Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog

My friend Dustin has some posters and tote bags for sale.

I think the tote bags are for a good cause and the posters are pure capitalism.

Clay Shirky’s latest post really hit me hard. I found it very uplifting.

When I was young, I wasted the same hours that Clay did in front of the television*, so I think it’s positive that kids are on their computers and phones, destroying the English language. A lot of my current lot in life comes down to Internet participation. I’ve gotten jobs, contributed to open source, made friends, made enemies, had wonderful intellectual conversations, written incredibly stupid and hurtful things, published my thoughts, had a recording of myself making an incredibly nerdy speech circulated on YouTube, found an apartment that came with roomates who became friends, answered random craigslist ads, helped someone out of a jam, damaged my permanent record, done things I’m proud of, done things I regret, traveled to far away places, lost my shit, acted holier-than-thou, reviewed restaurants, given noise-canceling headphone product advice, sent random email, had a black hat phase, and contributed to a community. I would do it again.

A lot of this happened in “spare time”. At least I wasn’t watching television.

* Mary Ann is way hotter. How could it even be a debate?

Mason has a great tour of Tamarin on his blog.

Check out this Ars.Technica post on Fennec. Our mobile efforts are going really well. I guess we should get around to adding ARM-specific optimizations, like we do for x86, PPC, and SPARC.

Joel Spolsky: What do you do if you find yourself reacting to a rival’s agenda instead of setting your own? Break the cycle as fast as you can. What do you do if you find yourself reacting to a rival’s agenda instead of setting your own? The answer is to break the cycle as fast as you can.

In the web browser space, this applies to working groups and editors, too.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/942/

Got this in the mail today… uh, OK.

Update: My RFC 4287 co-editor Mark Nottingham won’t link to this nonsense, but I’ll link to him.

From: IETF Secretariat
Subject: Posting of IPR Disclosure
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:32:10 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Mark Nottingham, Robert Sayre:

An IPR disclosure that pertains to your RFC entitled “The Atom Syndication
Format” (RFC4287) was submitted to the IETF Secretariat on 2008-03-31 and has
been posted on the “IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Disclosures”
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/ipr_list.cgi). The title of the IPR
disclosure is “Google Inc.’s Statement about IPR related to RFC 5023 and RFC
4287.”

The IETF Secretariat

Shawn Wilsher: “Most module owners and their peers are often patchers as well. If they have to now write tests for other people’s patches, do reviews in their module, and do patches elsewhere (because nobody who’s a peer or module owner really works in just one module), they are highly likely to put something on the back-burner. Personally, any bug that wasn’t a serious issue that required me to write a test would probably become very low priority (and I suspect that to be the same for most other people).”

That’s the idea.

Reading posts from Shawn and Edward, who have been doing a great job with testing, I see that we’re hitting a bit of inertia with testing requirements, review policies, approvals, etc. I think this is a real problem, and we need to find a way to reduce the number of hoops. I don’t think waiving testing requirements will be the way to go.

In Shawn’s post, he raises the issue of requiring tests from new contributors. This is a harder situation. I think it’s best not to require tests from new people, especially on their first patch, unless there is something easy for them to cut and paste. As they become more involved in the project, they’ll need to step up their game. But this presents a dilemma. Code that needs patching from external contributors is probably stuff that really needs tests. That means module owners and peers should be finding ways to cover testing of these patches. I don’t have an answer here, but we’ll have to find one.

All that said, regressions aren’t fun, so let’s keep our perspective balanced.

I was looking over the spreadsheet covering Mozilla’s Acid3 failures, and it struck me that very few of the fixes would substantially improve the Web or the browser. They are bugs and they will be fixed (except maybe SMIL… wtf?), but they don’t impact authors or users at all. Looks mostly like an opportunity for grandstanding about “commitment to standards.” I think testing createNodeIterator while text nodes don’t interoperate is both misguided and hypocritical.

Besides, commitment to standards is strong at Mozilla, where we don’t constantly seek to rubber stamp our own implementation.

P.S. — I hadn’t seen that Opera was first to score 100/100. Congratulations on that, poorly conceived standards and all.

P.P.S. — Shameful!

Overall Status

Blocking Firefox 3: 107 bugs found.
Blocking Gecko 1.9: 131 bugs found.

Blockers fixed between 12:00am and 11:59pm

Bug 416933. Invalid range error for in Þ-ß case-insensitive regular expression. Patch by Brian Crowder.

Bug 424093. CNN Video page will not load. Patch by Dave Camp.

Bug 407861. Bolding the found text in autocomplete breaks ligatures. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 407946. emphasize all matching text in title and url, not just the first match in title and url. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 424028. beta 5 theme update for windows (xp and vista). Patch by Alex Faaborg.

Bug 423874. Allocating native functions together with JSObject. Patch by Igor Bukanov.

Bug 423806. Keyhole (combined back forward) for small icons mode on windows. Patch by mcdavis941.

Bug 424163. topcrash [@ sqlite3BitvecSet]. Patch by Peter Weilbacher.

Bug 424165. topcrashes [@ FontEntry::Release] [@ gfxWindowsPlatform::FindFontForCharProc] [@ gfxWindowsPlatform::FindFontEntry]. Patch by Stuart Parmenter.

Bug 423977. Add-ons rating stars now a grid of 11×11 icons. Patch by Reed Loden [:reed].

Bug 421069. specifying line-height in px or with decimal values causes rendering errors. Patch by Robert O’Callahan (:roc) (reduced activity March 18 to April 9).

Bug 423130. Inconsistent layout with padding, removing RLM. Patch by Uri Bernstein (Google).

Bug 407204. adjust the title and url text sizes. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 415403. Show matches for all search words for location bar autocomplete. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 364713. [Cairo][regression] bold and italic not simulated for families that lack bold and/or italic faces. Patch by John Daggett (:jtd).

Bug 424035. Crash [@ JS_IsArrayObject] when trying to decode a bogus JSON string. Patch by Robert Sayre.

Bug 420786. Setting image as desktop background causes a crash in Linux. Patch by Sylvain Pasche.

Bug 414201. JPEG images dragged to the Finder have their file extensions changed to .jfif. Patch by Vladimir Vukicevic (:vlad).

Bug 404658. Drag and drop in Bookmarks Sidebar allows bookmarks to be placed in top level (”All Bookmarks”) folder. Patch by Dietrich Ayala.

Bug 418079. [Esc] doesn’t cancel changes in contextual bookmark dialog. Patch by Asaf Romano.