fidzu : Mozilla

Because I apparently don't know how to read a calendar, I booked my SIGGRAPH 2010 travel to start one day before SIGGRAPH began, and end on the last day of SIGGRAPH, meaning I missed everything that happened on the last day. Having been to SIGGRAPH several times, I have learned the hard way several times that you definitely want to arrive on the first day (when the technical papers "fast-forward" ultra-lightning talks session is held) and leave after the last day, so you can attend whatever technical papers sessions and courses might be held on that day. (At minimum, take the red-eye out on the last day, but I don't do that because red eyes are for suckers.

Even so, I learned a lot this year. It's pretty amazing what gradient-domain filtering can do to images and video. GPU techniques continue, but from my point of view, they are less focused on the pattern of past years: "precompute for 17 hours and you can play with this in real time!" In the past, there was a lot of "we have this hammer and by God are we going to use it for every nail"; people are more realistic now.

There was also a lot more research focusing on fully automatic results. I saw a paper presented that offered a way of automatically figuring out how a set of gears worked just from the geometric model; all the user had to do was select the part that drove the system (like a drive shaft or hand crank). In past years, I suspect that system would have required the user to specify what each type of gear was, and maybe even how it turned. This is really the holy grail for people like me who are passionate about things that Just Work; we have all sorts of research that makes automatic solutions possible, and using it is immensely satisfying.

There was a lot of focus on validating research results with user study. Of course, most of these user studies comprise very small groups - around 20 people, from what I saw - but they provided a lot of good input on the applicability of the methods these researchers discovered.

Overall, I was very impressed with this year's SIGGRAPH. A lot of researchers have spent a lot of time combining several years' worth of work on various topics, and created some very compelling user experiences out of it. I highly recommend searching for "SIGGRAPH 2010″ on YouTube or the like; there is guaranteed to be something that's up your alley there. (For example, Sony's 360° 3D display, or automatically generated sound from rigid body fractures, or perhaps best of all, what I'd like to call "Photosynth for video," except it gives you 3D animation from one pose to another. Seriously, check this out.)

I've enjoyed summarizing some of the interesting things I saw at SIGGRAPH, and I hope that people on Planet Mozilla have found it interesting and useful. There's a lot of fantastic research out there; SIGGRAPH is just the tip of the iceberg. The ACM hosts many conferences on many different topics, and it's one of many international bodies dedicated to research in computer science. I highly recommend people interested in computer science find a field they're interested in and attend a conference on it. Research is great!

30 Jul 2010 10:36pm GMT

The ECMAScript TC39 committee had its regular meeting this week. One of the things we talked about were some revisions that Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and I have been discussing for the Harmony module system.

In previous iterations, the design allowed nested modules to refer outside their bodies only to other modules. For example:

    module A {
        var foo = 42;
        module B { ... }
    }

Module B would be allowed to refer to A, but not foo. This would also be true if module B could be loaded from an external file:

    module A {
        var foo = 42;
        module B = load "b.js";
    }

On es-discuss, Jasvir Nagra and Ihab Awad raised the concern that this design renders externally-loaded modules too sensitive to external scopes, similar to textual inclusion (aka #include). To be fair, they would only be sensitive to modules in scope, since other bindings would be removed from scope. But the point still stands: non-local changes to the lexical environment in external files would affect externally loaded modules. It's not too hard to come up with plausible scenarios where this could bite programmers.

The revision we discussed proposes separating the cases of externally loaded modules and lexically nested modules. For one thing, in the first example above, why shouldn't B be able to refer to foo? It's right there! That's just good old lexical scope. But if B is loaded externally, it should not be sensitive to a lexical environment of unbounded size. But at the same time, we still need to provide the ability to link together modules, even with cyclic dependencies, and place them in separate files. For example, an MVC app might be divided up into a few sub-modules:

    module MyApp {
        ...
        module Model = load "model.js";
        module View = load "view.js";
        module Controller = load "controller.js";
        ...
    }

The individual sub-modules ought to be able to import from one another, even cyclically - for example, the view and the controller might be mutually dependent. In essence, MyApp is creating a local module graph, consisting of its immediately nested module declarations.

So instead of inheriting the entire lexical environment of the code loading them, the modules Model, View, and Controller should be given a lexical environment with just the modules bound in the local module graph. That way, within every component of a program, you can easily divide it up into separate pieces, each of which may depend on other pieces. But at the same time, because they only see the other modules nested within MyApp, the sub-modules aren't sensitive to code changes in the rest of the program.

30 Jul 2010 10:06pm GMT

Fast JavaScript is a cornerstone of the modern web. In the past, application authors had to wait for browser developers to implement any complex functionality in the browser itself, so that they could access it from script code. Today, many of those functions can move straight into JavaScript itself. This has many advantages for application authors: there's no need to wait for a new version of a browser before you can develop or ship your app, you can tailor the functionality to exactly what you need, and you can improve it directly (make it faster, higher quality, more precise, etc.).

Here are two examples that show off what can be done with the improved JS engine and capabilities that will be present in Firefox 4. The first example shows a simple web-based Darkroom that allows you to perform color correction on an image. The HTML+JS is around 700 lines of code, not counting jQuery. This is based on a demo that's included with Google's Native Client (NaCl) SDK; in that demo, the color correction work is done inside native code going through NaCl. That demo (originally presented as "too slow to run in JavaScript") is a few thousand lines of code, and involves downloading and installing platform-specific compilers, multiple steps to test/deploy code, and installing a plugin on the browser side.

I get about 15-16 frames per second with the default zoomed out image (around 5 million pixels per second - that number won't be affected by image size) on my MacBook Pro, which is definitely fast enough for live manipulation. The algorithm could be tightened up to make this faster still. Further optimizations to the JS engine could help here as well; for example, I noticed that we spend a lot of time doing floating point to integer conversions for writing the computed pixels back to the display canvas, due to how the canvas API specifies image data handling.

The Web Darkroom tool also supports drag & drop, so you can take any image from your computer and drop it onto the canvas to load it. A long (long!) time ago, back in 2006, I wrote an addon called "Croppr!". It was intended to be used with Flickr, allowing users to play around with custom crops of any image, and then leave crop suggestions in comments to be viewed using Croppr. It almost certainly doesn't work any more, but it would be neat to update it: this time with both cropping and color correction. Someone with the addon (perhaps a Jetpack now!) could then visit a Flickr photo and experiment, and leave suggestions for the photographer.

The second example is based on some work that Dave Humphrey and others have been doing to bring audio manipulation to the web platform. Originally, their spec included a pre-computed FFT with each audio frame delivered to the web app. I suggested that there's no need for this - while a FFT is useful for some applications, for others it would be wasted work. Those apps that want a FFT could implement one in JS. Some benchmark numbers backed this up - using the typed arrays originally created for WebGL, computing an FFT in JS was approaching the speed of native code. Again, both could be sped up (perhaps using SSE2 or something like Mono.Simd on the JS side), but it's fast enough to be useful already.

The demo shows this in action. A numeric benchmark isn't really all that interesting, so instead I take a video clip, and as it's playing, I extract a portion of the green channel of each frame and compute its 2D FFT, which is then displayed. The original clip plays at 24 frames per second, so that's the upper bound of this demo. Using Float32 typed arrays, the computation and playback proceeds at around 22-24fps for me.

You can grab the video controls and scrub to a specific frame. (The frame rate calculation is only correct while the video is playing normally, not while you're scrubbing.) The video source uses Theora, so you'll need a browser that can play Theora content. (I didn't have a similar clip that uses WebM, or I could have used that.)

These examples are demonstrating the strength of the trace-based JIT technique that Firefox has used for accelerating JavaScript since Firefox 3.5. However, not all code can see such dramatic speedups from that type of acceleration. Because of that, we'll be including a full method-based JIT for Firefox 4 (for more details, see David Anderson's blog, as well as David Mandelin's blog). This will provide significantly faster baseline JS performance, with the trace JIT becoming a turbocharger for code that it would naturally apply to.

Combining fast JavaScript performance alongside new web platform technologies such as WebGL and Audio will make for some pretty exciting web apps, and I'm looking forward to seeing what developers do with them!

Edit: Made some last-minute changes to the demos, which ended up pulling in a slightly broken version of jQuery UI that wasn't all that happy with Safari. Should be fixed now!

30 Jul 2010 9:14pm GMT

I was digging through a MSVC++ map file for xul.dll. Turns out MSVC++ isn't as naive about virtual initializers as the GNU toolchain. Initializers are all laid out next to each other. Same goes for what looks like finalizers and exception unwinding stuff. Initializers have an __E prefix and look like this:

0001:0089b470 ??__E?config@AvmCore@avmplus@@2UConfig@nanojit@@A@@YAXXZ 1089c470 f CIL library: CIL module
0001:0089b475 ??__EkStaticModules@@YAXXZ 1089c475 f nsStaticXULComponents.obj
0001:0089b638 ??__E?sSnifferEntries@nsUnknownDecoder@@1PAUnsSnifferEntry@1@A@@YAXXZ 1089c638 f necko:nsUnknownDecoder.obj


Now if only Microsoft fixed their kernel to do memory-mapped IO efficiently, it'd be a superior OS for starting Firefox.

30 Jul 2010 8:56pm GMT

A safe way for kids to get online in a click of a browser button. Firefox fans ages 3-8 experience a virtual playground of educational games and other goodies that adapt as they learn and grow.

On Mother's Day I talked about how KidZui provides a safe online experience for children. It's designed to give kids as old as 12 a way to explore the Web, while giving their parents an easy way to see what the kids are doing.

Not surprisingly, there are many great choices in online experiences customized for children. And it probably all comes down to what suits the kids (and parents!) best. So I'll keep reviewing them, and you guys will just have to let me know your favorites.

Designed for kids ages 3-8, Zoodles is a simple, clean visual experience. When I started exploring the Zoodles features I was reminded just how much goes on graphically in an adult's Web browser. The Zoodles folks must have kept this in mind too, because their presentation really cuts to the chase, keeping it easy for a little one to navigate:

After installing the Zoodle Add-on, your Firefox browser will feature a can't-miss giant letter "Z", directing kids to the right place. They hop on your computer, press that big "Z" and zoom right to Zoodles (probably breathing a sigh of relief to escape all that's going on in your grown-up browser):

If you have an existing account, after you install the add-on, just click the "Z" and you'll be taken to a log-in page.

I didn't have an account yet, but I created an account for my "child", Hester (my beloved Russian Blue cat), and made her a six-year old. I had to install Adobe AIR 1.5.3 along with Zoodles, which took a few minutes, but there were always step-by-step instructions, so it was a cinch overall.

Zoodles offers a basic account for free that includes age-appropriate games and educational content, and safe browsing designed just for kids. Your computer stays safer as well (no accidental downloads).

I played a few of the games, and even recognized characters like Curious George and the Berenstain Bairs. Looks like smart fun. And up to six children can customize experiences on a Zoodles account. Your kids just click on their picture to access their own virtual playground.

Zoodles also recently added an Art Studio where kids paint digital art that parents can share on Facebook, Twitter or email:

For a monthly fee, parents can access more Zoodles features, including advanced monitors and controls and the ability to promote specific subjects and set time and violence limits.

If your children are already in love with Zoodles, then don't wait another minute to install the add-on. It will be that much easier for them to get online.

If Zoodles is new to you, the add-on is a great introduction. Check out the basic features, and the upgrade is free for 14 days. Have fun!

---

Get It Now

Zoodles - Safe Web for Kids 1.6 has been tested and approved by Mozilla. learn more

Developed by Inquisitive Minds, Inc.

Visit this Add-on's Home Page

---

Post from Elise Allen, whose cat, Hester, is really 15. That's 74 in human years.

30 Jul 2010 5:27pm GMT

I hosted a presentation about realtime support at the awesome Mozilla Summit in Whistler. Live Chat tends to be one of the most popular areas that new support community members assist with, so it's a great place to actively work with a wide variety of people who love Firefox. Anyone with an active support.mozilla.com account can answer individual questions from users, but we highly encourage everyone to discuss what is being asked and to offer suggestions for other helpers' questions. It is likely that another contributor has already helped with any given problem, so we solve questions a lot faster by sharing advice. When we find a new solution to a frequent problem or one which has been filed as a bug, the person currently leading makes sure it's shared in the right places.

People who receive help through chat are most often very grateful for getting personalized help, and in some cases we have had satisfied users come back to help others. It's easy even for people without support experience to help out - we have a wide variety of questions and an even wider variety of people to collaborate with. Expert community members, even those who don't have time to participate in individual live chats, likewise play a valuable role by advising newer community members on more difficult questions.

Our purpose is to empower participants to talk to Firefox users, figure out the problem, and offer solutions. To achieve this, we have a wide variety of tools available - easy access to commonly cited snippets and links, an ability for interested contributors to request access to watch all chats, and a quick guide for answering almost any Firefox question. We also apply tags to chat sessions, which can be done while the chat is ongoing or while reading a previous chat log - we then use these tags to track trending issues and keep track of which solutions have worked.

The next thing we're working on is integrating with the new knowledge base platform. Our goal is to focus Live Chat on the types of users where chatting is most successful, such as users suffering from issues where the documented instructions don't help. More details are included in my slides from the summit, for everyone who couldn't be in Whistler. If you have ideas about what we should focus on or ways you can help, we'd love to hear them on this blog, in the contributors forum, or in IRC.

30 Jul 2010 4:55pm GMT

It seems it is once again System Administrator Appreciation Day. The one day a year (last Friday of July) where everyone stops and shows their appreciation to their systems administrator or team of systems administrators. Some of us are still called "operators" or more likely we are just known around your office as the "IT team", the "Ops team", the "computer guys" or any combination thereof. Regardless of how we are referred to, we are the people whose sole purpose in life is trying to make your life easier, better, and more secure. If you don't have a lot of problems with the computers or network, it means we are doing our job well. If you do have some problems with the computers or network, rest assured that it is not our fault, however we are the ones working through the nights and giving up our weekends to resolve these problems almost always caused by others.

So make sure and stop by the IT dungeon sometime today and show your appreciation to your sysadmins. If you aren't sure how to show your appreciation, a friendly greeting, a thank you, a cup of coffee, donuts, coupons for a free lunch, taking us out to lunch, or even just cold hard cash are some of the ways that you can tell your sysadmin how much you appreciate them.

30 Jul 2010 2:04pm GMT

30 Jul 2010 8:53am GMT

BabelZilla is now 5 years old

On July 30th, 2005, when together with early helpful enthousiasts, we (Giuliano, Jürgen, Luana and I) started this project, we just imagined it could be a useful meeting point for extension developers and translators.
We received such a tremendous response from the community of volunteer translators around the world that we were compelled to push our project constantly forward.
There have been about 900 extensions under translation on BabelZilla up to now, for more than 90 languages.
We are very proud to give individuals and teams worldwide the opportunity to bring their contribution to one competitive advantage of Mozilla apps : extensibility.
Thanks to each and every translator past and present for the time and work spent on the translation game.
We hope you enjoy BabelZilla, we know it is still very far from the perfect site and service we are all dreaming of, but hey we shall try to make it better together with you.
In one of the very early posts on the newborn site you could read

BabelZilla is online, but there is still much work to do.

Well, 5 years later, a lot has been done but we have still much work to do together: develop language team translation, find new translators, fix annoyances and bugs of the WTS, make the interface more user-friendly, find graphic artists contributors, support new extension formats, provide more documentation and guidance…
Join BabelZilla !

30 Jul 2010 8:39am GMT

The best user interface anticipates actions that you want to perform and never gets in your way. When planning out the new tabbed browsing features for Firefox 4, this principle guided our focus. One of the things we think Google Chrome really nailed is its tab closing behavior: when you close a tab with the mouse, the remaining tabs shift or resize so that the next tab's close tab button moves right under your cursor. This way, you can click the same spot to close the next tab.

Back in December, Basil Safwat wrote a fantastic piece, full of screenshots, that details these behaviors.

We now do the same in Firefox 4, so it will be super easy to close a whole row of tabs without moving your cursor a pixel:

[ YouTube HD HTML5 (if available) ] [ YouTube HD Flash ]

We are also taking it a step further and including support for the tab overflow mode that Firefox has had for a while. No matter how your tabs scroll and move and resize, you can always count on the close button being in the right location when you need to close them:

[ YouTube HD HTML5 (if available) ] [ YouTube HD Flash ]

Finally, let's talk about a design decision made in Firefox's earlier days: we placed the tab close buttons on the right side of each tab for all platforms, including OS X. To some people, this seems to break with the design of Apple's platform, since Safari and OS X windows have close buttons on the left side instead. (It's also worth noting that several of Apple's applications have the close button on the right too - iChat, Pages and Automator all do this in various parts of their UI.)

Now imagine if we put the close buttons on the left. With that configuration, when closing the rightmost tab, we would have to shift the remaining tabs to the right to move the next close button to the same place, leaving an awkward gap on the left side of the tab bar. Placing the close button on the right (for left-to-right locales) is the more intuitive choice.

Another important aspect we have found is that favicons on tabs are the primary way people identify and navigate tabs, so we give them prominent placement.

This optimized close/resize behavior is just one of the many improvements to tabbed browsing in Firefox 4. Be sure to check out this and other new tabbed browsing features in the upcoming Firefox 4 betas!

30 Jul 2010 7:04am GMT

When we make graphical web applications, we may use Canvas and SVG. Comparing SVG with Canvas, SVG is suitable to make applications with these features:

• use large images with smooth lines (SVG is vector graphics)
• edit size, position, shape or colors of images (easy to change)
• clip, mask or filter images (SVG supports these features)
• user interactive objects (DOM events can be added to SVG elements)

To demonstrate these advantages of SVG, Mozilla Japan has made a practical web application with SVG. "Foxkeh's Wallpaper Creator" is a tool that allows you to easily create your own wallpaper in your browser. Not only can you choose Foxkeh and background image, you can easily change the size, position and transparency of Foxkeh and calender image.

I believe this application is enough easy to use and no more explanation is needed.

Just try creating wallpaper and realize how SVG is useful for web applications!

http://wallpapers.foxkeh.com/en/

30 Jul 2010 2:42am GMT

At least now I have a publicly know excuse for being busy!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/y-combinator-backed-gazehawk-heatmaps-with-web-cams/

Keep an eye on our blog at http://gazehawk.com/blog/ for some interesting technology/startup posts.

Time to go deal with my ever-growing inbox .

29 Jul 2010 10:06pm GMT

[This is a continuation of the post "Redesigning the MDN (part 1)."]

In my previous post I mentioned our fundamental goal is provide web developers with a central hub for documentation and discussion. I've talked a bit about how we plan to achieve the former, but what of the latter?

For this reason, we added yet another tab to the MDN's header, called "Community." In the newest iteration of the MDN, this tab will primarily serve to host a UserVoice-based forum where web developers can congregate and discuss anything open-web related. As we get that finalized, I'll update this blog with a list of initial topics so that you can start to think about things to talk about.

Again, when the new MDN goes live sometime in mid-August, expect a more in-depth tour of the Community tab. Also, note that the Community tab will eventually encompass more than forums. Eventually there will also be community-provided news articles and other community engagement efforts via Mozilla. Those should be coming in later iterations of the MDN.

Thanks for reading! As usual, if you have any questions, comment or shoot me an email.

29 Jul 2010 9:44pm GMT

The response has been tremendous since Firefox Home, our free iPhone app, became available in Apple's App Store. We made some updates to Firefox Home, which are now available, so if you haven't tried it yet, get it now.

We read your comments in the App Store and on our forum and truly appreciate all the feedback you have given us. Your comments and ideas are great input for our future plans with Firefox Home. Keep 'em coming!

Firefox Home 1.0.1 Available in the App Store
We worked quickly to address the top three problems you reported and have released updates to both Firefox Home (v 1.0.1) and the Firefox Sync add-on (v 1.4.3)

In Firefox Home 1.0.1:
* FIXED: Now supports usernames with uppercase letters
* ADDED: Help button on login page that links to troubleshooting tips
* IMPROVED: More helpful error messages when problems occur
Get this update on iTunes.

In Firefox Sync 1.4.3:
* FIXED: Now correctly supports multi-byte characters in passwords
* ADDED: Ability to complete initial sync if setting up in Private Browsing mode
* IMPROVED: Helpful UI indicator to show sync status
* See the Firefox Sync Account Setup Demo
Get this update on the Mozilla Add-Ons site.

We believe Firefox Home is an excellent Web companion for the iPhone because it lets you access your Firefox history, bookmarks and tabs no matter where you are. We are humbled by all the interest and positive reviews we've seen on the Web.

"If you're at all like me and leave dozens (or more!) tabs open on your home machine, you'll definitely like the convenience of being able to access something you left open while you're on the go." - Chris Foresman, ars technica

"Can't remember where you saw that important story just before you left the office? Open the app and check your history. Want a shortcut to save you from typing a long URL on the iPhone or iPod Touch? Open the app. (As a bonus, on my tests, it opened Web pages faster than Safari.)" - Bob Tedeschi, New York Times: Gadgetwise

"Firefox's Home App for iPhone has opened my eyes to a world where desktop and mobile web browsing become one, but we're not quite there yet. Being able to pick up on the iPhone where I left off on the PC is one of those ideas that suddenly seems long overdue," - Jared Newman, PC World.

Firefox Home, Different from Firefox Web Browser
Firefox Home is a part of making the personal Web experience portable across multiple computers and devices. Firefox Home is a valuable app that gives you instant access to your most recently and frequently visited sites, right at your fingertips. You now have the ability to get up and go in a moment's notice, and access your flight status, reservation time or driving directions you were looking at at your desk without a second thought!

Going Global
Many of you have asked when Firefox Home will be available for download in your country's App Store. We're working to make Firefox Home available worldwide in the very near future. Stay tuned!

Get Involved & Stay Connected
This is the first release of Firefox Home on iPhone, and with your ideas, we hope to provide more features to this application over time. Please leave your comments or ask questions on our Firefox Home Support Forum. Designers, let the creative juices flow and participate in the Firefox Home iPhone Skin Design Challenge.

29 Jul 2010 9:15pm GMT

Fuzzyfox has put together a great screencast about the Thunderbird Quick Filter, check it out!

Mozilla Thunderbird - Quick Filter from William D on Vimeo.

29 Jul 2010 7:37pm GMT

Dave Dash made the fantastic suggestion to use Archer characters as project names so we get the chance to use quotes from the show in our release blog posts. So, here goes:

"Don't be shitty, can't we just enjoy the moment? "

For those that haven't watched an episode Archer, Malory employs raw commentary with a bit of panache to other characters on the show. We've employed that same characteristic with our newest version of the Input project. Here's a list of the new features out for this release:

1. Data Analysis Tool: Clusters - Mozilla has been experimenting with a method of text analysis called "clustering" for issues submitted to SUMO. We felt that there was a natural fit with Input's feedback data and wanted it in. It polls all received feedback over the previous week's daily, performs a Cluster analysis on that data and posts the output to the Input Dashboard's Clusters page. Note that the analysis software is still in-development and there are data issues that need to be fixed. If you want to help, Dave Dash has it stored on a handy github repo.
2. URL Submission for "Happy" Reports - From feedback received, our users want to tell us about websites that work better on our beta than previous versions of Firefox. So, we've added a spot for users to add URLs to their "happy" feedback.
3. Mobile Support - We're geared up for Mobile Firefox's Beta! Head over to m.input.mozilla.com and check out the new pages. Currently, our new Clusters pages is not mobile-friendly, but we'll be fixing that before Mobile Firefox Beta 1 comes out.

We've also added a number of bug fixes that make our dashboard faster and much more efficient:

1. Searches are sorted by time in descending order
2. Feedback from Windows builds are now separated by Windows versions (i.e. XP, Vista and 7)
3. Translation with escaped text (i.e. other languages that not be supported by your keyboard configuration) are now correctly sent to Google Translate.
4. Wording changes to our submission pages and dashboard
5. Parsing through the accept-language header to work with Firefox 4 Beta 2

29 Jul 2010 6:06pm GMT