digest. You immediately think "OK, sounds like there are no rules." For the large part, that's actually quite true: the mix of employees' experiences, personalities, and work style coalesces into a slow, but ever-progressively gelled set of "best work practices." We strive ardently for not repeating our mistakes; most times, we succeed; occasionally, we drop the ball. 2.0.0.8 wasn't a hot release--not to the public nor to us, individually--but it did fix over 200 issues (most of them security!), and provided somewhat limited (due to the surprise), but well-meaning, support for OS X; needless to say, we think we've really got it right this time--a noticeable Mac OS 10.5 AJAX bug aside--for 2.0.0.9, which we just shipped tonight around 4PM PST.

There's another side to Mozilla that often goes unnoticed,--until you need them--and that's the Web Development team (and, humbly, its nearly-sole QA counterpart, yours truly ATM). We're supporting Marketing and Engineering in each's drive to understanding the Firefox user-experience and making it the best it can be. Together, we're responsible for a successful launch on another platform, like Rock your Firefox, in addition to the many and increasing number of pages within the breadth of the Firefox experience (such as the new First Run, What's New, and Operation Firefox pages/compaign, respectively).

As one such prominent example of our work, we're redesigning the user-experience of browsing, installing, and managing Add-ons for Firefox 3 (both in the client and on the web), and the changes on http://add-ons.mozilla.org will also reflect this, in a newly skinned version set to launch within 7 or so weeks. We could use your help in testing! If you've got prior familiarity with the add-ons website (or, just mad testing/coding skills in general), please shoot me an email at:

stephend@mozilla.com

Your excellent feedback will help me solidify my Test Plan.

While I'm not a web-testing newbie (having tested both my.netscape.com and my.aol.com for both divisions of AOL), there's always more to learn, and any/all help really is appreciated!

Keeping in mind, though, that its goal is to launch in about seven weeks, please try to constrain the scope of suggestions/fixes in-line with the 3.2 PRD.

Thanks for your help!

- Stephen

Call for testing help!

If you've got especially either Mac OS X 10.4 or Windows Vista, Mozilla QA would be very appreciative of and interested in any testing help you can provide for the Download Manager.

Bug 103487 has landed, which now means we *should* integrate with the various anti-virus vendors' software.

Additionally, we now have Vista Parental Controls (which can disable the download ability), and other Download Manager fixes/UI features left to land.

At present, there are ~ 250 either open or known fixed/resolved bugs.

It's daunting at first, but if you're interested in helping out, you can:
1) File/verify bugs
2) Write testcases (using Litmus)
3) Stop by in #qa of irc://irc.mozilla.org and we can help you test this and/or other components

Asking 'stephend' in #QA is the best pre-screen for Download Manager bugs, as I've probably run into most of them, or at least have read their bugs.

My testplan (work-in-progress) might get you thinking about ways in which you can help test.

Thanks in advance for your interest and help in making Firefox 3 great! (And yes, most of us hope that the "Clear / Clear All" button is returning :)

Check out these guys' amazing sets, if you like progressive trance and/or house...just click on "Downloads" using Firefox 2.0.0.6, and get what you can.

Work.

If you're one of the 2 billion folks that I need to get back to via email, phone, instant messenger, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or--gasp--in person, please note that I will be doing so as soon as humanly possible, given the workload I'm currently experiencing.

More Firefox 3 QA love!

Just a note to myself that, I've signed up to test:

Add-ons (Plugin Management System)
Content Handling (Download Manager updates)
Search / Tabbed Browsing / Visual Refresh (theme changes)

Mo(re)zilla!

I'm happy to announce that starting Monday, July 9th, 2007, I'll be working full-time as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer for Mozilla Corporation in Mountain View, CA.

Having been out of the professional workforce for the three years' duration while finishing up my degree, I must concede a fair amount of trepidation, but I'm pretty familiar with most aspects of Mozilla development, so it should be a manageable learning curve. I'm also excited to hopefully get back to doing some Purify work, in addition to learning and running Eggplant, among the day-to-day testcase creation/running. There's a ton to learn around Mozilla, technology-wise, so I look forward to that.

INVENTING ENGLISH: A PORTABLE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE

Fascinating excerpt from Seth Lerer on the history of the English language.

* stephend also waves goodbye to the CW network's Hidden Palms.

Trunk Win32 Tinderbox Builds of Firefox

Just a note to self (and anyone else who cares): if you need Win32 Tinderbox builds of Firefox, they can be found here. They're considerably more recent than the published-one-time-a-day-only trunk nightlies.

History of Atari and its downfall

Amazing fix for Firefox 3

Bug 342810 goes down as being one of the coolest regression fixes I've seen in a long time. Thanks to all involved!

It just makes sense...

It's not secret that a lot of companies are started in the hopes that they will be acquired.

RememberTheMilk seems like one such company, especially since it links heavily with Google web applications (both Gmail and Calendar).

Nothing wrong with that, just pointing out the obvious, I guess :-)

*stephend waves goodbye to VaxGen.

How to create a jar protocol-linked testcase to/within Bugzilla

I filed bug 383632 against Fox News' Health page rendering (probable Gecko bug).

Here's how to link to the local (and hopefully reduced) testcase, within Bugzilla.

1. Do a File | Save As and choose the "Complete"
(the resulting files will be something like "index_files" (folder) and an "index.html" (file)
2. Using WinZip or 7-Zip, make an archive out of this (name it with the .jar extension)
3. Upload to your respective bug
4. Create a link to the file you want run, like so:
jar:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=267646!/index.html
5. Fill in the URL field of your bug with that from step #4, above.

How to find the build ID of a Mozilla build

Here's how to find the build id of a given Mozilla-based build:

1. Open the Error Console and type/paste in Components.classes["@mozilla.org/xre/app-info;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIXULAppInfo).platformBuildID
2. Click "Evaluate"

Voila!

(Actually, I just discovered that javascript: alert(navigator.buildID); yields the identical thing; bonus.)

This documentary really does have some of the scariest footage of ghosts I've seen.

Seemingly, no matter how much $$$ they pump into MySpace's budget, it doesn't translate into a concerted development effort where the goal might be to fix bugs.

The following is very nearly the most common response I get when trying to load a given MySpace page--that is, when it's not otherwise dropping my HTTP session...

Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.

This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group. (It's not as bad as the travails that Friendster went through during its burgeoning days, but still!)

Godspeed, Facebook!, I say.