In this issue…
- Mozilla: Defining our 2010 goals
- Firefox add-ons developer survey
- TraceMonkey and Firefox Mobile
- Firefox support: Envisioning the future
- Polishing Firefox
- Developing guidelines for “Powered by Mozilla”
- Firefox logo style guide progress
- JavaScript benchmark quality
- Managing in/with/around/by chaos
- Ars Technica on Firefox, Gecko, and WebKit
- Developer calendar
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
Mitchell Baker is leading the effort towards defining the 2010 goals for Mozilla and has recently posted a draft version of the proposed goals. Setting these sorts of wide-reaching aspirational goals is critical because “[a]rticulating a broad, commonly shared set of aspirations helps many disparate groups of people organize themselves and work towards very practical, concrete tasks that make our aspirations real.” The 2010 goals “should be concrete enough that people can respond to them and provide a means for evaluating the scope of progress. Perhaps even more importantly, these goals should express important ideas rather than specifying implementation plans.”
Mitchell’s initial post outlines the background and purpose of the goal setting process, and her second post includes the draft set of proposed 2010 goals that have emerged from various discussions including feedback gathered during the Firefox Summit. If you’re interested in the longer-term goal setting and direction of the Mozilla project, Mitchell asks that you “[p]lease take some time and review the proposed goals, make suggestions, ask questions, and make alternative proposals.” You are invited and encouraged to take part in this conversation, as these goals form the foundation of what it is that Mozilla does and aspires to become. Everyone is welcome to participate.
To take part in this conversation you should watch Mitchell’s weblog, as well as the mozilla.governance newsgroup, where further discussion topics will be posted. There’s also a new “#2010goals” channel in IRC (irc.mozilla.org) where you are welcome to engage in real time discussion regarding these goals.
Firefox add-ons developer survey
The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team is looking for help as they work on improving the add-on development experience. “If you’ve developed or tried to develop an add-on for Firefox (or other applications), we’d like your feedback to know what we can do to improve that experience through documentation, tools, and features. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey. Your responses will be anonymous, and every response will be read. We’ll summarize the findings in a few weeks.” Add-ons are a vital part of the Firefox ecosystem, so any help you can provide here would be hugely beneficial to the project as a whole — Add-ons Developer Survey.
TraceMonkey and Firefox Mobile
Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukicevic has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.
Firefox support: Envisioning the future
David Tenser, Mozilla’s SUMO project lead, has been writing a multi-part weblog post outlining a working vision for the future of the Firefox support project. “Since the SUMO team was formally created, we have grown from a fairly buggy web site managed by a tight group of people, to a truly community-powered support channel with over 70 active contributors per week. This is an amazing achievement that really shows the strength of the Mozilla community.” Even so, SUMO’s mission is not complete. David continues, “From my perspective, we’ve just started. I’ve thought a lot about what we should do to take SUMO to the next level, something I playfully called ‘SUMO 2.0′ when discussing this with the team at the Summit.” David has written five posts outlining the vision for SUMO so far: Part 1: Listen as hard as we can, Part 2: Understanding the bigger picture, Part 3: Increasing community participation, Part 4: Having our finger on the pulse, Part 5: Localization.
If you’re interested in volunteering to help with the SUMO project, you should keep an eye on David’s weblog and read the How to contribute page in the SUMO Knowledge Base. Helping out with user support is a great and easy way to get involved with the Mozilla project.
In an effort to improve the level of Firefox’s visual and interactive polish, Alex Faaborg will be posting a short list of top-priority user experience bugs every Monday morning between now and the Firefox 3.1 launch. He writes, “These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3’s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect.” The team could use some help getting these bugs finished up and closed off, so if you have the time and are interested in helping out, you are encouraged to dive in and get started. Additionally, if there are polish issues you think need to be addressed, Alex asks that you file bugs for those and leave a note in the comments of his post.
Developing guidelines for “Powered by Mozilla”
David Boswell has been working on creating some guidelines to determine how the “Powered by Mozilla” logo can be used as part of projects and products. “Guidelines need to be specific since we don’t want someone to be able to check out just one file from our repositories and then claim that their application is Powered by Mozilla. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an existing list of reusable technologies that the Mozilla community creates.” This being the case, David has taken the time to put together draft lists of these technologies and criteria, but is unsure whether the lists are complete or entirely makes sense. He has posted the lists on his weblog, and if you have feedback or suggestions about these he asks that you leave a comment on the blog post or edit the wiki page directly.
Firefox logo style guide progress
As mentioned previously, Tara Shahain and John Slater have been working on a new Firefox logo style guide with the help of the Royal Order and a small team of community volunteers who are acting as an informal panel of advisors. Lots of progress has been made, and Tara has written a new blog post talking about the initial logo inventory (there were 32) and the thought processes that went into narrowing that down to a core set of eight. You can read Tara’s post over at her weblog and join the discussion there.
While JavaScript engine performance has been undergoing a renaissance, JavaScript benchmark tests haven’t been keeping pace and aren’t adapting well to the rapid performance increases we’ve been seeing. John Resig has put together a post analysing the problem, looking at three different benchmark suites — SunSpider, Dromaeo, and V8 Benchmark — and what they are doing to counter-act the problem of error levels increasing as browsers are able to run the tests more and more quickly. It’s a detailed and interesting peek into the world of JavaScript benchmarking, and you can read John’s full post on his weblog.
Managing in/with/around/by chaos
John Lilly recently gave a talk at Stanford about Mozilla’s structure and decision-making processes. “[I]t’s about how Mozilla is organized, and how we push decision-making to the edges of any organization we have — it’s really an organization design and behavior talk.” The presentation is an interesting look into the thinking and blended system of chaos and order behind Mozilla. John has posted his slides over on Slideshare, which you can view here: Stanford Presentation on Mozilla.
Ars Technica on Firefox, Gecko, and WebKit
Ryan Paul of Ars Technica posted an interesting two-page article last week explaining why Mozilla remains committed to Gecko while WebKit popularity is increasing. As WebKit has been adopted by more browsers, Ryan writes, “some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine.” This is not at all the case, however, and “those who understand the differences between the two rendering engines and have an appreciation of Gecko’s technical strengths recognize that there is no basis for speculation about the possibility of Mozilla adopting [WebKit] for future versions of Firefox.” In the article, Ryan discusses WebKit’s strengths, why Apple opted for WebKit over Gecko in 2003, how Gecko has evolved and improved since, why Gecko is preferred by a host of third-party developers, and more.
In writing the article, Ryan spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering. “Although [Shaver] respects the technical achievements of WebKit, he believes that the WebKit development model and fragmentation in the WebKit ecosystem would create serious challenges that make it unsuitable for Firefox.” Shaver goes into much more detail in the article, which you can find over on the Ars Technica site.
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.
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