16 Sep 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Jonathan Almeida: Checkout a Github pull request from one-off contributions

EDIT: Updated to reference gh correctly. Thanks flod!

Sometimes on Github, I need to fetch a patch from a fork I don't typically see everyday so I can try it out locally. I use the line at the top of the patch which has a copy button next to it because it's convenient.

The common steps for this are:

  1. Click the contributor's branch and go to their github fork repository.
  2. Copy the repository link.
  3. Add a new git remote with an alias (typically their username).
  4. git fetch <alias>
  5. git checkout <alias>/<branch>

Here is a one-liner for it that you can add to your gitconfig:

[alias]
  co = "!f() { PNAME=$(basename `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`); OWNER=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f1); BRANCH=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f2); git fetch git@github.com:$OWNER/$PNAME.git $BRANCH; git checkout FETCH_HEAD; }; f"

You might ask, why do all of this when the github gh CLI does this for you? While it does simplify some tasks, I wanted a solution that was independant to a specific git host. The git@github.com remote that is used in the alias can be changed or made configurable if desired. This is something that I wouldn't be able to do with platform-dependant gh.

The fetch also works well with jj too because the fetch and checkout remain headless.

Formatted and commented, it looks less intimidating:

f() {
  # Get the repository name from your checkout (assuming it is the
  # original directory name as the remote).
  PNAME=$(basename `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`);

  # Parse out the fork's owner.
  # Example: `<owner>:<branch>`
  OWNER=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f1);

  # Parse out the branch name.
  # Example: `<owner>:<branch>`
  BRANCH=$(echo $1 | cut -d':' -f2);

  # Do a fetch of that particular branch using the extracted
  # information from above.
  # This assumes the remote is hosted on github.
  git fetch git@github.com:$OWNER/$PNAME.git $BRANCH;

  # Checkout using the alias `FETCH_HEAD` which git provides.
  git checkout FETCH_HEAD;
};

# Execute the function!
# It's easier to build a function that holds variables and execute
# rather than in-line it.
f

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16 Sep 2026 5:38am GMT

15 Sep 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

The Servo Blog: Your Donations at Work: One Year of Sponsored Servo Development

Last September, the Servo project announced that long-time maintainer Josh Bowman-Matthews (@jdm) would work part-time on improving the Servo contributor experience, entirely funded by the monthly donations on OpenCollective and GitHub. In his own words, here is a look back over the past year!

First of all, I am enormously grateful to everyone who financially supports Servo, as those donations have enabled me to devote significant time to a project that I care a lot about. Some highlights from that funded work that I'm proud of:

On top of that, I spent time diagnosing unexpected failures in others' PRs and fixed numerous intermittent test failures that made merging PRs more difficult for everyone.

A few pieces of work from this period that stand out to me:

This role I've carved out means a lot to me-I've found a healthy balance that allows me to spend time with my family as well as make meaningful contributions to Servo, and I get to spend a lot of time looking for ways to make the project more accessible for others. A big thank you to everybody supporting the project and my work; each individual monthly donation makes a big difference! I'm excited to see what's possible in the coming year.

15 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

11 Sep 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Firefox Nightly: The Need for Speed Controls – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 208

Highlights

Playback speed settings panel in a Picture-in-Picture window.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Script to find new contributors from bug list

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons
WebExtensions Framework

DevTools

::picker rules for a pseudo element within the DevTools Inspector pane.

A tooltip showing a breakdown of a CSS var function

WebDriver

New Tab Page

A layout variation for the New Tab page with the Widgets column on the left and Popular Today column on the right.

Picture-in-Picture

Search and Urlbar

The Firefox New Tab page with an unstyled in-page search bar in the center, showing Google search suggestions for "what's a scotch bonnet"

11 Sep 2026 5:32pm GMT