Paris Developer Day
June 24th, 2007
Congratulations to Tristan, Anne-Julie, and Mike Shaver for putting on an absolutely fantastic Developer Day here in Paris. The venue held about 80 people and it was filled to capacity for most of the day. Shaver kicked us off with his usual good humor. Neil Deakin followed-up with a discussion of XUL present and futures – this sparked a lively discussion with the large number of XUL application developers in the audience. That discussion flowed into one of developer tools for the Mozilla platform and the web.
The Demo Session went over 2x as long as planned, partially because scheduling is not one of Shaver’s numerous talents, and mostly because they were so compelling. I encourage you to checkout the applications demoed as they are too numerous to mention here. They ranged from a screen reader, a document management application, to a slide show viewer and editor, and an application from TomTom that ships with their GPS devices which has been re-written from wxWidgets to XUL, and Joost’s dazzling combo of SVG, animation, and peer-to-peer video on demand.
It’s pretty clear that there is a very healthy, engaged, and innovative XUL developer community here in Europe. Although other less-mature application platforms have very slick demos, the Mozilla Platform has shipped hundreds of applications to hundreds of millions of people over the last five years or so.
Sheppy lead a fantastic session of MDC localization – you should check out his thoughts on it. Vlad showed off his OpenGL ES bindings for canvas which is just as amazing each time I see it. I can’t wait until he releases a build for all of us to play with.
I packed my flame suit specifically for the session on Challenges of Hacking on Mozilla in Europe. But I didn’t even get it take it out of the bag – the overall mood was really really upbeat. Shaver took detailed notes – but the items that stuck out to me was the difficulty in finding available Mozilla hackers (along with some great ideas on how to help this), the slowness of several critical developer webapps like Bugzilla and DevMo, and single IP connection limits to IRC.m.o. All issues we can definitely improve.
Dinner was a blast at La Bodga. Check out Tristan’s pictures of the event.
Overall the event was a rousing success – big kudos to everyone involved. It was, as always, a real treat to spend time with the Mozilla community here in Europe. It is inspiring to be able to be part of such a passionate and talented group of people.
Heading back from China
May 31st, 2007
Tuesday Li Gong and I spent most of the day catching up on Mozilla and brainstorming about the future of Mozilla China. Li’s clearly great and we are rather fortunate to have him at Mozilla. Afterwards I made it to Tiananmen Square just in time to see the flag lowering ceremony during sunset. Also got to ride the subway during rush hour – which was an experience all its own. Lots of folks texting and playing games on their cell phones and not a single smart-phone in sight.
Wednesday Johnny joined me and we spent the day working with the Sun China folks. Many thanks to Alfred Peng for organizing the day. It was great to see the enthusiasm for Mozilla and the Mozilla + dtrace demos were quite impressive. We’ll have some Sun folks over to MV to demo to a wider audience. Sun has been doing some great things with Bug and Test days in China – and they thanked Tim, Tomcat, Tracy, and Jay for their help. Hopefully we’ll be able to do more here in the future. Finally, Johnny gave everyone some insights and history about the Mozilla platform. We’ll have to get him on video for everyone to see. Alfred, Brian, and Emily then took us out for some great food including our own numbered Peaking Duck. It was really a pleasure to meet the Sun team – I look forward to working with them in the future.
Thursday was the Google developer day. It was packed and honestly I haven’t seen an audience that excited, engaged, and full of questions at any event I’ve been at in recent memory. Nearly the entire room had heard of Firefox and Mozilla. Almost all of those used the en-US version. Lots of great questions about how someone can get started in open source. We did two rounds of press briefings with about 6 reporters each. The questions ranged from “what products does Mozilla build” to “what’s our plan in China” to “how big is the office space.” There were also many many questions about web compatibility problems and a few on memory usage. IE only sites and web compatibility is definitely an area we’ll have to focus on to be successful here.
It is quite humbling to realize how little we, or more specifically I, understand about China. However, the energy of the people here coupled with the horrible state of affairs in web standards makes it obvious to me that with plenty of local help we can really make a difference. No pressure Li 
In Beijing this week
May 28th, 2007
Today I’m spending the day catching up with Li Gong . Tomorrow Johnny joins us to spend the day at Sun China. On Thursday I’ll be speaking at the Google Worldwide Developer Day. If you are in the area please be sure to come by and say hi!
The importance of updates
May 18th, 2007
Secunia just released an interesting study on the update rates of various applications. When it came to browsers they said:
“Comparing browsers and looking at Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, we found out that Firefox 2 is the least vulnerable, as only 5.19% of all Firefox 2 installations miss security updates, whereas 11.96% of all Opera 9.x installations miss security updates, and the numbers for IE6 and IE7 are 9.61% and 5.4% respectively. “
You should always be careful drawing broad conclusions from any one study (e.g. this one has a sample size of 350K). However, this does highlight to me the importance of all the hard work that goes on here to produce security updates. By keeping the update process simple, updates small, and the quality of those releases high we encourage people to take updates.
The speed and quality of updates is one of our best weapons again the advancing state of the art of exploits. Hopefully the teams working on this keep this in mind when they stay up late for another night of RC re-spins .
Mozilla Platform
May 16th, 2007
There has been a great discussion going on with lots of thoughts and clarification about XULRunner and the “Mozilla Platform.”
I believe part of the confusion here is a lack of a clear definition of “Mozilla Platform” and shared understanding what’s being worked on. We got together a good bunch of the platform hackers with someone who has a much better aesthetic sense than I and produced an updated Mozilla Platform “Marketechture” Diagram: (yes yes I know – the actual relationship of the components is much more complicated than this simplified 2D plot):
What’s interesting to me about this is looking at how big, rich, and *actively developed* the core platform is here. What do I mean?
- Graphics: Vlad and Pav have spent the better part of the last two years integrating Cairo and exposing it through Thebes – effectively re-writing our core graphics architecture. High quality scaling for all!
- Layout: David Baron has spent the better part of their last 18 months and implementing the reflow branch making future version of Firefox, Camino, Seamonkey, and any other application that views web content built on Mozilla support the nasty edges of the CSS 2.1 specs…
- Content: Lots of awesome work on SVG, Cairo gets faster each release, XML content sink now incremental …
- JavaScript: Brendan, Igor, Bkap and others spent much of their time last year implementing JS 1.7. Iterators and Generators anyone? They and others are off now nailing down the standard for JS2/ECMAScriptV4 – not to mention the upcoming integration of Tamarin giving the entire platform a JITing VM to boot.
- XUL: Spinbuttons? Date Pickers? Neil’s been pounding away at enhancing XUL for all of us.
- NSIS installers – specifically chosen because the toolchain was FOSS so all Mozilla projects could easily use.
- Toolkit: MozStorage and SQLLight anyone? Extension Manager improvements, Integration of Brakepad client and server for FOSS crash reporting to everyone on the Mozilla Platform, much more…
This is just a snapshot – the full list here is very long.
This is not meant to dismiss the frustrations of people working with Mozilla when their particular use of the platform isn’t being well enough supported. Firefox is the most widely deployed application built on the Mozilla platform – so it does and should get disproportionate attention from the Platform. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t tremendous investment in the platform in a manner which benefits all applications – it’s by far the biggest area of Engineering investment by MoFo/MoCo.
So in short – I don’t want us to lose sight of the work that has gone into the platform over the last few years, the dedication of people all around the world making this happen, and and most importantly the really exciting things planned for the future…
Heading of to Microsoft Mix07 next week
April 27th, 2007
I’m part of a panel discussion on Open Source, the Web, Interoperability and Microsoft. I’d link directly to the session, but amusingly the Mix07 website doesn’t seem to want to use anchors. Oh well.
So – here’s the question for you – as part of the Mozilla community what would you like discussed here?
More developer videos coming
April 17th, 2007
We started taping 1 hour architecture overviews from Mozilla developers late last year. You can look at the first two here.
The schedule for upcoming recordings is here. Add your name if you would like to do one or add a comment if there are others you’d like to see!
Oldest Bug Fixed in FF2
March 25th, 2007
In my presentation at FOSDEM I claimed that bug 21344 was the oldest fixed. Robert Sayre informed me that in fact bug 15090 was the oldest fixed. I missed it because it was duped and I was excluding dupes in my search. The original bug was > 7 years old when FF2 was shipped – now that’s progress!
Slides from FOSDEM07
March 20th, 2007
A few people have asked me for these – so I thought I’d post for all.
At FOSDEM this year I gave two talks. The first was a general update on Mozilla in the Mozilla developer room. The second was on the main web track and was a more technical presentation focusing on future web and Firefox features.
Unfortunately my MBP failed to sync properly with the projector so I was unable to show any of the awesome demos developed by Mark Finkle and Chris Double . But you can browse their respective blogs and seem them for yourself.
It was a real highlight to spend time with the localization communities from all over Europe – well worth the trip.
At FOSDEM this weekend
February 23rd, 2007
I’m at FOSDEM this weekend. I’ll be giving a talk in the Mozilla developer room today and a second one in the Web track on Sunday.
If you are here please come by and introduce yourself (I look like this).
Whenever I travel to Europe I’m always struck by a few things:
1) Why the heck don’t we have high speed trains in the states? The TGV (and Eurostar for that matter) are definitely a better and environmentally cleaner way to travel..
2) Why is internet access so expensive and spotty in hotels? This is true in the states as well – wireless either doesn’t exist, is very unreliable, or extremely expensive (usually a combo of the last two) I’m test driving a EDGE/GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA card which might turn out to be *cheaper* (gulp) than wifi in the hotels.
So far it has been working well – performance was blazing at SFO – workable but slow here in Brussels. It has definitely made me appreciate sites like Google that are low bandwidth. We’ll see when I get back whether it is worth it or not…
3) Yogurt (all dairy for that matter) always tastes better here. Maybe the lack of pasteurization?
I’m staying in Europe through the next week to meet with a variety of folks (Leiden Monday, London Tues, Warsaw Weds, and Paris Thurs->Fri) – so if you are close to any of those places and want to meet up – please do drop me a line!
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